cutting diplomatic ties with Qatar

Salaam

A little different, its good to know if anymore confirmation is needed where the rulers of Qatar make Qibla to.

NATO dashes membership hopes of Qatar

NATO has thwarted Qatar’s hopes of becoming a member of the alliance.

“According to Article 10 of the Washington Treaty, only European countries can become members of NATO,” an official told AFP on Wednesday.

“Qatar is a valuable and longstanding partner of NATO,” the official added.

It comes a day after Qatar’s defense minister, Khalid bin Mohammad Al Attiyah, expressed his country’s ambition for “full [NATO] membership.”

“Qatar today has become one of the most important countries in the region in terms of the quality of armament,” he told the official magazine of the Qatari defense ministry.

Qatar signed a security agreement with NATO in January, setting out a framework for the exchange of classified information, according to NATO.

Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates severed diplomatic ties with Qatar in June 2017, after accusing it of supporting terrorism and backing Iran.

Bahrain and the UAE have also signed individual security agreements with NATO under the same framework as Qatar.

https://www.politico.eu/article/qatar-nato-dashes-membership-hopes/

Salaam

Oh dear.

Questions raised over paid protest timed for Qatari leader's No 10 visit

Casting agency offers £20 per head for extras to stand outside Downing Street during emir of Qatar’s visit

A casting agency advertised for paid extras to come and stand outside the gates of Downing Street when the emir of Qatar visits on Tuesday, amid accusations that the country’s Gulf rivals are paying protesters to oppose the country’s activities and create the impression of an upswell of British support against the country.

“This is NOT a film or TV production,” said the advert from booking agency Extra People, offering £20 to respondents willing to take part. “The company are looking for a large group of people to fill space outside Downing Street during the visit of the president of Quatar [sic]. You will not have to do or say anything, they just want to fill space.”

A Qatari diplomat pointed the finger at the country’s regional rivals, who have placed it under an economic blockade since last year, creating a vicious and expensive media war often fought through lobbyists, online advertising and selective leaks to journalists in the UK and US.

“The blockading countries have a long history of using paid protesters to try and discredit those who do not agree with their views,” said the Qatari diplomat. “Despite their latest attempts to spread lies about Qatar, the visit of HH the Emir has further strengthened the historic and strategic partnership between Qatar and the UK.”

The casting agency later retracted the advert and said that they did not want to be involved in providing extras for the event, which was arranged to coincide with the arrival of Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani to meet prime minister Theresa May.

“Upon receiving further information about the event, which regrettably was after our enquiry went out to our artistes, we began to understand what the hirer was asking of our artistes and the event involved,” said a spokesperson for the booking agency.

The agency declined to identify their client but said they backed out when they realised the event would involve the extras protesting outside the gates of Downing Street.

There have also been separate claims that attendees were paid to take part in an earlier anti-Qatar protest outside parliament on Monday afternoon. Protesters at the earlier event waved placards referring to allegations Qatar paid up to $1bn to terrorist groups as a ransom for 28 members of a royal hunting party kidnapped in Iraq.

The advert raises questions over the growing influence of Gulf money in the UK, with the ongoing political struggle between Qatar and the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. It follows an agreement by the Independent to licence its brands to a publishing business with close links to the Saudi government to produce Middle Eastern versions of its publications.

A series of anti-Qatar adverts have appeared on billboards around London, while other adverts highlighted the country’s treatment of migrant workers, its record on LGBT rights, and the continued existence of an absolute monarchy.

Many of the protests were also attended by British-based Qatari businessman Khalid Al-Hail. He has previously organised a “Qatari opposition” conference in London featuring paid speakers, such as the former cabinet minister Iain Duncan Smith and the BBC journalist John Simpson.

Embedded Tweet

Al-Hail has also been linked to a high-profile big budget football conference opposing corruption in sport, which was attended by Tory MP Damian Collins and footballer Louis Saha, and focused on criticism of the decision to award Qatar the right to host the 2022 World Cup.

