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As Qatar Emir Visits Canada, Just What is Doha Up To?
By HENRY SREBRNIK (Sept. 19/24) Qatar…home of Hamas leaders, Al-Jazeera, host of soccer’s 2022 World Cup, and wealth beyond measure. And everyone’s favourite centre for “negotiations” to end the war Hamas unleashed on Israel a year ago. It’s become everyone’s go-to country, a veritable “light unto the nations.”
However, as the 1946 song “Put the Blame on Mame” has it, in a different context, of course, “That’s the story that went around, but here’s the real lowdown” … about this duplicitous Persian Gulf emirate.
Even before the Gaza war began, there was an upswing of commentary celebrating a shift in the policies and behavior of Qatar: away from promoting and subsidizing radical Islamist groups, and towards “deconfliction” and moderation.
Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the country’s emir, has been basking in the glow of international approval, depicting the country as a global influencer and peacemaker. The Qataris want to make themselves indispensable.
It plays into Doha’s ongoing attempts to create an illusion of rebranding as a moderating actor in the Middle East and beyond, pushed by various propagandists in the West on Qatar’s payroll, including more than a few American university centres and departments awash in Qatari money.
The emir and other officials spent two days in Canada Sept. 17-19, meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and cabinet ministers. The Gaza war was on the agenda, of course. Indeed, Jewish-Canadian leaders urged Trudeau to criticize him over his patronage of Hamas. But being able to tap into Qatar’s wealth via business and trade was more likely on Trudeau’s mind.
Qatar has one of the highest per capita incomes in the world, at $110,000 a year. And while its total population is some 2.7 million, most of these are guest workers, including European lawyers and consultants at the top of the scale, and at the bottom South Asian labourers. Only some 313,000 are native Qataris, the ones who benefit from the riches it derives from the sale of oil and gas.
The Peninsula, an English language daily newspaper published in Doha, ran an article on the occasion of the emir’s visit by noting the expanding trade and investment cooperation between Canada and Qatar, especially with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in June between the Qatar Financial Center and the Canada Arab Business Council, a non-profit organization that aims to enhance trade and investment relations between Canada and the Arab world.
The MoU “aims to establish an integrated framework for cooperation and coordination in specific sectors through joint initiatives and the exchange of information and expertise, with a focus on stimulating growth and promoting innovation in areas such as financial services and professional business services.” Ahmed Hussen, Minister of International Development participated in a signing ceremony with Lolwah bint Rashid Al-Khater, Qatar’s Minister of State for International Cooperation.
More than 9,000 Canadian expatriates live in Qatar, working in Canadian and Qatari companies and institutions. From January to July, Canada exported goods valued at $103.45 million to Qatar, while Qatar’s exports to Canada amounted to $90.27 million.
There is also a partnership in academic programs, as the University of Calgary has been in Doha since 2006, offering a Bachelor of Nursing program, along with the College of the North Atlantic, which transformed into the University of Doha for Science and Technology. Furthermore, there are several Doha-based schools that offer Canadian curricula.
In their meeting, Sheikh Tamim expressed his aspiration to work with Trudeau to advance their bilateral cooperation across multiple sectors in order to “contribute to enhancing regional and global peace and stability.” Bilateral relations between the two countries were discussed, especially in the fields of investment, economy and international cooperation, “in addition to developments and situations in the Gaza Strip and the occupied Palestinian territories.”
Qatar has been very successful in its efforts to shape public opinion in Canada, as well as in the far more important United States. The amount of money that Qatar has poured into universities, schools, educational organizations, think tanks, and media across America, and the number of initiatives that Qatar uses to influence American opinion, is overwhelming.
