The infernal Qatari strategy
While Donald Trump threatens the enemies of Israel and civilization, Britain licks their sandals.
By Melanie Phillips
JNS
Dec 5, 2024
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has said that there will be “all hell to pay” if the Israeli hostages being held in the Gaza Strip aren’t released by his inauguration on Jan. 20. He added: “Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied history of the United States of America.”
While no one knows what Trump would actually do, can anyone doubt that a similar stance by the United States after the Oct. 7 pogrom would have produced results?
If, instead of appeasing Iran and bullying Israel, the Biden administration had told Qatar on Oct. 8 that unless the hostages were released within 24 hours, Washington would sever all economic, diplomatic and security relations with Doha—and meant that—it’s likely the hostages would have been freed and the horrors of the past year averted.
That’s because Qatar is Hamas. The Gulf state founded it, funded it and, until Trump won the November presidential election, sheltered the men who run it.
Qatar is a profound threat to the free world. As Yigal Carmon of MEMRI has written, it supports ISIS, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas and Hezbollah. In 1996, it hid the future 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) in Doha. When the FBI came to arrest him, informing only the Qatari Emir, KSM disappeared within hours.
Arab states that support the Abraham Accords have repeatedly warned the West against Qatar. In 2017, Dr. Anwar Gargash, then the United Arab Emirates’ minister of state for foreign affairs, described Doha as the “main sponsor” of terrorism and a “safe haven” of extremism.
In 2017, Qatar’s behavior led Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt to cut their diplomatic ties with it and impose a blockade on all contact by land, sea and air—a blockade that lasted for three-and-a-half years.
Yet the West refuses to treat Qatar as a godfather of terrorism and an enemy of civilization. During the past year, the United States has used it instead as an interlocutor with Hamas, treating the emirate as an honest broker in the negotiations to release the hostages.
These negotiations were never going to succeed. They were used instead to cripple Israel’s ability to inflict a speedy military defeat of Hamas. The only way the hostages were ever going to be released was through pressure on Hamas.
Yet Qatar had no intention of exerting that pressure, and none was exerted on Qatar, in turn, to do so. So the emirate played America for suckers, while more Israeli soldiers were killed or injured, and the hostages were left to their appalling fate.
Refusing to cut off the head of the snake in Tehran, the Biden administration conducted a Potemkin negotiation with Qatar which, despite its Islamist extremism and terrorist ties, has insinuated itself into the West on an enormous scale.
That’s why there were nauseating scenes in London this week where the red carpet was rolled out for the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tammi bin Hamid al Thani and his wife. Britain put on a grand royal reception for the Qatari ruler, including a horseback procession down The Mall, a visit to Parliament and a state banquet at Buckingham Palace.
Queen Camilla, who has been suffering from pneumonia, struggled from her sickbed to be present. The Princess of Wales, who is still recovering from cancer, also put in an appearance, having pointedly dressed in maroon—the color of the Qatari flag.
At the glittering banquet, King Charles, who had earlier invested the emir with an ancient British honor as Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, made a speech that would have been written for him by the Foreign Office.
He lavished praise on Qatar’s “tireless mediation efforts over the last year in pursuit of peace against the most unbearable heartache and suffering”—implying a troubling equivalence between the suffering of Gaza and the suffering of Israel.
He described the United Kingdom as the emir’s “second home.” He quoted from the Quran, saying “Whoever saves a life it will be as if they saved all humanity,” and from the Bible, saying “Blessed are the peacemakers.”
This betrayed an egregious and offensive ignorance on the part of whoever wrote those words for the king to speak. The line from the Quran actually appears in the Talmud, which says: “Whoever saves a single life is credited as if he saved an entire world.” And the Talmud was edited several centuries before the Quran was written.
Moreover, the noble Jewish sentiment in this line is undermined in the Quran by its context. Not only does it say that the Jews failed to live up to their own precept, but it also adds a crucial qualification: “unless it be for manslaughter or for mischief in the land.”
According to the Quran, therefore, a life need not be saved at all if Muslims deem that person to be responsible for “mischief.” Since it anathematizes the Jews as responsible for a great deal of “mischief,” this is therefore a get-out clause that allows Muslims to kill them.
It’s doubtful whether anyone in Britain’s Foreign Office is aware of any of this. It’s doubtful if anyone in the Foreign Office would even care. After all, what do the interests of truth, Judaism or the Jewish people matter compared to the importance to Britain of Qatar?
The Gulf state has made a point of making itself invaluable to the West it wants to destroy. It has poured billions of dollars into funding professors and programs at American universities and curricula at publicly funded schools, helping turn them into crucibles of antisemitism and Islamic extremism.
Its media propaganda arm, Al Jazeera, is tailored to appeal to Western audiences, while the emirate has also suborned some conservative journalists to promote its talking points.
And the British fawning over the emir reflects the fact that, over the past decade and a half, Qatar has established a vast assets empire in Britain.
Its investments in the United Kingdom—valued at over £40 billion (nearly $51 billion)—include stakes in British Airways, Heathrow Airport and three English premier league football clubs. It also owns more than 4,000 properties such as the iconic Savoy Hotel, the Shard skyscraper in London and the Harrods department store.
The emir’s state visit was a kick in the teeth for Britain’s beleaguered Jewish community. It was all of a piece with the government under Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer dumping on Israel by voting against it at the U.N. Security Council last month, sending an additional £7 million ($8.9 million) to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency despite its clear ties to Hamas, and continuing to sanitize, excuse and fund the Palestinian Arabs’ incitement against Jews and to echo their demonization of Israel through a narrative of demonstrable lies.
And now, while the Starmer government says it would arrest Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for “war crimes” based on the specious and malevolent arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court, it has been licking the sandals of the Emir of Qatar, patron of genocidal, war-criminal Hamas.
As Trump threatens to unleash the punishments of hell against the enemies of Israel and civilization, the British government is selling what remains of its soul to the devil.
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