Obama 'Admin' BFF Qatar: 'State Sponsor of Terrorism'

Obama 'Admin' BFF Qatar: 'State Sponsor of Terrorism' HT: MoneyJihad.

We’ve known about Qatar’s funding of Al Qaeda-linked Syrian rebels from the outset of the uprising against Bashar al-Assad. The piece below from the Oriental Review puts Qatar’s role in even starker terms, pointing to a history of clandestine financing of militants by Qatar since at least the 1990s.

Like Saudi Arabia, Qatar is a state sponsor of terrorism all but in name, and should be legally designated as such. Keep in mind that Qatar isn’t just funding the rebels in Syria that the U.S. supports, but that Doha is also supporting the jihadists in Mali who are fighting America’s longtime ally, France.

if we go back a few years further, we find that Qatar was on the US list of state sponsors of terrorism. It was only taken off the list because it offered to host a US naval base — the largest one in the region — which was used as a command post during the 2003 operation by forces of the United States and its allies to occupy Iraq.

Huge amounts of money from natural gas sales enabled the Qataris get the “leader” of the global antiterrorist coalition to turn a blind eye on all of Doha’s transgressions in the sacred cause of assisting the “brothers” in sharing the Salafi faith everywhere — from Africa to Kashmir.

If we can trust documents on the WikiLeaks site, in 2008 the former US ambassador to Doha, Joseph LeBaron, cabled the State Department that Qatar was still financing international terrorism. Leaks of his cables published by the Qatari newspaper Peninsula in 2010 generated an exchange of remarks between LeBaron and its chief editor. But the US ambassador left, and Washington simply hushed the matter up.

if we apply the international legal norms to Qatar’s activities, we find that they actually meet the legal definition of sponsoring international terrorism as spelled out in several UN Security Council resolutions and other international community documents. Doha’s provision of money and weapons to terrorist groups like Jabhat al-Nusra qualifies as financing international terrorism. Read the full story here.