The Brookings – Qatari - U.S. Connection

The Brookings – Qatari - U.S. Connection

The U.S. - although maybe unknowingly, or’, because of willful ignorance – has been supporting terrorism and Islamic jihad for decades.

By de Andréa, Opinion Editorialist
for ‘THE BOTTOM LINE’:

Published April, 2015 

A yearlong in-depth investigative research project on America’s involvement in terrorism, has revealed a cover-up that I have been working on and reporting for years.

In spite of the criticism I continued, and finally began to connect the dots on an indirect U.S. connection and support of Islamic Jihad and terrorism through the country of Qatar and the long time trusted Brookings Institution.  

In case you wonder why Western civilization is not making any progress in the fight against the international spread of terrorism and Islamic Jihad, then this my friend, may just be the flicker of light you need to see what is in store for you down the road.  

This may generate yet another FBI harassment against me but I have survived it before, and I will again.

This report will show the U.S. governments’ indirect ties through the Jihadist government of Qatar, to conspiracies and support of terrorist groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaida, ISIS, Hamas, Taliban, Ahfad al-Rasoul and scores of so-called Muslim Charities, some of them operating right here in the U.S. as government protected 5013c’s that support the agenda of Islamic Jihad and worldwide terrorism starting back as early as the late 1980’s.

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The Brookings Institution is one of Washington's oldest and most well respected and influential think tanks in the world. But now because of its dependence on donations from Islamic terrorist countries and organizations, it just may have lost its glitter as a shining star.

Brookings conducts research and education in the social sciences, primarily in economics, metropolitan policy, governance, foreign policy, global economy and development.  And the most important discovery of all is that the U.S. Government completely depends on it for recommendations in international issues and involvements.

The Washington Post hints at foreign donors in “Who Funds Brookings ?”

According To Wikipedia the Brookings Institution stated mission is to "provide innovative and practical recommendations that advance three broad goals: strengthen American democracy; foster the economic and social welfare, security and opportunity of all Americans; and secure a more open, safe, prosperous, and cooperative international system".

Brookings states that its scholars "represent diverse points of view" and describes itself as non-partisan, while the media most frequently describe Brookings as "liberal-centrist" or "centrist". An academic analysis of Congressional records from 1993 to 2002 found that Brookings was referenced by conservative politicians almost as frequently as liberal politicians, earning a score of 53 on a 1-100 scale with 100 representing the most liberal score. The same study found Brookings to be the most frequently cited think tank by the U.S. media and politicians.

The Brookings Institution bills itself as "the most influential, most quoted and most trusted think tank in the world," but is it really?  The real truth about the dependence on Brookings Islamic influence might reveal some answers as to why America is soon headed straight into the burning fires of Hell!

Note: A reminder that Qatar is touted as a trusted U.S. Middle Eastern Ally and Brookings is Washington's oldest most well respected and influential think tank.

Brookings', as is true of the U.S. government, has had a long-term relationship with the Qatari government – who has also been a long time notorious supporter of terror in the Middle East – this casts a very dark cloud over Brookings lofty claim to credibility, and might explain the ongoing support of Americas College and Universities by Islamic terrorist groups as well.

A September New York Times exposé revealed Qatar's status as the single largest foreign donor to the Brookings Institution. Qatar gave Brookings $14.8 million in 2013, $100,000 in 2012 and $2.9 million in 2011. In 2002, Qatar started subsidizing the Brookings outreach program to the Muslim World which has continues today. Between 2002 and 2010, Brookings never disclosed the annual amount of funds provided by the Government of Qatar.  And since 2002 Brookings has had a satellite center in Qatar called the Brookings Doha Center in Doha the capital of Qatar.   

Side Note: Doha in Arabic: الدوحة‎‎, or al-Da’wah or al-Dōḥa is another word for: Da‘wah (transliterated daawa(h); Arabic: دعوة‎  literally means "invitation") the proselytizing or preaching of conversion to Islam.  Islam in Arabic: الإسلام‎, al-ʾIslām, itself means “Subjugation to Allah”.

Sources of funding should not necessarily discredit an organization, but in this case, critical facts and claims about Brookings should be examined in light of them, starting with a harsh indictment by a former Brookings scholar.

The Investigative Project on Terrorism has revealed a dozen Brookings-based programs that were linked to the Qatari financed outreach to the Muslim world; and analyzed 27 papers sponsored and issued by the Brookings Institution and scholars based in Washington and at the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar since 2002.

