Posted on 09/29/2015 1:37:38 PM PDT by Faith Presses On
"The country is a modern-day Casablanca, full of intrigues in luxury hotels. Rosie DiManno on the world’s ‘frenemy.’"
With one hand they took: The Taliban Five.
That was a political favour to the United States, accepting a quintet of high-ranking Guantanamo detainees, after President Barack Obama authorized a grossly imbalanced prisoner swap for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the only American soldier still held prisoner by the Taliban in Afghanistan. With the other hand they give: Moral support to insurrectionists, asylum for jihadist radicals, a diplomatic foothold for the Taliban-in-exile and, most incriminatingly, a blind eye turned to terrorist financing via a network of fundraising activities that operates in the open and permissive banking legerdemain.
Money in, money out — to Syrian rebels, to Hamas, to the Muslim Brotherhood, to Libyan belligerents. And allegedly, if hotly denied, to Islamic State radicals (also known as ISIS).
That is the political double-dealing of Qatar.
Once the poorest of Persian Gulf States, a former pearl fishing backwater and British protectorate. Now a monarchy wealthy beyond imagining — possessing more than 15 per cent of the world’s proven gas reserves — and keen to situate itself as a regional power-broker, ally to the West yet abettor of the West’s enemies. Enemies of the combustible Gulf neighbourhood too, where totalitarian regimes under unprecedented internal pressures cast a worried eye upon threats emerging from the Middle East to North Africa to Central Asia.
Nonetheless, trying to make sense of Qatar’s imperial ambitions, its paradoxical foreign policy, has become an intense preoccupation of global analysts and think tanks. Broadly stated, it boils down to this: One hand does know what the other hand is doing, and finesses the geopolitics with cunning.
(Excerpt) Read more at thestar.com ...
Clock Boy is going there so it must be on the up and up. **wink**
100% Club Med for terrorists (or Club ACHmed) and that is why they are an ALLY to 0dunga, Jarrett, etc. Killing America isn’t easy without getting caught but they’re doing a fine job of it.
More from the article:
“The best way of characterizing Qatar’s relationship with the United States, with Europe and with Canada, is that it’s a frenemy,” says David Weinberg, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense and Democracies, a Washington-based non-partisan institute focusing on foreign policy and national security. “It likes to portray itself as a reliable friend, but simultaneously it does all kinds of things, usually when you’re not looking, that are counterproductive or adversarial in nature.”
In recent weeks, Qatar has become embroiled in the FIFA scandals, although awarding the 2022 World Cup to the emirate has been a simmering controversy since the votes were counted five years ago — too hot, too polluted, too hard-line Islamic, too violating of human rights, particularly against foreign “slave labour” brought in by the tens of thousands to build all those spectacular new soccer venues.
I never trust any Moslem country. Never.
From the article:
“Yet radical clerics and rabble-rousers abound in Qatar, their inflammatory rhetoric uncensored at state-owned mosques, their invocations to fund jihad, at minimum, tacitly tolerated. A half-dozen of them, at least, have been identified by the U.S. as private fundraisers for Al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise but they continue to operate openly in Doha.
“One of them, visiting sheikh Hajjaj al-Ajmi — based in Kuwait — notoriously stood in front of a conference hall in Doha, imploring his audience of wealthy Qataris not to bother with donations to humanitarian programs or the Western-backed Free Syrian Army.
“Give your money to the ones who will spend it on jihad, not aid,” he thundered. (That pitch, recorded in 2012, is still circulating on the Internet.)”
Somehow this sort of thing doesn’t matter?
Here’s the Georgia love: http://www.barenakedislam.com/2015/09/28/georgia-parental-outrage-over-public-schools-islamic-indoctrination-of-students-in-the-classroom/
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