Emir of Qatar to Hamas: 'If you want my support, cut off relations with Iran, recognize Israel, give up on Jerusalem'
According to a report in a French magazine, last month's meeting between Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and the Emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa,wasn't quite as cordial as the 'Palestinians' have cracked it up to be. According to the report, Khalifa told Haniyeh that if he wants support from Qatar, he must give up his alliance with Iran, and recognize Israel with a united Jerusalem (including 'east' Jerusalem) as its capital (Hat Tip: David H). This is from an English Google translation of the French report.
According
to Palestinian sources, the meeting between Palestinian Prime Minister
in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, and the Emir of Qatar Hamad bin Khalifa, ended
with a disagreement about the conditions imposed by Qatar to support the
Palestinian cause. Cited yesterday by the Lebanese Hezbollah chain El-Manar, these sources have reported that the emir of Qatar has suggested: "If you want to obtain economic and financial aid, you must break your alliance with Iran, enemy of Islam and Muslims
"- According to these sources, the conditions set by Hamad bin Khalifa
Palestinian Prime Minister were also negotiate with the" Zionist entity
"without preconditions, to recognize Israel, to accept that Jerusalem
is the capital of Israel and abandon the recovery of the eastern part as
well as to announce the end of the armed resistance and begin
negotiations as the only option for resolving the Palestinian question.
Iran claims Emir of Qatar helped Israel target Hamas
This is too much. Iran is claiming that the Emir of Qatar helped Israel to target Hamas terrorists(Hat Tip: Shy Guy).
Iranian news agencies claimed Saturday that Qatar’s King Sheikh Hamad
bin Khalifa Al Thani served Israeli intelligence during his recent
visit to Gaza by planting transmitters on senior Hamas members.
According to a report published by the semi-official Fars news agency and quoted by the official Press TV,
the emir of Qatar "distributed a number of watches and ballpoint pens
among Hamas leaders, which could transmit low-frequency signals to
Israeli satellites."
"The Israeli military officials would then use the received signals
to spot the high-ranking Hamas fighters, and launch assassination
strikes on them."
Sheikh Hamad arrived in Gaza on October 23 to become the first head
of state to visit the besieged enclave since Hamas seized power in the
territory five years ago.
For those of you who think the title is in jest, it's not. Giulio Meotti reports that Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani of Qatar is Europe's new owner.
Qatar, not exactly or even the slightest bit French-speaking, has
just joined the “International Organisation of la Francphonie” as an
associate member. Qatar’s goal is clear: to change and manipulate French
culture. For example, the Voltaire School in Doha banned a religious
book that discussed Christianity in the Middle Ages.
Qatari Emir
Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, who has cultivated the image of a
pro-Western reformist, vowed to “spare no effort” to spread the
teachings of Wahhabi Islam across “the whole world”. Last December
Qatari Emir inaugurated the “Imam Imam Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab” Mosque
in Doha, dedicated to the founder of the most virulent, anti-Jewish and
totalitarian Islamic school of religion.
Qatar’s octopus is
working on three fronts: overthrowing despotic Arab regimes and replace
these with sharia-based countries; destroying Israel by financing the
terror groups (the emir just visited Gaza) - and Islamizing the European
continent through mosques and investments.
In Germany, Qatar’s
sovereign fund, the Qatar Investment Authority, owns 17 percent of
Volkswagen, 10 percent of Porsche and 9 percent of construction giant
Hochtief.
In Italy, to mention just one well known firm, Qatar
just bought Valentino’s fashion style company, while AC-Milan owner
Silvio Berlusconi is also ready to sell the powerhouse to the ruling
Emir of the State of Qatar.
In the UK, the Qatar Muslims own
swathes of the Canary Wharf financial district in London. Qatar also
owns 20 per cent of the London Stock Exchange.
Qatar invested in
the Paris St. Germain soccer club and it is an investor in the French
Total Oil group, as well as British Shell.
Qatar financed the 95% of the Shard tower in London, the highest skyscraper in Europe.
In
Cannes, the emir bought an hotel famous for hosting celebrities during
the film festival, but it’s also looking to buy a Jewish symbol like the
Les Trois Rois hotel in Basel, Switzerland, scene of the iconic
portrait of Theodor Herzl.
Qatar has also purchased, for 300 million euros, the building which hosts part of the US Embassy in Paris.