This review finds that the Brookings institute is an organization that routinely hosts Islamists who justify terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians and American troops, who advocate blasphemy laws of beheading which would criminalize criticism of Islam, and which never scrutinizes or criticizes the government of Qatar, its largest benefactor.  Moreover along with more than a dozen Islamic terrorist’s organizations in the U.S. is a 501 c3 nonprofit tax-free corporation no different in that respect, than a Christian Church.

“There is a no-go zone when it comes to criticizing the Qatari government," Saleem Ali, who served as a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar in 2009, told the New York Times.  "If a member of Congress is using the Brookings reports, they should be aware — they are not getting the full story. They may not even be getting the true story." Ali noted that he had been told during his job interview that taking positions critical of the Qatari government in papers would not be allowed, a claim Brookings vigorously denies.

"Our scholars, in Doha and elsewhere, have a long record of objective, independent analysis of regional affairs, including critical analysis of the policies of Qatar and other governments in the region," Brookings President Strobe Talbott said in response to the Times story.

Unfortunately for Talbott, Qatar's own Ministry of Foreign Affairs openly acknowledges that the partnership gives Qatar exactly what it wants: a public-relations outlet that projects "the bright image of Qatar in the international media, especially the American ones," a statement announcing a 2012 memorandum of understanding with Brookings said.

Indeed, their close collaboration stretches back more than a decade.

Ambassador Martin Indyk, who headed the Saban Center, and other Brookings leaders noted their desire to "build strong bridges of friendship" to avoid a "clash of civilizations."

Indyk took a leave of absence from Brookings in 2013 and the first half of 2014 to serve as President Obama's envoy for the so-called Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. Indyk of course placed excessive blame on Israel for their failure.  It is difficult to grasp what he meant by failure!

At an April 2013 Brookings forum in Washington, Indyk mentioned that he and then Qatari Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr al-Thani, a key player in Qatar's engagement with Brookings, had remained friends for "two decades." This relationship dates to when Indyk served as special assistant to President Clinton and senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs at the National Security Council.

Indyk noted that he approached the sheik after the 9/11 attacks, informing him that Brookings planned to launch a project focused on American engagement with the Islamic world.  "And he said immediately, 'I will support it, but you have to do the conference in Doha.' And I said, 'Doha, well that sounds like an interesting idea,'" Indyk said at the 2013 forum. "Three years into that, he suddenly then told me we want to have a Brookings in Doha. And I said, 'Well, okay, we'll have a Brookings in Doha, too,' and we ended up with the Brookings Doha Center" (BDC), in 2008."

Brookings' Qatar-based scholars ignorantly see their host country with rosy spectacles, ignoring the emirate's numerous Jihadi terrorist ties.

Sultan Barakat, research director at the Brookings Doha Center (BDC), portrayed Qatar as an emerging peacemaker in the Muslim world and as a force for good in a 2012 report titled, "The Qatari Spring: Qatar's Emerging Role In Peacemaking."

"… During the Arab Spring, Qatar has emerged as a 'reformer'; that is, as a vocal and progressive leader of modern Arab nations, with the willingness and the capacity to utilize a broad range of both hard- and soft-power initiatives to achieve its foreign policy goals," Barakat wrote.

Highlighting Qatar as a regional peacemaker seems strange in the light of its longstanding support for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and allegations that its leaders aided al-Qaida in the past.

Cables released by Wikileaks and other U.S. government secret documents demonstrate these connections proved disturbing to some American policymakers.

"Qatar's overall level of [counter-terrorism] cooperation with the U.S. is considered the worst in the region," a top level U.S. State Department official wrote in a secret Dec. 30, 2009 State Department cable. "Al-Qaida, the Taliban, UN-1267 listed LeT (Pakistan's Lakshar- e-Taiba), and other terrorist groups exploit Qatar as a fundraising locale."

The official also noted that Qatar's security services fail to act against known terrorists because the Gulf state feared terrorist reprisals "out of concern for appearing to be aligned with the U.S." Another 2008 State Department cable noted that Qatar's government "has often been unwilling to cooperate on designations of certain terrorist financiers."

Qatar’s connection to the (9/11) attack on the U.S.

Qatar's royal family has a long history of harboring terrorists. Former Minister of Islamic Affairs Sheikh Abdallah bin Khalid bin Hamad al-Thani, a member of the royal family, personally invited 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to relocate his family from Pakistan to the emirate during the 1990s, according to the 9/11 Commission Report. Mohammed accepted a position as project engineer with the Qatari Ministry of Electricity and Water which he held until 1996, when he fled back to Pakistan to evade capture by the United States.

Mohammed dedicated much of his considerable travel while working for the ministry to terrorist activity.

Note: All Muslim charities are money laundering terrorist organizations.

