Eitan Fischberger is an Israel-based open-source intelligence analyst and writer specializing in uncovering terror networks and foreign disinformation campaigns, with a particular focus on Qatar’s malign influence in the West. Fischberger spoke to a December 1 Middle East Forum podcast (video). The following summarizes his comments:
Qatar has backed the Hamas regime for over a decade, funding the terror group in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Contrary to Qatar’s portrayal as a key U.S. Mideast ally, “it is actually a strategic threat––not just to the security of the United States, but to the fabric that binds all of the West and all Americans together.” Although it hides its duplicitous actions by extolling the virtues of diplomacy, always ready to mediate conflicts, it funds many of these conflicts, most recently the Hamas terrorists in Gaza who attacked Israel on October 7, 2023.
Qatar has backed the Hamas regime for over a decade, funding the terror group in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It hosted terror leaders at fancy Doha hotels and gave the group “prime media coverage” on Al Jazeera, Qatar’s government-funded major global network. Al Jazeera went so far as to produce a Saturday Night Live-styled “comedy” skit parodying Hamas’s October 7 invasion of Israel, complete with mock reenactments of the massacre. The sick humor is only one example of how Qatar uses Al Jazeera as “their key vehicle for promoting this type of propaganda.”
Qatar is still attempting to “save what is left of Hamas” following the Israel Defense Force’s decimation of the terror group in the Gaza Strip. Doha is working to ensure that Hamas “plays an integral role in ruling whatever is the next iteration of the government in Gaza.” The terror organizations that Qatar props up have taken the lives of not only Israelis, but also of many other nationalities, including those from the U.S., Europe, Australia, and Latin America, to name just a few.
Qatar, “ensconced in the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) ideology,” shares the “same radical Islamist agenda” with its neighbor Iran, even though there is the Sunni-Shia divide between the two nations. In addition to their mutual interest in sharing a vast natural gas field, they have a “mutual agenda of thwarting and subverting and ultimately dismantling Western civilization in and of itself.” Frequent meetings between the two regimes have resulted in multi-billion-dollar contracts for technology, communications, schooling, and education. A recent conference in Tehran included official speakers from the Qatari government and featured banners demonizing America, which is “emblematic of Qatar’s actual agenda.”
Qatar is a small country with a total population of just over 3 million. Its native population is only 300,000 people, with the rest largely comprised of foreign workers subject to a two-tier system where many of them are mistreated. Qatar does not have the military might of its neighbors but uses its economic might to gain a strategic advantage to pursue its MB worldview in the West. The country has funded American universities “to the tune of billions of dollars to radicalize American youth,” indoctrinating them to parrot “this sort of decolonial, anti-American agenda.” In Doha, Qatar funds six key U.S. university campuses, each offering “expertise in particular niches.” Two examples are the Northwestern University campus, which specializes in journalism, and the Georgetown University campus, which focuses on government and foreign policy. Each campus has professors hailing from Iran, Qatar, and Yemen who inculcate students with anti-Western biases.
Its native population is only 300,000 people, with the rest largely comprised of foreign workers subject to a two-tier system where many of them are mistreated.
Qatar’s “enormous economic assets” make it the “single largest funder of American universities, with $6.3 billion in the last 20 years alone.” Following the MB playbook of fraying Western civilization “from within,” Qatar is executing its agenda against the U.S. on a “civilizational level.” Qatari media will oftentimes post content and broadcast statements in English praising America and touting Qatar’s role as a partner, while Arabic-language Qatari media spew anti-American content.
A recent example on Al Jazeera Plus, a U.S.-based subsidiary of the Qatari government propaganda outlet Al Jazeera, distributed a video about America’s Thanksgiving holiday with the disparagement that it is a “national day of mourning because the United States is built on colonization and genocide.” Qatar’s state-run media mine “highly contentious issues” such as the progressive debate over “the need to abolish the police force” in an effort to inflame disagreement among Americans. Such actions exacerbate social unrest to “dismantle the civilization from within” by provoking Americans to “turn on each other.”
When it comes to influencing key targets behind the scenes, Qatar’s insidiousness is very subtle. Evidence supports Qatar’s “nefarious attempt to get celebrities and influencers and journalists to promote their agenda, whether they realize it or not.” In 2018, Qatar “targeted 250 Trump influencers to change U.S. policy.” This past year, Qatari lobbyists targeted conservative media. Since 2016, Qatar has spent $250 million on lobbying and public relations firms in order to influence the American public and the political landscape.
Qatar’s economic investment in America’s businesses is slated to exceed a trillion dollars after President Trump signed deals with Doha following his visit there a few months ago. Doha has been collaborating with the U.S. on air defenses to shore up Qatar’s security. It lobbied the Biden administration to get non-NATO ally status, culminating in Trump’s recent executive order last October giving Qatar de facto NATO Article 5 status, meaning that “an attack on Qatar is going to be treated like an attack on the United States.”
The economic reality is that the monies Qatar invests in the U.S. will create jobs—a shrewd investment on Doha’s part. In addition, “Qatar actually owns a ton of real estate in the United States.” Doha hopes that the Trump administration and the American public will rationalize away the regime’s Islamic terror funding and indoctrination on America’s campuses in exchange for jobs and the hundreds of billions of dollars it has poured into the U.S. economy.
Short-term gains cannot override the “moral and strategic imperative” for America’s long-term security.
In 2020, the Department of Justice under Trump’s first term mandated that Al Jazeera Plus register as a foreign agent so the American public “knows what kind of media they’re consuming.” Qatar refused but suffered no repercussions. “If people don’t wake up,” more of America’s adversaries will deploy Qatar’s tactics to indoctrinate America’s youth through their media. China, Russia, and recently Turkey are using similar tactics to influence the American public. Israel failed to take Qatar’s double-dealing seriously enough and “put a little too much trust into Qatar,” and the result was October 7. “And so, I’m afraid that the same thing could happen to the United States as well.”
The takeaway lesson is that “money isn’t everything.” Short-term gains cannot override the “moral and strategic imperative” for America’s long-term security. “We have to continue making noise about it and ensuring that there is accountability and that Qatar does not retain the sort of glowing ally status that it has. Something has to change.”
