Guest
Column: The Road from Qatar to the Gaza Strip
by Reuven Berko
Special to IPT News
October 15, 2014
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 In a recent
speech, Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Ron Prosor mentioned the
central role of Qatar in supporting international terrorist organizations.
Money flowing from Qatar to Hamas, for example, paid for the terrorist
attack tunnels dug from the Gaza Strip under the security fence into
Israeli territory, and for the thousands of rockets fired at Israeli
civilian targets in both the distant and recent past. In response, State
Department spokesperson Marie Harf rushed to Qatar's defense, claiming it
had an important, positive role in finding a solution for the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Qatar's funding for Islamist terrorist organizations all over the world
is an open secret known to every global intelligence agency, including the
CIA. It was exposed by Wikileaks, which clearly showed that funds from
Qatar were transferred to al-Qaida. Qatar also funds the terrorist movements
opposing the Assad regime in Syria, such as the Al-Nusra Front, encourages
anti-Egyptian terrorism in the Sinai Peninsula and within Egypt itself, and
is involved in Islamic terrorism in Africa and other locations. It
accompanies its involvement in terrorism targeting Israel and Egypt
(through the Muslim Brotherhood) with vicious and inflammatory propaganda
on its Al-Jazeera TV channel.
Qatar also spends millions of dollars supporting the Islamic Movement in
Israel, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood headed by Sheikh Ra'ed Salah.
The Islamic Movement is responsible for ongoing acts of provocation on the
Temple Mount and in Judea and Samaria, and incites the entire Islamic world
against Israel, claiming that the Jews are trying to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque
and replace it with the Jewish Temple. The incitement continued even as the
Islamic Movement's sister movement, Hamas, fired rockets at Jerusalem and
endangered both the mosques on the Temple Mount and Jerusalem's sites
sacred to Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
As Qatar's representative, the Islamic Movement, which has not yet been
outlawed in Israel, contributed to Hamas what it could during Operation
Protective Edge by instigating riots, blocking roads and seeking to foment
a third intifada which, according to the plan, would be joined by Israeli
Arabs to augment the deaths of thousands of Israelis killed by rockets and
the mass murders through the attack tunnels planned for the eve of the
Jewish New Year.
In his recent UN speech, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
rebutted Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' accusations of
Israeli "genocide" of the Palestinian people. He reminded his
audience of Hamas' use of Gazan civilians as human shields and of the
rockets fired to attack specifically civilian Israeli targets.
Unfortunately, he did not mention the Hamas charter, which calls for the
murder of all the Jews. The fact that Abbas now heads a national consensus
government in which Hamas is a full partner commits him to the slaughter of
the Jewish people – a true genocide – and it is to the disgrace of the
international community that such an individual was permitted to address
the UN instead of being tried for war crimes.
In fact, the similarities between Hamas and ISIS are clearly stated in
the Hamas charter, which defines Hamas as part of the Muslim Brotherhood's
global Islamic movement. One of its objectives is to fight "infidel
Christian imperialism" and its Zionist emissaries in Israel in order
to impose the Sharia, Islamic religious law, on the world. According to the
charter's paragraph 7, Hamas' intention is to slaughter every Jew, as
ordered by Muhammad and those who accept his legacy. That is the basis for
the threat issued by ISIS "Caliph," Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, that
under his leadership, Islam will "drown America in blood."
Throughout its history, Hamas, like ISIS, has been committed to the
concept of the global caliphate, which it plans to help construct by
creating its own Islamic emirate on the ruins of the State of Israel. Since
its founding, Hamas has attacked Israel and murdered thousands of its
citizens exactly as ISIS has attacked and murdered "infidels."
They share the same slogans, with "There is no god but Allah" and
"Allah, Prophet Muhammad" inscribed on their flags and headbands.
Hamas terrorists have blown themselves up in Israel's coffee shops, hotels,
restaurants, buses, malls and markets, wherever there are large
concentrations of civilians. The way Hamas executed suspected collaborators
during the final days of Operation Protective Edge bore the hallmarks of
the al-Qaida execution of Daniel Pearl and the ISIS beheading of James
Foley and others.