Qatar Charity, formerly the Qatar Charitable Society and currently headed by Hamad bin Nasser al-Thani, a member of Qatari royal family, demonstrates a lingering link between Qatar and terror financing.

Russia's interior minister accused Qatar Charitable Society of funneling money to Chechen jihadist groups in 1999. Al-Thani responded to the accusation (response since removed) in a 1999 interview with Al-Jazeera, saying his government would not interfere with the funding because the Russian actions in Chechnya were "painful for us as Qatari, Arab, or Muslim citizens."

Qatar Charitable Society played a key role in financing the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, according to the U.S. government.

Recent reports suggest the charity's connection with al-Qaida persists.  Maliweb,(written in French) a U.S.-based independent news source, accused Qatar Charity of significantly financing "the terrorists in northern Mali operations." French military intelligence reports accused Qatar of funding Ansar Dine – a group that works closely with al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb – and MUJAO in Mali at the time of France's January 2013 intervention.

U.S. court documents (click the pdf file in the lower left of the page) notes additional ties between Qatar Charity and al-Qaida U.S. conspiracies dating back to the 1990s. Osama bin Laden complained to an al-Qaida member following a failed 1995 assassination attempt against former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak that the then-Qatar Charitable Society funds had been spent in the operation. Consequently, the terror mastermind became concerned that his ability to exploit charities for al-Qaida's ends would be compromised.

Qatar also funded the Ahfad al-Rasoul Brigade in Syria, which engaged in joint operations with Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaida's Syrian affiliate.

Qatar played a similar role in Libya where it has openly funded and armed jihadists. IHS Jane's Defence Weekly found that Qatar sent a C-17 cargo plane to provide arms to a militia loyal to Abdelhakim Belhadj, a Libyan warlord who fought alongside Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora in 2001 and was in touch with the leader of the 2004 Madrid train bombing.

Brookings scholar Bruce Reidel openly acknowledged in a Dec. 3, 2012 piece published in The Daily Beast that Syria's al-Qaida branch benefitted from arms supplied by Qatar.

In a separate Aug. 28, 2013 column in Foreign Policy magazine titled, "The Qatar problem," Brookings scholar Jeremy Shapiro observed that Qatar had undermined "U.S. efforts to isolate and delegitimize Hamas." Shapiro laid blame for Qatar's misbehavior at the feet of American policymakers. Yet he argued that the U.S. should not "oppose Qatar at every turn" and that it should "thus seek to get the best deal on every transaction" with the emirate, which he classed as neither a friend nor a foe of the United States.

However, such observations have not translated into public criticism of Qatar or recommendations that the emirate alter its stances by Indyk, Talbott or other top people who have been involved in managing Brookings' partnership with Qatar. They also have not brought about any public talk of reassessing Brookings relationship with the emirate.

The think tank denies that Qatari money and the involvement of a senior member of the emirate's royal family in its BDC translates into subservience to Qatar's foreign policy objectives.

"Brookings is an independent research institution, none of whose funders are able to determine its research projects," Indyk said after the New York Times story. "I hope nobody really believes that I cashed a check for $14.8 million dollars, which is what's going around in right-wing Jewish circles. We should all take a deep breath about some of these lurid, scandalous stories."

The figure Indyk cites stems from Brookings Foreign Government Disclosure. The nearby United Arab Emirates ranked a distant second among foreign government donors with a $3 million donation in 2010 and another $3 million in 2012.

Qatari involvement in Brookings goes beyond conventional donor relations, evidenced by Sheik Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr Thani's appointment as chairman of the BDC's board of advisers.

Even if Qatar exerts no overt control over Brookings' activities and policy positions, partnering with Qatar to discuss bridge-building with the Islamic world following 9/11 appears peculiar considering the oil-rich emirate's established ties with Islamic extremist groups and individuals at the time of the attacks.

Heritage Foundation scholar James Phillips slammed Brookings' cooperation with Qatar in comments to the Investigative Project on Terrorism.

"Qatar finances foreign entities for a reason: to advance its own foreign policy goals, which entail working closely with Islamist ideologues to empower Sunni Arab movements, including Hamas," Phillips said. "By accepting Qatar's money, Brookings risks appearing to be a tool of Qatar and unfortunately could help to legitimize such Islamist groups in the West.

"The implicit quid pro quo inherent in accepting money from foreign governments is one reason that the Heritage Foundation does not accept funding from foreign governments, which often attach strings to their donations, or even from the U.S. government."

Despite denials from both Talbott and Indyk, numerous examples illustrate how Brookings' pro-Qatar bias manifests itself, not always in what its Qatar-based scholars say, but in what they omit. A review of Brookings studies mentioning Qatar finds a consistent description of the emirate as a force for peace; complimenting its commitment to democracy and human rights; and education.

