Qatar: An Honest Broker?
(Yigal Carmon, March 7, 2025)
Transcript available below
Transcript
Introduction
Robert Reilly:
Hello and welcome to the Westminster Institute. I am Robert Reilly, its director. Today we are particularly delighted to welcome to the program an old friend of mine and one of the great experts on the Middle East, and particularly on the subject that we are going to be addressing today, the Emirate of Qatar.
Yigal Carmon is the president of MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which he founded back in 1998. I am a long serving member of the board of MEMRI. Yigal combines four different areas of expertise: intelligence, counterterrorism, diplomacy, and research. He is a colonel, retired, in the Israel Defense Force intelligence corps. He was counterterrorism advisor to two Israeli Prime Ministers. He participated in the 1991-1992 peace talks in Madrid and Washington as deputy head of the Israeli delegation negotiating with Syria.
As I mentioned, he founded MEMRI in 1998, which bridges the language gap between the Middle East and the West by monitoring, translating, and analyzing the media of the Arab and Muslim world in Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, Urdu and Pashto. As is often the case, as any observer of the Middle East will know, what is said in English in the Middle East is often not what is said in Arabic, and MEMRI and Yigal Carmon make sure that we hear what the Arabic version says. MEMRI recently launched a new project to bridge the language gap between the West and Russia by monitoring, translating, and analyzing Russian media as well.
Under Mr. Carmon’s leadership, MEMRI is serving the needs of media, academia, legislatures, and governments, and its research is particularly sought out by intelligence agencies in Europe and North America. Today, Yigal and I are going to be discussing Qatar, whether this Emirate in the Middle East is what it seems, an honest broker for Western powers, and specifically the United States, with terrorist groups that seize American citizens or those from other Western countries to obtain their release. Qatar has been particularly active since October 7th and the Hamas kidnapping of all of those Israeli, American, and other citizens.
I want to read one thing about Yigal and Al Jazeera, which is the TV network that Qatar started quite some years ago, and this is from someone in California. “MEMRI’s Yigal Carmon, who has been the leading expert in alerting the world to Qatar’s complicity as the puppet master for Islamist terrorism and along with Iranian regime the biggest obstacle to peace in the region, has exposed in detail just how Qatar’s Al Jazeera has consistently acted as a propaganda organ for Hamas and other jihadi terrorist groups.” Yigal, welcome to the program.
Yigal Carmon:
Thank you for having me, Bob.
Robert Reilly:
Qatar is so successful in presenting the face of the honest broker and intermediary for the United States and Western powers, with various terrorist groups, that the United States has designated it a [Major] non-NATO Ally, this being done in the latter years of the Biden Administration. Now, how can Qatar be all those good things and at the same time be an abettor of terrorism, which you claim it to be?
About MEMRI
Yigal Carmon:
Thank you for giving me a chance to explain this tragic situation. But if I may, Bob, just one word. Our board is made up of many advisors, directors, or many former heads of American intelligence agencies, and that has to do with our program today. We were joined by General Frank McKenzie, who was the latest commander of CENTCOM.
We moved from Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Pashto, Turkish to Russian, but then also to Chinese six years ago because there is a need to bridge the language gap also from these countries, Russia and China. And we monitor whatever hurts the American security and safety because what they say in Russian or in Chinese is not what their spokesmen say in English to the American public.
Qatar and Iran
So to come back to Qatar and Jazeera, how did this monster come into being? I want to go back to the time of the early 90s when the Soviet Union collapsed and the situation became such that as Charles Krauthammer described it, the unipolar moment, that America won over this empire of evil, the Soviet Union, and it was America’s moment and the Western civilization’s moment.
Unfortunately, this lasted only 10 years.
Two countries rose up to challenge that. Russia could not, they were destroyed. China was not even beginning to rise. Who came out to challenge and to create another pole, an anti-American pole? The two countries were Iran and Qatar: Iran, with its ideology, straight confrontation with America in the name of Islamism, of those Ayatollahs and their leadership, and Qatar did it in a deceptive way, through its money, basically, and began pouring money into the West to deceive them and to take over universities, institutions, economic enterprises, what have you, intelligence, military industry, and so on. We are going to publish soon what they bought from Boeing, that produces some F-16 planes. It is mindboggling, just mindboggling, the number of planes that they do not have enough people to deal with them. They go somewhere to other countries, enemies to America.
To go back, this is what Qatar does in the world. It is in nature a Wahhabi state, and they say it. We published that. We published the speech of the Emir of Qatar in 2010 when he inaugurated the main mosque in Qatar, the mosque of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, and he explained, ‘Our mission in life is to promote Wahhabism in the spirit of modern times.’ Namely, you do not need to wear a I-do-not-know-what and drive a camel. You can wear Prada, like his mother does, and own Valentino and preach for Hamas and for jihad and for others. This is in the spirit of modern time.
They supported the Taliban for many years, all the way to the bloody takeover of the country of Afghanistan from the hands of the democratically elected secular leadership that was there, and then they pretended to be helpful to America. They take the people, but they caused it all, they did it all, and the leadership of the Taliban were in Qatar, in Doha, the capital.
The same story they did with Hamas. So what do they say? America is the one who asks us to keep lines of communications. Now I am asking this question. Did they keep lines of communications? No, they brought in the leadership of the headquarters of the terrorists into Doha, saying ah, that is America that asks us to keep [lines of communication]. This is not keeping lines of communication. This is handling the Islamist leadership of this organization, the Muslim Brotherhood.