In the decades during which Hamas has carried out a continual series of
deadly terrorist attacks against Israel, wearing the same "Allah,
Prophet, Muhammad" headbands as ISIS terrorists, the international
community rarely voices its support for Israel, or takes into account that
by defending itself Israel also defends the West, which has failed to
understand that "political Islam" inspired by the Muslim
Brotherhood was setting up shop in the free world's backyard and that the
ticking bomb was set to go off sooner than expected. The West has not
clearly condemned Qatar for openly supporting Hamas and its terrorist activities
against Israel or demanded that it stop.
While Israel responded to Hamas' rocket attacks on civilian targets to
keep thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Israeli civilians from being
killed, the international community demanded "proportionality."
That requirement kept Israel from responding as it should have and
encouraged Hamas to fire ever more rockets at "military targets"
such as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. When Israel built its security fence to
keep Hamas suicide bombers from infiltrating into Israeli territory to blow
themselves up in crowds of civilians, the international community opposed
it, rushed to embrace the Palestinians' vocabulary of "racism"
and "apartheid," and willingly played into the hands of Hamas and
Abbas. This reaction occurred although Israel is the only truly democratic
country in the Middle East, where Jews and Arabs can live in peace without
"apartheid."
Today President Obama says he "underestimated" the threat
posed by ISIS, while Israel has been warning the world of extremist military
Islam for at least a decade, as Netanyahu warned the world of a nuclear
Iran in his UN speech.
The international community has been curiously silent about the genuine
apartheid in the Arab states neighboring Israel. There, descendants of the
original 1948 Palestinian refugees, by now in their fourth generation,
still live in refugee camps, do not have citizenship, and are excluded from
jobs and social benefits. Israel, however, absorbed hundreds of thousands
of Jewish refugees, many of them destitute, who fled Europe and were
expelled from the Arab countries when the state was founded, and were given
citizenship and enjoy full rights, as do the Arabs who remained in Israel
after the War of Independence.
Israel, which has nothing against the Palestinian people, would like to
see the Gaza Strip rebuilt for both humanitarian reasons and to give Hamas
something to lose. Radical Islamic elements around the globe, however,
including Hamas, ISIS, al-Qaida, the Al-Nusra Front and Hizballah, all
financed by Qatar, do not want to see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
resolved. They all have the same global agenda, based on fueling the
conflict to unite Islam around it, under their leadership.
Therefore, Qatar continues to support global Islamic terrorism. On Sept.
13, Qatar paid the Al-Nusra Front a ransom of $20 million to free abducted
UN soldiers from Fiji. The world praised Qatar for its philanthropy, but in
effect, it was a brilliant act of manipulation and fraud, both filling the
Al-Nusra Front's coffers and representing itself as the Fijians' savior.
Qatar is using the same underhanded trick in the Gaza Strip. After sending
Hamas millions of dollars to fund its anti-Israeli terrorist industry, it pledged $1 billion to help rebuild the Gaza Strip
during last weekend's conference in Cairo.
While the world hopes Operation Protective Edge was the last round of
Palestinian-Israeli violence, senior Hamas figures reiterate their position
of gearing up to fight Israel again. Not one Hamas leader is willing to
agree to a full merger with the Palestinian Authority to establish a
genuine unified Palestinian leadership. Hamas rejects even the idea of
disarming or demilitarization as part of an agreement to rebuild the Gaza
Strip and promote the peace process. Unfortunately, no one has suggested it
as a pre- condition for any U.S. dollars that will be contributed to the
reconstruction of Gaza.
All that is left now is to hope that the billions of dollars poured into
the Gaza Strip for its rebuilding will be accompanied by the disarmament of
Hamas and the establishment of an honest mechanism for overseeing the money
and materials Egypt and Israel allow into the Gaza Strip. It is imperative
that they not be diverted to rebuild Hamas' terrorist infrastructure and
tunnels, or to bribe UNRWA officials to look the other way, as has happened
so often in the past. There is every indication that only Hamas and Qatar
know whether there is anything to justify that hope.
Dr. Reuven Berko has a Ph.D. in Middle East studies, is a commentator
on Israeli Arabic TV programs, writes for the Israeli daily newspaper Israel
Hayom and is considered one of Israel's top experts on Arab affairs.
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