Qatar
announced last February, when Nicolas Sarkozy was still the President
of France, that it was willing to spend $65 million in the French
banlieues, the suburbs home to the vast majority of the six million
Muslims in France. Then Qatar doubled the sum to €100 million, which the
extreme leftist French newspaper Libération describes as a "Qatari take over of the banlieues.”
Another newspaper, Le Figaro,
seeing the handwriting on the wall (writing a check?, published an
article recently, titled: “Will France become an Islamic Republique?”
But Qatar isn't just interested in buying up Europe and spreading Wahhabi Islam. There's also the matter of that little Jewish state in their own neighborhood.
Qatar is a bastion of anti-Semitism, which goes around the world
along with the investments. A Qatari television show, based on a book by
late Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani, shows a Holocaust survivor
who resorts to prostitution and claims the Nazis did no wrong. “I didn’t
see any gas chambers”, she is seen saying. An actor depicting former
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin calls on Jews to murder Arab
civilians.
Qatar is also hosting many conferences which demonize the Jews.
Speaking
at the International Conference for Defense of Jerusalem in Doha,
Palestine Authority head Mahmoud Abbas recently said that “the Israeli
occupation authorities are using the ugliest and most dangerous means to
implement plans to erase and remove the Arab-Islamic and the Christian
character of east Jerusalem”. The conference’s purpose, under the
auspices of the Palestinian Islamic-Christian Committee, is to combat
the “Judaization of Jerusalem”.
In Doha’s Friday sermons, Jews are called “parasites”. Back to the Nazis.
With
an imperial flux of money and ideology, the former British protectorate
of Qatar is discouraging Muslim integration in Europe in order to
better dominate it, fomenting anti-Semitism and cultural separation,
actively encouraging jihad against the State of Israel.
Qatar’s course
of action is very practical: convincing Europe that the real name of
Jerusalem is Al Quds, that the Koran replaced the Bible and that the
Jewish Temple Mount is just a conspiracy.
Aiming for the
destruction of Israel allows Europe, the new mercenary of Qatar, to free
itself from its own identity and the memories of their complicity in
the Holocaust that come with it.
President Obama's Best Friend Forever - indeed his only friend in our part of the world - is planning to pay a visit to Hamastan.
A visit to the Gaza Strip, where Qatari Emir
Shaikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani recently visited, is on Erdoğan's
agenda. He said he finds the Qatari emir's visit a very positive step,
and added he also plans to go to the Gaza Strip in the near future after
reaching a consensus with the authorities in Gaza.
I guarantee you that if this visit happens while Hussein Obama is still President, he will have nothing to say about it. And you thought Obama was trying to push the 'Palestinian Authority' as the 'Palestinians' leadership, didn't you?
On Friday, Erdogan suggested that he may take'moderate' 'Palestinian' President Mahmoud AbbasAbu Mazenalong with him to Gaza, and complained that Prime Minister Netanyahu had sent 'weird' envoys to try to resolve the ongoing Mavi Marmara dispute.
The emir of Qatar on Tuesday became the first head of state to visit
the Gaza Strip since Hamas took full control of it in 2007, the latest
step in an ambitious campaign by the tiny Persian Gulf nation to
leverage its outsize pocketbook in support of Islamists across the
region — and one that threatened to widen the rift between rival
Palestinian factions.
This actually is a pretty good way to describe the visit, including a
mention of the Emir's support for Islamists. It's much better than Qatari emir makes historic first visit to Gaza, in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Further, the New York Times reports:
In the West Bank, allies of Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the
Palestinian Authority, who has struggled to preserve his own legitimacy,
warned that the visit set a dangerous precedent of Arab leaders’
embracing Mr. Haniya as a head of state and thus cleaving the
Palestinian people and territory in two. “We call on the Qatari prince
or his representative to visit the West Bank too!” blared a headline on
an editorial in the leading newspaper Al Quds.
The visit signaled just how much the region had changed for Hamas since
the advent of the Arab Spring. Where Egypt under President Hosni Mubarak
once allied with Saudi Arabia to squeeze Hamas by keeping the border
largely closed, Egypt under a new Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi,
opened the crossing to allow the Qatari ruler through. But the visit
also reflected the unique foreign policy that has allowed Qatar to
straddle competing worlds, bankrolling political movements like Hamas,
deemed a terrorist organization by the United States, while maintaining
strong links to Washington.
