Qatar is not our friend

The key to the Qatari approach lies in embracing the Muslim Brotherhood’s strategy of infiltrating Western institutions, including through the electoral process. But this does not translate into adapting to Western values, notes scholar Mark Menaldo. Instead, it advances an ideology developed by the Muslim Brotherhood’s intellectual founder, Sayyid Qutb, that ‘cannot accommodate democratic principles such as legal pluralism’ outside Islamic practice.

America was the main object of Qutb’s anger. He saw America, where he lived for a short time, as a society that was sick and obsessed with sex and materialism. Americans, he suggested more than half a century ago, were already at ‘a point of no return when it comes to moral redemption’. The Muslim Brotherhood calls not just for the destruction of Israel, but also for the replacement of corrupt, infidel Western democracy with an Islamic world order.

Hamas follows these principles and carries them out with brazen violence, against both Israeli civilians and the Palestinians in its charge. Qatar’s game is different. Its rulers realise it is far easier to pay off politicians, professors and sports professionals than to convert them to Islamism. ‘Qatargate’, which involved alleged pay-offs to EU politicians, revealed how the Islamic regime had penetrated and influenced Brussels.

Increasingly, Europeans look to Qatar and other Middle Eastern states to bail out their sinking economies. Britain is particularly exposed, having become ever more reliant on Qatari cash and natural gas. Paris, another faded and increasingly Muslim-dominated former world capital, also looks to Qatar to prop up France’s permanently torpid economy.

Qatar’s tactical focus is clearly working. Even as it buys credibility, Qatar – a tiny state of just over three million people, sitting atop a gusher of natural gas – uses its money to bolster jihadism both in the Middle East and across the West. It openly funds outlets such as Mekameleen TV, a Muslim Brotherhood-aligned Egyptian TV channel, which broadcasts apologia for terrorism. It also controls Al Jazeera, which despite promoting anti-American and anti-Israel propaganda around the world, has just entered an AI partnership with US tech giant Google.

America is increasingly proving Sayyid Qutb right about the corruptibility of the West. Qatar – like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – has discovered how eager Trump’s inner circle is to be paid off, whether through real-estate ventures or bitcoin.

In classic, transactional Trumpian fashion, family members and associates are getting rich off deals with Middle Eastern monarchs. The UAE reportedly poured $500million into the Trump family crypto fund, just days before his coronation in January last year. Top administration officials such as Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and FBI chief Kash Patel have had strong past connections with Doha. Trump, no stranger to impropriety, has even accepted his presidential plane from Qatar. Meanwhile, Patel has signed a security arrangement with his former lobbying client.

This shameless profiteering has been so blatant that investor Ken Griffin, a strong GOP supporter, accused the Trumpistas of ‘enriching’ themselves through their foreign dealmaking, notably in the Gulf. How else do you explain a proposed Qatari air base in Idaho, the US base outside Doha and even a US commitment to defend the terrorist-sponsoring kingdom?

In its advocacy, Qatar’s orientation is plain. The annual Doha Forum is largely an exercise in promoting a Hamas-friendly view of the Middle East. Qatari ministers openly venerate the mostly now deceased architects of the 7 October 2023 attack on southern Israel, while continuing to host and finance Hamas’s political leadership. This year’s Doha Forum even featured a speech by key Hamas operative Khaled Mashaal, a man wanted for the murder of both Israelis and Americans. Calls for his extradition to the US will likely be ignored.

Given their harsh view of the West, the Qataris maintain no permanent allies or affiliations. They know that MAGA may have a short shelf life. Luckily for them, Democratic politicians, like the Trumpistas, are also lured by foreign lucre. Virginia’s new governor, Abigail Spanberger, has appointed Qatari lobbyists to the board of George Mason University. Timmy Davis, Joe Biden’s ambassador to Doha, also landed a big job at Irth Capital Management LP, a fund controlled by the ruling al-Thani family. This despite the fact that Davis has no experience in finance – but what does that matter among friends?

The Qataris are not just run-of-the-mill corrupters. They maintain a long-range strategy to undermine the West. Even as they genuflect to Trump, they invest heavily in that institutional bulwark of anti-Western progressivism – the universities. Along with Beijing, they are behind a large proportion of the $29 billion in foreign money that was sunk into American universities between 2021 and 2024. In 2025, Qatar reportedly outspent even the Middle Kingdom as the No1 financier of US colleges.

These and similar funds flooding Canadian, Australian and British universities buy ‘goodwill’ and political influence. On campuses, faculty and students – often recipients of generous funding from Muslim states such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar – have turned even New York colleges into hotbeds of anti-Zionist, and often anti-Jewish, fervour.

Even as they pay to play with the Trumpistas, they also support fiercely anti-Trump, anti-Israel factions in America. Qatar cultivates environmentalists, sending hundreds of millions to climate guru Al Gore, weaponising them to tamp down America’s huge fossil-fuel industry. They can even claim to have financed the film career of Mira Nair, the mother and benefactor of nepo-baby socialist Zohran Mamdani.

Like the Chinese, their closest competitors in buying the academy, the Qataris know a weak-minded, easily corrupted and unprincipled customer when they see one. At the Qatar branch of Northwestern University, funded by over $700million, the school was reportedly pressed to broach no criticism of the ruling al-Thanis.

Simply put, Qatar plays a smart game. It makes itself a broker, using Hamas’s atrocities and Islamist terrorism as incentives to cooperate.

It also cultivates figures in right-wing media, such as Tucker Carlson, who delights in boosting such ‘enlightened’ regimes as Putin’s Russia and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Carlson recently bought some fancy new digs in Doha.

Yet even as they stoke anti-Western and anti-Semitic currents, the cynical Qataris have recruited some Jews, including Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, by offering not only diplomatic successes, but also potentially lucrative business deals. In 2023, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie alleged that the whole point of Trump sending Kushner instead of a secretary of state in his first term was so he could ‘cash in on those relationships when he left office’.

Even more revealing has been the attempt by the son of Trump’s real-estate associate and diplomatic agent, Steve Witkoff, to raise funds in – you guessed it – Qatar, a country whose ideology literally translates to making Jews dead. The Qataris have even sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to an Israeli journalist at Haaretz, Israel’s leading left-wing paper, often hostile to the government’s military response to Hamas.

Right, left – whatever. All that matters is how Westerners can be duped into allying with a regime that, in the end, seeks their eventual destruction. When an economic and military superpower sells itself to those who detest it, one has to wonder about the worth of our civilisation.

Trump’s fleet may well topple Iran’s mullahs. But Americans and the West may need to turn their focus soon to a more subtle and calculating enemy. Rather than fall into an ‘alliance’ with regimes like Qatar, we should see them for what they are: a clear and present danger disguised as a friend.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, a presidential fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute. Find him on Substack here.