Qatar, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Israel

This article follows "What lies behind Benjamin Netanyahu’s lies and Hamas’s dodges", by Thierry Meyssan, November 28, 2023.

Lolwah Al-Khater’s blunder

Lolwah Al-Khater, Qatari Minister for International Cooperation, visited Tel Aviv on November 25, 2023. It was the first time a Qatari official had visited Israel. She was received by the War Cabinet to resolve problems with the implementation of the hostage exchange agreement. She also visited Gaza.

Accustomed to discussions with Mossad director David Barnea, she didn’t seem to grasp that the war cabinet included not only loyalists of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In order to gain time, she made decisions in the name of Hamas, without referring to it.

Members of the former opposition who joined the emergency cabinet and witnessed this discussion were shocked to see her step out of her role as mediator and reveal her links of authority over Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

After the meeting, Joshua Zarka, Deputy Director General for Strategic Affairs at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, declared that Israel would "settle accounts with Qatar" as soon as it had completed its role as mediator. Indeed, if Qatar can give orders to Hamas, it can no longer conceal its responsibility for the October 7 attack. Not only is it not a mediator, it is an enemy of the Israelis.

Let’s return for a moment to Qatar’s identity.

Qatar and the United States

Qatar only became independent from the British Empire in 1971. Its first emir, Khalifa ben Hamad Al Thani, turned to France. He developed his country, wary of easy revenues from hydrocarbons. But in 1995, he was overthrown by his son, Hamad ben Khalifa Al Thani. The new Emir signed gas and oil agreements, mainly with Anglo-Saxon companies (Exxon Mobil, Chevron Phillips, Shell, Centrica), French companies (Total), Chinese companies (China National Offshore Oil, CNOOC, Petrochina), Indian, South Korean and Japanese companies. The money is now flowing.

In 1996, in the wake of the Oslo Accords, Qatar teamed up with French-Canadian Jews David and Jean Frydman, friends of Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, to set up Al-Jazeera, a pan-Arab television channel to confront Arab and Israeli viewpoints. It was an immediate success. However, the channel, which was intellectually involved in the Israeli peace movement, became the bête noire of the United States during its wars against Afghanistan and Iraq.

In 2002, the United States signed a military agreement with Qatar. They set up their Middle East command headquarters, CentCom, on the gigantic Al-Udeid base. It houses 11,000 soldiers and around 100 aircraft. To this end, they withdrew their men from Saudi Arabia.

The Pentagon then reminded the Emir that he was in no position to defy it: one morning, he was awakened by Special Forces in his bedroom. A US officer assured him that they have just protected him from an imaginary coup. The Emir understood the message and complied with the demands of his protectors.

In 2005, Al-Jazeera’s shareholder base was shaken by the boycott of Saudi advertisers. The Frydman brothers withdrew from the channel. It is completely reformatted by the JTrack consulting firm. JTrack placed Brother Wadah Khanfar at its head [1]. Gradually, he censored all criticism of "American imperialism" and even withdrew certain images showing US crimes in Iraq. Al-Jazeera, several of whose journalists were killed by US forces and one of whose contributors was taken prisoner and tortured at Guantánamo, became the mouthpiece of the Anglo-Saxon powers, giving a voice to Sunni Islamism. In 2009, Wadah Khanfar visited the United States, where he was received by all those who count among the ruling elite.

In 2008, the Emir enthroned a new president in Lebanon, in violation of the Constitution, in place of the outgoing president.

In 2011, the head of JTrack, Brother Mahmoud Jibril, suddenly became the leader of the opposition to the regime, of which he was a minister. Palestinian Brother Wadah Khanfar left Al-Jazeera to head a Turkish think tank, Al-Sharq Forum. The channel is taken over by the Prime Minister, Sheikh Hamad ben Jassem ben Jaber Al Thani. It instantly became NATO’s main propaganda tool in the Arab world. It gave a one-sided view of the conflicts in Libya and Syria, transforming itself into the channel of the Muslim Brotherhood. Imam Youssef al-Qaradawi became the channel’s official preacher. He explained to his listeners that Mohammed would undoubtedly be on NATO’s side today.

Qatar has become the main go-between in the Middle East. It negotiates peace agreements between Arabs wherever the United States asks, in Western Sahara, in inter-Palestinian rivalries, in Darfur, Eritrea and Yemen. But it can also use its power to restart wars. In 2012, for example, it gave Brother Omar al-Bashir’s Sudan $2 billion to recall his special envoy, General Mohammed Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi [2]. General Mustafa al-Dabi, who until then had been widely appreciated for his peaceful role in Darfur, had been appointed President of the Arab League’s International Mission in Syria. He and his colleagues had access to everything they wanted to see. In a preliminary report, he concluded that the Western media were lying and that there was no revolution in Syria.