It’s fair to say that an underappreciated obstacle to a two-state
solution between Israel and the Palestinians is Hamas’s rule of Gaza.
For such an agreement to take shape, Hamas would have to either consent
or not be in charge of the strip. Though a Hamas-Fatah reconciliation is
unlikely, even if it were to happen, it might only bring about Hamas’s
conquest of the West Bank, thereby doubling, rather than solving, the
problem posed by Hamas. And since Hamas won’t abide a true peace with
Israel, it’s difficult to solve the conflict under current conditions.
With that in mind, those who seek to end the isolation of Hamas are
strengthening the terrorist group’s hand against Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah
and the Palestinian Authority’s main governing structure. In this
scenario, it isn’t Israel that loses nearly as much as Abbas and Salam
Fayyad, in whose corner the West claims to be. So while Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pleads with the international community to
help strengthen the PA’s balance sheet, the opponents of Palestinian
reconciliation are helping Hamas, at Fatah’s expense. The latest such
actor is the government of Qatar.
Will the same people who criticize Israel for not doing enough to help
the Palestinian Authority, now complain about the active efforts to
undermine it by much of the Arab world? Will the same people who
advocated allowing Hamas to participate in elections because it would
moderate them, now concede the disaster that has caused?
The rocket attacks against Israel occurred soon after the Emir's visit,
suggesting that his support emboldened Hamas. Khaled Abu Toameh makes
this point in Why Hamas is confident enough:
Tuesday’s high-profile visit, the first of its kind by the leader of
an Arab country, is seen as a huge political and moral victory for
Hamas. The emir’s visit marks the beginning of the end of years of
isolation for Hamas, particularly in the international arena.
But now that Hamas has the backing – and financial support – of a
wealthy and influential country like Qatar, it can afford to do almost
anything it wants.
Hamas knows that in addition to the backing of Qatar, it also enjoys the
support of many Arabs and Muslims thanks to the Arab Spring, which has
resulted in the rise to power of Islamist groups, most significantly in
Egypt.
(Egypt's role until now and possibly in the future was also mentioned by Barry Rubin.)
The New York Times reported on the attacks in Four Palestinian Militants
Killed in Israeli Airstrikes. (No I can't blame the reporter, but
shouldn't the headline have been "Israel's south under missile attack by
Hamas?")
Palestinian militants fired more than 60 rockets from Gaza into
southern Israel overnight and early Wednesday, hitting several houses
and wounding three Thai workers, two critically, in an Israeli border
community, according to the Israeli military. Israel carried out several
airstrikes against rocket-launching squads, killing four militants,
Palestinian officials said. Three of the four belonged to Hamas, the
Islamic militant group that controls Gaza.
The rocket fire began hours after a landmark visit to Gaza by the emir
of Qatar, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the first head of state to
visit Gaza since Hamas took full control there in 2007. It also came as a
major American-Israeli joint military exercise was under way in Israel,
underlining the volatility in the area at a delicate time before the
American elections, in less than two weeks, and Israeli elections,
scheduled for January.
The Israeli government has come under increasing criticism from
residents of southern Israel who have been forced into protected spaces
and bomb shelters during repeated bouts of cross-border violence.
I don't think that the joint military exercise is relevant here. As
noted above, the emir's visit was likely one of the causes of the Hamas
escalation.
Ever since it forced the Israelis’ panicky retreat from Lebanon in 2000,
Hezbollah has been building up an immense military force, with
firepower that 90 percent of the world’s countries don’t possess,
according to Meir Dagan, the former director of the Mossad, Israel’s
intelligence agency.
The militia’s war doctrine is based on the assumption that Israel is
hypersensitive to civilian casualties, that it cannot wage a protracted
war and that it will always aim for the quickest possible clear-cut
victory. With this in mind, Hezbollah has constructed a complex network
of underground bunkers with the goal of assuring survivability,
redundancy and an ability to maintain a prolonged missile barrage
against Israeli cities.
...
The doctrine proved itself in the war between the two sides in 2006,
when Israel failed in its attempt to liquidate Hezbollah and was once
again forced to withdraw from Lebanon, bruised and bleeding.