According to a 2022 study from the National Association of Scholars, Qatar is the largest foreign donor to American universities. It found that between 2001 and 2021, the petrostate donated a whopping $4.7 billion to U.S. colleges. The largest recipients are some of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning. They include Carnegie Mellon University, Ivy League Cornell University, Georgetown University in Washington, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Texas A & M. These schools have partnered with the regime to build campuses in Doha’s “education city,” a special district of the capital that hosts satellite colleges for American universities. (Texas A&M decided earlier this year to shutter its branch campus in Qatar.)
Georgetown University in Qatar, for instance, was hosting the “Reimagining Palestine” conference Sept. 20-22. The event engages scholars, experts, and the public “in timely and relevant dialogues on globally significant issues,” according to a description of the gathering. One of the speakers, Wadah Khanfar, “was active in the Hamas movement and was one of its most prominent leaders in the movement’s office in Sudan,” the Raya Media Network, a Palestinian outlet, tells us. In the months following Oct. 7, the campus has hosted a variety of seemingly anti-Israel events.
Since 2008, Qatar has donated nearly $602 million to Northwestern University, whose journalism school is ranked as one of the best in the world, to establish a school of journalism in Qatar. The Northwestern University campus in Qatar and Qatari broadcaster Al-Jazeera in 2013 signed a Memorandum of Understanding to “further facilitate collaboration and knowledge transfer between two of Qatar’s foremost media organizations.” Are Northwestern’s interests really aligned with Qatar?
Qatari state-financed entities also often fund individual scholars or programs in the United States without official disclosure or being directly traceable to a government source, thus avoiding public scrutiny. For example, Ivy League Yale University disclosed only $284,668 in funding from Qatar between 2010 and 2022. Researchers at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) in a report released in June, though, found that this amount reflected only a small fraction of the money and services the university and its scholars had in fact received over that period. The most common channel for hard-to-track Qatari support for Yale came from individual research grants originating from the Qatar National Research Fund, and their report found 11 Yale-linked QNRF grants which came to at least $15,925,711.
Recent research from the Network Contagion Research Institute indicated that at least 200 American universities illegally withheld information about approximately $13 billion in Qatari contributions. Also, according to the report, from 2015 to 2020 institutions that accepted money from Middle Eastern donors had on average, 300 percent more antisemitic incidents than those institutions that did not.
Overall, the report found that “a massive influx of foreign, concealed donations to American institutions of higher learning, much of it from authoritarian regimes with notable support from Middle Eastern sources, reflects or supports heightened levels of intolerance towards Jews, open inquiry and free expression.”
Much of Doha’s engagement with the world is run out of the Qatar Meeting, Incentive, Conference and Exhibition (MICE) Development Institute (QMDI), which promotes Qatar as a good place for business. The annual Doha Forum gathers major policymakers from around the world.
Qatar’s influence-buying strategies are a textbook example of how to transform cash into “soft” power. The relationship between one of Washington, D.C.’s top think tanks and Qatar, for example, began in 2002, when the emirate underwrote a Doha conference featuring then Qatari Foreign Minister Hamad bin Jassem Al Thani and former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, at the time the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings. (Hamad oversaw Qatar’s $230 billion sovereign wealth fund until 2013.) In 2007, Brookings followed up by opening a centre on Doha. It didn’t end well. In 2021 the institute ended its relationship with Qatar amidst an ongoing FBI investigation.
Still, Washington treads carefully when it comes to criticizing Qatar. It’s not just about money. After all, the Al-Udaid Air Base is home to the U.S. military’s Central Command (CENTCOM), and the country is just across the Persian Gulf from Iran. In fact, Washington’s relationship with Qatar is so close that in 2022 the White House officially designated the emirate a “major non-NATO ally.” The Qataris, realizing that their very existence would be threatened were the U.S. to relocate its CENTCOM operations to the UAE or Saudi Arabia, in January hastened to nail down the agreement for another decade.
Yoni Ben-Menachem, a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, told the Jewish News Service (JNS) that the Gulf country is more dangerous than Hamas or Hezbollah since it is extraordinarily wealthy and thus in a position to influence U.S. administrations.