In 2013, the Emir abdicated in favor of his son, Tamim ben Hamad Al Thani.

The « Gulf crisis »

From June 2017 to January 2021, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates led a blockade of Qatar, paralyzing the Gulf Cooperation Council. This Cold War has been misinterpreted. According to the Financial Times, it was linked to a murky story of ransom payments, and according to others to a declaration by the Emir, Sheikh Tamim ben Hamad al-Thani, in favor of the political use of Islam as practiced by both the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran.
In fact, the President of the Arab Republic of Egypt, Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, had managed to obtain documents from the secret society that had ruled his country for a year, the Muslim Brotherhood. A former director of military intelligence, he had studied them. After US President Donald Trump’s speech in Riyadh against Muslim Brotherhood terrorism (May 21, 2017), he understood the use he could make of them. So he had sent the king the evidence in his possession hoping to gain his support in his fight against the Brotherhood. They contained evidence of a plot by the Brotherhood and Qatar to overthrow the King of Arabia, Salmane ben Abdelaziz Al Saoud. For the king and his son, it was a shock: not only was the Brotherhood, which the Kingdom had pampered for years, granting it a military budget larger than that of its own army, taking the liberty of supporting Daesh, but it was also attacking the monarch.

On June 5, 2017, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain, followed by the Yemeni government of Abdrabbo Mansour Hadi, the Libyan government in Tobruk, Mauritania, the Maldives and the Comoros broke off diplomatic relations with Qatar. These countries closed their land, air and sea borders to the emirate, suddenly strangling it. US President Donald Trump took sides, accusing Qatar of funding "religious extremism". The Emirate was supported by Turkey, Morocco, Hamas, Iran and Germany, where the Brotherhood’s National Guide, Ibrahim el-Zayat, has a seat at the Foreign Ministry. Niger and Chad supported Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain issued a 13-point ultimatum to Qatar [3]. The ultimatum was to break with political Islam and its supporters: Turkey and Iran.

The crisis was only resolved when US President Donald Trump attempted to reconcile Arab countries with each other and with Israel. He organized the rapprochement between Morocco and Israel, followed by the Gulf crisis. The controversy surrounding political Islam is muted.

The Emirate of Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood

The Brotherhood (Ikwan) pursues the goal set by its founder, the Egyptian Hassan El-Banna, at the end of the First World War: to re-establish the Caliphate [4]. In a letter to the Egyptian Prime Minister of the time, he describes his three objectives:
• "a reform of legislation and the union of all courts under Sharia law ;
• recruitment into the armed forces by instituting voluntary service under the banner of jihad;
• connecting Muslim countries and preparing for the restoration of the Caliphate, in application of the unity demanded by Islam".

The Ikwan is a secret society organized on the model of the United Grand Lodge of England. As such, we only know about its activities from the testimonies of its former members, or from documents seized during its defeats.

As soon as it was created, the Brotherhood set up militias to assassinate its opponents. It developed first in Egypt, then throughout the Arab world and in Pakistan. The United Kingdom and the United States were quick to use its politicians (such as Brother Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan or Brother Mahmoud Jibril in Libya) and its militias, such as al-Qaeda, Daesh and the League for the Protection of the Tunisian Revolution. As soon as he arrived at the White House, President Barack Obama appointed a member of the Brotherhood, Mehdi K. Alhassani, to his National Security Council, in order to establish a permanent link with it [5].

When the United States began the Syrian episode of the "Endless War", it asked Hamas to move its office from Damascus to Doha. When Saudi Arabia definitively broke with the Brotherhood in 2014, Qatar spontaneously took its place. Without having the same resources as its powerful neighbor, the emirate became the big money-maker with the approval of the United States. In 2018, Qatar is paying the salaries of Hamas officials in Gaza. With the agreement of Benjamin Netanyahu, its ambassador travels there with suitcases full of $15 million in small bills. The operation will be repeated every month.

In 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden elevated Qatar to the rank of Major Non-NATO Ally, an honor reserved for only a dozen countries worldwide.

Lolwah Al-Khater’s blunder shows that Qatar is more than that. It exercises authority over Hamas’s political and military strategy.