Many mainstream media newspapers have joined The New York Times in shilling for the Muslim Brotherhood — claiming that the movement gave up violence years ago and such a designation stems merely from Islamophobia — yet few are looking at the Qatar connection.
In a particularly disingenuous article, The Washington Post ran an op-ed authored by human rights lawyer and Muslim personality Arsalan Iftikhar titled “Calling the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization will scapegoat all Muslims.” The article postulates that “Nearly 7 million American Muslims would become the primary domestic target of such a designation.”
Putting aside the fact that the Muslim population in the U.S. is about 3.5 million, this suggests that all American Muslims are somehow affiliated with or sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood. Somehow, according to the logic of the article, any criticism or stain on the Brotherhood is condemning the entire American Muslim ummah and is therefore “Islamophobic.”
“Many people believe that this Muslim Brotherhood designation is simply a political smokescreen to criminalize Muslim civic life,” writes Ifikhar.
Missing in this and the other articles that whitewash the Brotherhood is the influence and reach of the Brotherhood’s lobby in Washington and Britain.
Saudis and Qataris have long spent dizzying amounts of money on spreading Islamist ideologies to Muslim countries and the Muslim diaspora in the West through funding clerics, mosques and institutions and universities to carefully modulate perceptions and sway public opinion in their favor.
The lesser known and therefore perhaps more insidious of the two Arab meddlers is Qatar. For decades, Qatar has been the nexus of hard-line Islamism, with its support for jihadists groups from ISIS, the Taliban and al-Nusra (al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria) to Jamaat-e-Islami and Hamas. Most of all, Qatar is the very hub of the Muslim Brotherhood and its machinations which emanate to the rest of the world.
Qatar uses its vast wealth to wage “information warfare” by lavishly financing a colossal web of lobbyists, media outlets, think tanks and hackers.The sums of money involved in carefully manipulating perceptions and narratives are so vast that it is impossible to even know the true extent of Qatar’s meddling in U.S. policy and it’s influence on American public opinion.
Qatar has a surreptitious relationship with the Democratic Party. In 2016, Wikileaks revealed that both Saudi Arabia and Qatar are large donors to the Clinton Foundation. Both countries subscribe to the literal Wahhabi/Salafi interpretations of Islam. The Brotherhood has served to be a perfect way to export this ideology across the globe. According to The Wall Street Journal, Qatar targeted 250 Trump “influencers” to change U.S. policy and has quadrupled it’s spending on U.S. lobbying.
Qatar further extends its tendrils of control over young minds by donating tens of millions to American and European schools, colleges and universities, making the rich country the largest foreign donor to American universities.
So, is it a coincidence that just when Qatar quadruples its spending in America to control and influence public policy and popular opinion, that we’re seeing such blatantly pro-Brotherhood op-eds running in The Washington Post, The New York Times and other major media outlets?
If you thought that Qatar’s influence over the media was out in the open after The Washington Post admitted how murdered writer Jamal Khashoggi’s articles that the paper published were commissioned by the Qatar Foundation International, think again.
As for The New York Times, just before the recent onslaught of more than 700 rockets sent by the terror organization Hamas to murder Israeli civilians in a 72-hour period, the Time’s famous Sunday magazine ran a cover story that amounted to a hit piece on Israel. It was later revealed that the author of the piece works for an organization whose major donor is Qatar. Qatar holds the distinctions of being the largest state funder of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s arm in the Gaza Strip.
Connecting these dots reveals where loyalties lie in the media and what kind of narratives are sold to Americans and why.
RELATED STORIES
Questioning Qatar’s Terror Financing? Here Are the Facts
Revealed: Khashoggi Was a Qatari Asset
Qatar Hires Ex-Trump Aides as Lobbyists