Despite the Republican Party’s shrill campaign rhetoric on Israel, no
Democratic president has ever strong-armed Israel on any key national
security issue. In the 1956 Suez Crisis, it was a Republican, Dwight D.
Eisenhower, who joined the Soviet Union in forcing Israel’s founding
father, David Ben-Gurion, to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula after a
joint Israeli-British-French attack on Egypt.
In 1991, when Iraqi Scud missiles rained down on Tel Aviv, the
administration of the first President Bush urged Israel not to strike
back so as to preserve the coalition of Arab states fighting Iraq. Prime
Minister Yitzhak Shamir resisted his security chiefs’ recommendation to
retaliate and bowed to American demands as his citizens reached for
their gas masks.
After the war, Mr. Shamir agreed to go to Madrid for a Middle East peace
conference set up by Secretary of State James A. Baker III. Fearful
that Mr. Shamir would be intransigent at the negotiating table, the
White House pressured him by withholding $10 billion in loan guarantees
to Israel, causing us serious economic problems. The eventual result was
Mr. Shamir’s political downfall. The man who had saved Mr. Bush’s grand
coalition against Saddam Hussein in 1991 was “thrown under the bus.”
I don't think that a single one of Halevy's examples is wrong. I do think that his examples are highly selective.
The fallacy here is that Halevy cites this in order to refute Mitt
Romney’s charge that President Obama has repeatedly thrown Israel “under
the bus.” In doing so he chooses to ignore the many instances of
pressure from Democrats. Indeed, just as every Republican occupant of
the White House has some blots on his ledger with regard to Israel, the
same is true of almost every Democrat dating back to Harry Truman. Yet
what’s truly odd about the piece, and causes me to question the judgment
not only of the Times editors that chose to publish it but those
liberals circulating the article around the Internet today as if it was a
damning refutation of Romney’s allegations, is that none of this stuff
about past Republicans or Democrats has anything to do with Obama. Based
on the tone of the last debate, the president seems quite anxious to
demonstrate his pro-Israel bona fides to wavering Jewish voters in
Florida and Ohio. Those who care about Israel will judge him on his
record, but it mystifies me as to why anyone’s vote would be influenced
by unhappy memories of Ike or the Bushes.
Will they say it's not about Israel this time too?
A Facebook page calling for March 16 protests demanding the removal of Qatar's Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, because he is an 'agent of Israel,' has garnered more than 18,000 'likes' since being posted last week.
A Facebook page demanding the ouster of Qatar's moderate, pro-Western emir, accusing him of being an agent of Israel, had attracted 18,262 fans by Saturday in the latest web-driven push for change in the Arab world.
In what is apparently the first call for change in the gas-rich state since popular revolts began sweeping the Arab world, the page has a profile picture with an image of Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, crossed out in red.
Against a backdrop of Qatar's flag is the tagline: "For Qatar: try the traitor, an agent of Israel."
Entitled "Freedom Revolution, March 16, Qatar," the page calls on Qataris to hit the streets to demand change."
...
Among other demands are the exclusion from public affairs of the emir's wife, Sheikha Mouza, and an end to Qatari ties to Israel and the United States, which has a military base in the small Gulf state.
Qatar does not have diplomatic relations with Israel but did maintain informal ties with the Jewish state.
It broke off those ties and closed Israel's trade office in Doha in protest at Israel's offensive against the Gaza Strip over New Year 2009 in which more than 1,400 Palestinians were killed.
The page features pictures of Hamad and others with Israeli officials accompanied by angry comments about the emir being a "traitor like Mubarak."
I did not find the Facebook page itself, but I did find this video, which shows some of the pictures.
Let's go to the videotape.
My Arabic is non-existent, but if someone wants to try translating the song, please put it in the comments.
We keep hearing how the uprisings in the Arab world are not about Israel. In fact, that's a point that Egypt's Mona Eltahaway made quite forcefully during her wildly applauded speech at the J Street confab over the weekend. Those claims ignore pictures like this one:
They also ignore the graffiti in Libya referring to Gadhafi the Jew, the demands by Egyptian protesters and potential Presidential candidates to abrogate the Camp David treaty, and the attacks on the Jewish community in Tunisia.
In the Arab Muslim world, it's always about the Jews. Maybe the blatant nature of the protests in Qatar will open the West's eyes to that reality. But don't bet on it.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