Now, wherever you look in the Muslim world, wherever there is a battle in any country between the Islamists on the one hand, and the secular [on the other hand], and I am not relating now that the secularists are mostly like in the Muslim world, dictators, but sometimes, of course, Islamists. Wherever there is a battle, Qatar is on the side of the Islamists. Take Sudan, Egypt of course, Libya, Tunisia, wherever you go. They even paid money to – I published that – to Islamist militias in northern Mali, everywhere. Everywhere they pour money. They turned over the regime in Egypt until Sisi took it back from the president of the Muslim Brotherhood, Muhammad Morsi. He was removed in a coup.
They are, of course, aligned with Turkey, which is another Islamist state, but also with Iran, and that is the main thing, and they serve as the moneybag for Iran. Iran is so much constrained by many sanctions, so they have Iraq on the one hand, which they basically occupied, though not officially, and they have Qatar, that allows them to act, that gives them money, that they share the biggest gas field in the world, maybe, South Pars. And they develop it. They share it with Iran. They develop it for the benefit of both of them. If Iran had to pay for the development, they would not have the money. Qatar does it for them so they can break the sanctions and sell, sell, sell, sell like the are no American sanctions.
This is what Qatar is doing today, like a few moments before we spoke, I see in Syria a jihadist took over the power from another dictator, Assad. Okay, and who stands by this jihadist, Jolani? Qatar, and Jazeera describes the situation and tells all kinds of lies and fabrication about how good they are. They are killing all their opponents. They are doing horrible things.
Jazeera is doing for them the PR like they do the PR for Hamas and for the Muslim Brotherhood. But there is opposition in Syria, and I am not saying the opposition is good, both sides are bad, bad, bad, but Qatar and Jazeera are for the Islamist ones. And they talk about what happened today as if there is a decent regime, a decent government there. And there are some members of the old guard of the old government that behaved horribly, and they killed. Both sides kill, but Qatar is on the side of the Islamists anywhere and everywhere, the Islamists.
Many perceive Qatar as, you know, a little country [with] a lot of gas. They want to secure themselves. They want to survive or something. No, it is a mission of Wahhabism. It is not a little country. A little country that wants to survive is the [United Arab] Emirates, and they chose a different path, a path of interreligious understanding. In Abu Dhabi, they have the Abrahamic compound. There is a church, there is a mosque, there is a synagogue. They try to promote interreligious understanding. In Qatar, they have the mosque of Ibn Abd al Wahhab. There are some churches, two or three, that look like they were deserted from anyone, but there is no interreligious understanding. They support the jihadists, simple.
Now Jazeera, back to Jazeera.
The previous government of Biden, the DOJ, ordered Jazeera to register according to the FARA laws as a foreign agent because they are owned by the government of Qatar. And they could not care less. They could not care less. This was two years ago, and they just ignored it. So what? Who cares about the government, the American government? So they say we just do not register.
And worse than that, we published – AP also published it – that they dared to hire an ex-CIA official, a former [official], a retired one, Kevin Chalker is his name, to spy on American legislators, Senator Ted Cruz, Senator Tom Cotton, representative Mario Diaz-Balart, and former representative Ed Roy. Why? Because they promoted legislation against the Muslim Brotherhood.
Now, how dare a country contract a former CIA official to spy on its legislators? This is a crime. They should be punished for [it] in a way that I cannot even imagine, but no, nothing is done. I understand that President Trump has one million urgent issues to deal with. This is not the most urgent one, but symbolically it is. Symbolically, it is something to be taken care of immediately. No one can hire anyone to spy on American legislators. Isn’t that [right]?
Robert R. Reilly:
No, I just want to mention quickly, Yigal, that it appears from some background pieces about President Trump that he has no Illusions about Qatar, that he understands the situation. Is that correct?
Yigal Carmon:
Well, I read books, and we published that. I read books written about 2017. In 2017, four countries in the Middle East, all allies of America, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Bahrain, [which has held] the biggest navy base since ’45, and Egypt declared a boycott on Qatar. And they said why, because they are promoting terrorists, terrorist organizations, and they are allies of Iran. And the president realized that he was on the side of America, obviously, on the side of those countries.
But then what happened? I read it in Jared Kushner’s book. He managed to somehow save Qatar in exchange for a commitment, which was never respected, never honored, never nothing. And the boycott was over.
Now, there is a point that I need to explain, Bob. America has the biggest base in the Middle East in Qatar, in Doha, Al Udeid Base. It is a front base for CENTCOM. Qatar gave it as a present to America in ’96, early on. Why? When the father of the present emir did the coup against his own father, many Arab countries were against that and were boycotting him. So what did he do? He needed some protection. Who did he find? America. The Americans, they do not understand anything, here, take a base, you have it.
They paid for it, all of it, even later. They pay all the time. They pay everything that America does there. Why? Is it a favor to America? No, it is a favor to themselves. America is doing a favor to them. Without the American base there, Qatar will be off existence in a week because they are endangering all other Arab countries who look for westernization, for reform, for openness. And Qatar hit them with Islamism of the 7th century, and they do not want to get rid of it, but America protects them. America supports them. America is holding them alive. They could have been gone long ago with all their support of terrorism. It is a tragedy.
Robert R. Reilly:
If I may ask you a question, because I have read this in MEMRI literature, about that, what you just said, if the American base was not there or if it was removed, Qatar’s existence would not last more than a matter of weeks? Well, who exactly is it amongst their neighbors who would do this?
Yigal Carmon:
Saudi Arabia and the Emirates will take it over. They do not need to take over. It is a ruling family. If America stopped supporting this dictatorial ruling family, a new regime will rise up. There are families there which this ruling family is repressing, is putting in jail. There is no freedom.