Qatar has for many years been involved in financing the campaigns of the Democratic Party, he claimed, “especially Hillary Clinton’s campaign” in 2016. He added that former U.S. President Bill Clinton is known to have flown to Qatar to bring back suitcases full of cash.
According to Jonathan Ruhe, director of foreign policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), Qatar has portrayed itself as “indispensable to U.S. interests in the Middle East, including negotiations with the Taliban, reconstruction aid for past Gaza conflicts, and building the massive Al-Udeid base for U.S. forces.”
Yet although it hosts the Pentagon’s regional command, Qatar has long supported terrorism. For decades, it has opened its doors to Islamist terrorists, Taliban warlords and African insurgents. Doha housed the Taliban’s political office before that group returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021.
Beginning in 2012, the Israeli government allowed Qatar to deliver cash to Gaza. Over the next nine years, Qatar provided $1.5 billion. Prior to the outbreak of the present conflict, Doha subsidized Hamas to the tune of $360 million to $480 million a year. With one third of that money, Qatar bought Egyptian fuel that Cairo then shipped into Gaza, where Hamas sold it and pocketed its revenue. Another third went to impoverished Gazan families, while the last third paid the salaries of the Hamas bureaucracy.
The leaders of Hamas, including Khaled Mashaal and the late Ismail Haniyeh, who was chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau until assassinated by Israel in July, have been regular guests in Doha, living in luxury. (The emir sat in the front row with mourners during Haniyeh’s funeral in Doha.) Qatar has defended Hamas’s presence in the country.
“This was started to be used as a way of communicating and bringing peace and calm into the region, not to instigate any war,” Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani told U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken last October. “And this is the purpose of that office.” Blinken seemed to buy this. At a press conference in Doha in February, he asserted that “we’re very fortunate to have Qatar as a partner.”
As far back as 2007, when Hamas seized control of Gaza, Qatar recognized that “adopting” the group would be a worthwhile opportunity: connections with Hamas in Gaza grants Qatar influence and status in the Middle East and beyond. In addition, they bolster the popular Arab perception of Doha as working for the Palestinian cause. In 2012, the emir became the first head of state to visit Gaza, pledging $400 million to Hamas. At the same time, the Qataris became the exclusive mediators between Israel and Hamas.
The U.S. has accused the Qataris of harboring members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC). But at the same time the Qataris are an important intermediary between America and Iran. Doha has enjoyed good relations with the Biden administration, which it helped in the American hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan three years ago.
While organized as a private company, the Al-Jazeera television network is the voice of Qatar’s regime. Founded in 1996 and financed by the then-emir of Qatar, it has described terrorist attacks that killed Israeli non-combatants as martyrdom operations and even posted articles describing Israel as “the Zionist entity.” For years, Al-Jazeera aired all of Osama bin Laden’s speeches. The late Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yusuf Al-Qaradawi was based in Doha and for years hosted a prime-time program on the network. The war on Israel was declared on Al-Jazeera by Hamas military commander Muhammad Deif last October 7. Its operations in Israel were finally terminated by Jerusalem in May.
Qatar has been using the immense wealth it has accumulated to turn Al-Jazeera into an international media conglomerate, spreading Muslim Brotherhood propaganda, Hamas’ original sponsor, on a global scale. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by the cleric Hassan al-Banna as a reaction to his perception that the Muslim world had become week in relation to the West. The royal family of Qatar has since been using the Muslim Brotherhood to minimize political opposition against them. In exchange for allowing the Brotherhood to use the country as a base for its international operations, the Brotherhood makes sure that there is no political threat based on organized religion against the Qatari monarchy.
A major shock to Qatar’s economy occurred when some Gulf Cooperation Council members — Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — imposed an embargo on Qatar from 2017 to 2021. The reason for the embargo was Qatar’s support for the Brotherhood.
