DOHA: Some anti-Qatar commentators in the US have dragged Doha into the latest flare-up in Israeli-Palestinian violence, even accusing Qatar of being behind the firing of rockets by Palestinian militants.
UAE-funded lobbyists and commentators have routinely dubbed Qatar as Hamas sponsors and the latest attack is seen as an attempt to incite US public opinion against Qatar.The current spike in violence between Israel and Palestinians began on Friday when two Palestinians were shot dead by Israeli forces during protests. Eight Palestinians and one Israeli have been killed so far after Israel responded with airstrikes and tank fire in retaliations for 200 rockets fired against it.
“Qatar-backed Hamas terrorists fire nearly 100 rockets into Israel from Gaza following collapse of Egypt-brokered ceasefire talks between radicalised groups and Israel,” Adelle Malka Nazarian wrote on Twitter yesterday. Nazarian, a writer and filmmaker, who calls herself ‘creator of positive change’, is a virulent and spiteful critic of Qatar in the US, who never misses an opportunity to attack this country. “An investigation needs to be made into Congress as to who is taking Qatar money,” RickJ, a ‘Vegas sports handicapper’ wrote on Twitter in response.
Interestingly, even as the likes of Nazarian and mercenaries of the UAE call Qatar sponsors of terrorism and Hamas, the US and Israel have until now never accused Qatar, officially, of sponsoring Hamas or terrorism. On the contrary, according to reports in the Israeli media, the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office has appreciated “the efforts of Egypt, the UN and Qatar to bring about calm” in Palestinian territories.
The Israeli reports said the firing of rockets from the Gaza Strip was “carried out by direct instruction from the Islamic Jihad headquarters in Damascus”.
Also, the accusations sound ridiculous because Qatar has been actively involved in the reconstruction of Gaza and it’s against common sense to think that it would do anything to undo its own work.
Nazarian’s tweet yesterday was a continuation of her vicious attack on Qatar. Last month, she tweeted that an “author of New York Times anti-Israel piece works for group funded by Qatar.” A few days after the tweet, she wrote an article in Foxnews.com titled ‘How Qatar Infiltrated the New York Times’.
“Qatari efforts to influence American journalism have been growing rapidly in recent years, as the Gulf state pays hundreds of millions of dollars to buy influence and manipulate what and how the American press reports on issues in the Middle East,” she wrote.
Her article was a brazen and unabashed attack on the freedom of the press and the right and duty of The New York Times to publish a divergence of opinions.
The reason for Nazarian’s provocation was an article published in The New York Times Magazine about the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement that, according to her, “evokes age-old anti-Semitic tropes to accuse prominent Jewish philanthropists, like Haim Saban, of holding the Democratic Party hostage on Israel”. She accused the author of the piece, Nathan Thrall, of having “ties to one of the world’s biggest sponsors of terrorism – referring to Qatar.
She spewed copious amounts of vitriol against Qatar. “It’s not Jews that are paying journalists. It’s Qatar. It’s not Jews who are telling prominent newspapers what to publish. It’s Qatar. It’s not Jews who are using money to shape the national conversation. It’s Qatar,” she wrote.
According to sources, if Qatar wields such gargantuan influence on the US media despite counter efforts by the UAE, it’s a sign that American media now stands fully convinced about the unjustness and illegality of the siege imposed on Qatar by the neighbouring countries.
Nazarian has now latched on to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to tarnish Qatar’s image and please her masters. But it is also a sign of the desperation and anguish of anti-Qatar forces that they are forced to repeat the same charges ad nauseam, charges which have failed to cause even a ripple of reaction except from their promoters.