Even worse, Brookings reports gloss over the harsh realities of jihad terror and Islamism, instead recommending that the U.S. reach out to and cooperate with Islamist and jihadist groups.

Brookings calls for U.S. rapprochement with al-Qaida-linked group

In a January Foreign Policy magazine piece, Brookings scholars Will McCants, Michael Doran and Clint Watts urged the Obama administration against classifying Ahrar al-Sham, an organization backed by Turkey and Qatar and linked to al-Qaida, as a terror organization. Ahrar al-Sham founder Mohamed Bahiaiah, aka Abu Khalid al-Suri, was a senior al-Qaida operative, and the group routinely fights alongside Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), both of which were affiliated with al-Qaida at the time.

Al-Qaida leaders mourned the Islamic State's killing of Ahrar al-Sham's top leadership in September on their Twitter accounts.

'"The al Qaeda of yesterday is gone. What is left is a collection of many different splinter organizations, some of which have their own – and profoundly local – agendas. The U.S. response to each should be, as Obama put it, 'defined and specific enough that it doesn't lead us to think that any horrible actions that take place around the world that are motivated in part by an extremist Islamic ideology are a direct threat to us or something that we have to wade into,'" the Brookings scholars wrote.

They argued that U.S. policymakers required "flexibility" in dealing with Ahrar al-Sham because it stood as a lesser of two evils when compared to the greater threat posed by ISIS.

"The Islamic Front, including Ahrar al-Sham, represents the best hope in Syria for defeating ISIS," the article said. "[D]esignating Ahrar al-Sham as a terrorist group would destroy what little chance the United States has of building relationships with the other militias in the Islamic Front."

Thus far, the Obama administration has not designated Ahrar al-Sham as a terrorist group despite its intimate ties to al-Qaida.

An October 2013 report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused Ahrar al-Sham of war crimes.

Brookings' support for the Muslim Brotherhood

Peter W. Singer, co-coordinator of the 2002 conference, wrote in the conference's proceedings that "moderate," e.g. non-violent, Islamist parties needed inclusion in the political systems of majority Muslim countries.

"In dealing with burgeoning democracies, a general finding is that outside parties should support integration of Islamist parties into [the] political system rather than exclusion," Singer wrote. "The key is that inclusion helps moderates moderate, rather than forcing them outside the power structures, into possible violence."

Recent experience in Egypt discredits the theory. Egypt's MB pursued an authoritarian course during its year in power and supported its Palestinian sibling, Hamas, despite its access to Egypt's political process. Even some liberals conceded Egypt's Brotherhood proved itself incapable of adapting to democratic norms during its tenure.

Yet Brookings scholars continued to advocate including the MB in Egypt's political process in the wake of its defeat, even while conceding its authoritarian tendencies.

  

Whitewashing conditions inside Qatar

The Brookings Doha Center "also works to contribute to the local society, supporting the National Vision's goals of human and social development in Qatar," Director Salman Shaikh wrote in an April opinion piece. "At the same time, the Center's publications and public events foster Qatar's 'knowledge economy' by promoting a culture of informed citizenship."

Such studies read like propaganda designed to encourage foreign investment in the emirate rather than provide complete and unvarnished truth.

Reality in Qatar is quite different from the picture Brookings paints. Human Rights Watch notes that only 10 percent of Qatar's population of 2 million are citizens. Most are foreign migrants who live under conditions that HRW describes as those of "exploitation" and "forced labor." Shaikh makes no mention of this.

The January HRW report also finds that "[d]omestic migrant workers, almost all women, are especially vulnerable to abuse," and that Qatar's standards fall well short of international labor norms.

"Qatar's record on freedom of expression causes concern. In February, an appeals court affirmed the conviction of a Qatari poet for incitement to overthrow the government over poems critical of Qatar's then-emir," HRW wrote.

None of these independent observations appear in any Brookings reports published by its Doha-based scholars.

Building one-way bridges

Brookings engaged with Qatar 12 years ago, seeking to build bridges with the Muslim world, but that bridge seems to steer traffic in one direction. As subsequent stories in this series will show, Muslim participants in its Doha conferences remain unflinching in their support for Hamas and other Palestinian terror factions. Brookings scholars, similar to their Islamist partners, now unequivocally classify al-Qaida and similar groups as terrorists while attaching caveats to describing Hamas in the same vein.

Such a shift marks a clear victory for Qatar.

Thanks for listening – de Andréa

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Disclaimer - The writer of this blog is not responsible for the language used in links to referenced articles as source materials. Thank you – de Andréa