Qatar owns other news media that are equally awful. The London-based daily newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi in June published an article entitled “War Criminal Blinken Wages Diplomatic Campaign to Eliminate Palestinian Resistance and Buy Time for Israeli War in Gaza.”
Qatar is not a neutral agent, despite its attempts to portray itself as such. Time and again, it has supported the region’s most radical nations and paramilitaries, all to the detriment of American and Western interests. Its malign influence activities the United States reflect the broader issue of foreign manipulation in America’s political landscape.
“Qatar has been playing a dual role since the beginning of the Gaza war. On the one hand, it is a well-known supporter of Hamas, and even finances it with a lot of money, and on the other hand, it is trying to help in the deal for the release of the Israeli hostages,” remarked Dr. Udi Levy, a former senior official of Israel’s Mossad spy agency in April. But the U.S. relationship with Qatar will continue as long as the American government finds it useful in the on-again off-again negotiations to have Hamas release the remaining Israeli hostages.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
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It was once Sweden’s only news broadcast — what did it say about Israel?
The team behind Israel and Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989 bares it all with the title of their documentary. It is, in fact, three and a half hours of footage about the conflict from the Swedish public broadcaster Sveriges Television AB (SVT), stitched together in mostly chronological order.
SVT was founded in 1956 and held a monopoly on news broadcasts in Sweden until the early 90s, when the commercial channel TV4 was launched. The intention behind SVT programs was to present impartial news produced solely by Swedes.
In the two years since the beginning of the current war, there’s been a renewed interest in understanding the history of the Israeli-Palestine conflict. For those well-versed in the region’s history, they likely won’t learn anything new here. For those who don’t know much, it’s a good crash course — if one considers three and a half hours to be succinct.
The film, directed by Göran Hugo Olsson, documents many major developments that happened in Israel during those three decades, including big waves of American immigration in the 60s, economic growth, and, of course, the Six Day and Yom Kippur wars. Although the early footage focuses on Israel’s impressive agricultural projects and the modernization of the country’s major cities, as the years go on, the increasing focus is on the plight of Palestinians in Lebanese refugee camps and the Gaza Strip, as well as political unrest within Israel.
The film opens with the statement that archival material “doesn’t tell us what really happened — but says a lot about how it was told,” so the broader implications of the footage are left up to the viewer’s interpretation. Some may see a welcome, growing awareness of Palestinian suffering. Others may see overly harsh criticisms of Israeli policies that disregard the country’s security issues. With no elaboration or editorializing, it doesn’t feel like the film is helping clarify or challenge the audience’s preconceived notions about the conflict.
And although the footage is Swedish, it’s unclear what, if anything, that lends to the conversation. There is barely anything in the film about Swedish attitudes towards Israel, though we get a peek into diverging viewpoints during a 1964 debate between diplomat Gunnar Häglöff and political scientist Herbert Tingsten about the issue of Palestinian refugees. In a 1968 broadcast, two Swedish journalists question Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Abba Eban about the Israeli government destroying Arab homes. There are also interviews with Swedish soldiers from the United Nations who were stationed at a former railway station on the border between Gaza and Egypt in 1975. They have little to say about the conflict, however, and are more interested in discussing how they can build a sauna, a luxury from home they can’t live without.
How the Swedish government or its citizens have felt about Israel over the years remains strangely obscured. Whatever impact this footage may have had on Swedish-Israel relations and how these broadcasts were received is never discussed. It’s especially unfortunate that the films offers no way to compare the countries’ past relationship to current diplomatic tensions around Israel’s treatment of activist Greta Thunberg
With the humanitarian crisis in Gaza growing more dire and the future of Israel’s democracy becoming an increasingly pressing issue, one wonders what can be gained from the rehashing of history on view in Israel and Palestine on Swedish TV. The documentary primarily underscores a point most people already understand by now: The situation in Israel and Palestine is complicated. It’s violent. It feels neverending. Most people probably don’t need to watch a three and a half hour documentary to tell them that.
‘Israel and Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989’ opens at Film Forum NYC on October 10th.
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It was one of klezmer’s greatest days — will there ever be another?
18 years ago, America’s finest and most influential klezmer musicians gathered on the steps of the historic Eldridge Street Synagogue, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, for a photograph.
The picture was organized by Yale Strom, a violinist and klezmer musician who, having watched ‘A Great Day in Harlem,’ a documentary about Art Kane’s celebrated 1958 shot of America’s best-known jazz musicians, sought to do something similar by assembling those responsible for America’s klezmer revival. Strom called the photo, which was taken by Leo Sorel, ‘A Great Day On Eldridge Street’.
Whereas most of the musicians in Kane’s photograph knew each other, and indeed were friendly, a good few of Strom’s klezmer musicians had never met. “It certainly brought together a lot of people who had never been together at the same place at the same time,” recalled Hankus Netsky, a founding member of the Klezmer Conservatory Band and a central figure in the klezmer revival.
For Strom, this remains the photograph’s abiding achievement. “I accomplished something no one had ever done,” he told me. “And most likely never will.”
Several of the 106 musicians photographed that day have since passed away, including Theodore Bikel, one of the founders of the Newport Folk Festival; Elaine Hoffman Watts, the first female graduate of Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music; and renowned Yiddish poet and songwriter Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman. But American klezmer has continued to grow in popularity, thanks to the contributions of Don Byron, John Zorn, Jake Shulman-Ment, and Pete Rushefsky, among numerous other performers.
‘A Great Day on Eldridge Street’ was partly a celebration of American klezmer’s New York roots, and of the Lower East Side’s historic Eastern European Jewish immigrant community, but since 2007, the klezmer revival, which began in the late 1970s, has taken on an increasingly international character. “There’s a lot more access to international workshops now, and klezmer’s presence in the global music scene is only increasing from year-to-year,” Netsky said.
“The music is larger and more varied,” Strom added. “More sounds, more venues, more academic study, and more global cross-pollination.”
And though the 2007 photo cannot be recreated, it is past time for a sequel, Netsky said — one that honors “the incredible dedication and virtuosity of the younger generation.”
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Has the Jewish joke become an endangered species — Òu sont les blagues d’antan?
Is the Jewish joke on the verge of becoming extinct? The Last Jewish Joke, written by the veteran Parisian sociologist Michel Wieviorka, and newly translated into English by Cory Stockwell, argues that in recent years, Jews began to seem less heimish for at least three reasons: The Holocaust receded from memory; Israel’s government became guilty of actions decried internationally as war crimes; and right-wing antisemites who were always present became more boldly vocal.
Reminiscing about when he heard certain jokes, the author compiles his own consoling self-portrait in an autumnal mood. Wieviorka will be 80 next year, and his prose has a tendency to poignantly deem things as the “last” or at their “end.”
English language readers may need to be reminded that, when Wieviorka alludes to family situations in which he first heard Jewish jokes, it is in the context of his distinguished family of overachievers. His sister Annette is an eminent historian of the Holocaust. Another sister, Sylvie, is a psychiatrist and academic, and a brother, Olivier, is a historian specializing in World War II and the French Resistance. The entire mishpocheh is inspired and motivated by the memory of their paternal grandparents, Polish Jews who were murdered at Auschwitz. Indeed, Annette Wieviorka recently published a “family autobiography,” which asked subtle, eloquent, and nuanced questions about her antecedents.
In a comparable emotional aura of reverence, Wieviorka characterizes Jewish comedy of the past as “never malicious” (though apparently insult comics like Jack E. Leonard, Don Rickles, and Joan Rivers never got the memo).
The notion that joking Jews had to be sympathetic victims to elicit empathy from non-Jewish audiences may be true of some raconteurs, but is also belied by historical examples of potty-mouthed rapscallions like Belle Barth, B. S. Pully (born Murray Lerman) and Joe E. Ross (born Joseph Roszawikz), who startled nightclub audiences of their day with profanity.
Later Jewish shock jocks of the Howard Stern variety likewise chose to surprise, rather than charm, the public as a way to win notoriety. And Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, far from relying on vulnerable Jews as victims, presented characters screaming putdowns to elicit hilarity.
To bolster his arguments, Wieviorka refers to the counterexample of Popeck (born Judka Herpstu), a demure, wry entertainer of Polish and Romanian Jewish origin, who at 90 still appears at French theaters with gentle monologues akin to those of the Danish Jewish wit Victor Borge. Popeck presents himself onstage as a grumpy Eastern-European immigrant speaking Yiddish-accented French.
Wieviorka values such exemplars of rapidly vanishing tradition; as a social scientist, he is convinced that because communal settings such as the Borscht Belt no longer exist, the comics who once flourished on hotel stages in the Catskills have disappeared from memory.
To be sure, American standups like Myron Cohen, Jan Murray, and Carl Ballantine, once familiar from TV variety shows, are rarely mentioned now, though others like Eddie Cantor are periodically rediscovered by a new public, as Cantor was when he showed up as a character in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire. But in his autobiographical deep dive, Wieviorka, who writes here more as a memoirist than a history of comedy, is naturally more concerned with things that he personally saw or heard, rather than any objective history of Jewish comedians through the ages.
Wieviorka also somewhat curiously refers to the “Yiddish-inflected” comedy of Groucho Marx. Apart from the word “schnorrer” which appears in “Hooray for Captain Spaulding,” a song written by Harry Ruby and Bert Kalmar, it is difficult to think of many other explicit Yiddishisms in Groucho’s verbal elan.
Wieviorka’s anecdotes tend to be hefty and hearty, like a family repast of kreplach that remains in the visceral memory for days after being consumed. Some of the quaintly old fashioned tales he refers to recall the precedent of Sigmund Freud’s The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, a dissection of pleasantries that reflects a sturdy Yekke approach to light-heartedness. Of course, in this optic of Jewish humor, there is no room for concise one-liners from the likes of Henny Youngman or Rodney Dangerfield (born Jacob Cohen). For Wieviorka, as with Freud, brevity was so far from being the soul of wit that it might almost seem non-Jewish.
Another of Wieviorka’s claims appears to conflict with Jewish tradition itself, such as when he states that funny Jews laugh at themselves, never at others, negating the othering of mocked and disdained people in Chelm, a legendary village in Yiddish folklore inhabited by fools who believe themselves to be wise.
To support some of his claims, the author discusses the 1970s French film The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob, a box office success, now somewhat frantic and dated-looking, starring the popular Gallic comedian, Louis de Funès disguised as a rabbi. More to the point, Wieviorka justly reveres the French Jewish comedian Pierre Dac for his still-fascinating wartime broadcasts from London for the Free French forces. Dac’s sense of humor simultaneously expressing Yiddishkeit and also undermining the enemy’s Fascist ideology is a subject that might have intrigued Freud himself.
To bolster the essentially serious messages of his book, Wieviorka mentions the writers Elie Wiesel and André Schwarz-Bart as well as the painter Marc Chagall, names rarely seen in books about humor.
Wieviorka’s elegiac, end-of-an-era tone might be cheered up by a glance at the Netflix streaming schedule or a visit to a comedy club. Of course Jewish humor is thriving, as Wieviorka himself admits; Le Monde headlined a relevant story about the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks, “Israeli comedians are boosting morale in wartime.”
So, for all its methodical, highly intellectual analysis, The Last Jewish Joke might be best appreciated as a moving Kaddish for the demise of anecdotes that were once considered the height of drollery. It is very much a product of brainy French Jewish creativity, which itself deserves to be cherished and celebrated.
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