Qatar’s successful bid to host tournament has been beset by widespread allegations of corruption and poor conditions for workers building the stadiums.

Qatari-funded news network al-Jazeera has previously claimed that extras were paid to protest against the Qatari government at events in Germany.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/23/qatar-accuses-gulf-rivals-of-paying-for-political-protest-in-london

Salaam

Another update

Rex Tillerson stopped Saudi and UAE from 'attacking' Qatar

Former US Secretary of State reportedly prevented Saudi troops from attacking its Gulf neighbour, The Intercept reports.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates planned to launch a military operation against Qatar at the beginning of a diplomatic crisis that erupted in June last year but were stopped by former US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in an act that may have played a key role in his dismissal.

According to the investigative news website The Intercept, the plan involved Saudi ground troops crossing the land border into Qatar, and with military support from the UAE, advancing 100km inland and seizing the Qatari capital.

Based on information it said it received from a current member of the US intelligence community and two former Department of State officials, The Intercept said the coup, which was largely devised by Saudi Arabia and the UAE's crown princes, "was likely some weeks away from being implemented".

It said the attack against Qatar's emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, would have involved Saudi forces circumventing the Al Udeid Air Base, which is home of the US Air Force Central Command and some 10,000 American troops, and seizing Doha.

Al Udeid serves as one of the US' most important overseas military bases and carries out operations throughout the Middle East.

However, after Tillerson was notified of the plan by Qatari intelligence officials, he reportedly urged Saudi Arabia's King Salman not to carry out the attack and also encouraged Defense Secretary James Mattis to explain the dangers of such an invasion to his counterparts in the kingdom, it said.

Pressure from Tillerson caused Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MBS, to back down, who was concerned that the invasion would damage Saudi Arabia's long-term relationship with the US.

Long-standing rivalry

However, Tillerson's intervention reportedly enraged Mohammed bin Zayed, also known as MBZ, with the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and de facto ruler of the UAE, subsequently lobbying the White House for Tillerson's removal.

MBZ has had a long-running rivalry with Qatar and supported a failed coup against the Qatari government in 1996 when he served as chief of staff of the UAE armed forces.

The Intercept said none of the current or former officials interviewed by The Intercept had direct insight into why Trump decided to fire Tillerson, but one source said that the timing - a week before the Saudi crown prince arrived in Washington for a much-publicised visit - was significant.

Tillerson, a former executive for the energy company Exxon, had repeatedly criticised the blockading countries for the crisis before his dismissal, and in October last year, accused them of heightening tensions.

"There seems to be a real unwillingness on the part of some of the parties to want to engage," Tillerson said at the time.

"It's up to the leadership of the quartet when they want to engage with Qatar because Qatar has been very clear - they're ready to engage."

Emirati influence over Trump

Tillerson has not given any interviews since he was replaced with Mike Pompeo, but is believed to have disagreed on a number of issues with President Donald Trump, including the blockade of Qatar.

According to one news report, Tillerson was frustrated with Trump for endorsing the blockade, with his aides suspecting that a line in the president's speech where Qatar was accused of funding terrorism at a "very high level" had been written by the UAE's ambassador, Yousef al-Otaiba.

Otaiba is a well-known figure in US national security circles, and according to Politico maintains "almost constant phone and email contact" with Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.

The Intercept also reported that four of the sources it interviewed pointed to an ongoing campaign by the UAE to try to provoke Qatar into escalating the crisis.

The UAE has made it illegal for people to express sympathy with Qatar on social media, meanwhile Emirati officials, with close links to its leadership, repeatedly hurl insults against Qatari women.

Saudi Arabia, the UAE, along with Egypt and Bahrain severed diplomatic and trade links with Qatar on June 5, accusing Doha of supporting "extremism and terrorism" and cosying up to Iran.

Qatar has vehemently denied all allegations.

The quartet subsequently ordered Qatari nationals to leave their countries, and also urged their citizens to return to their respective nations, disrupting the lives of thousands in the region and restricting their freedom of movement.

According to several media reports, the four countries want Qatar to join a regional alliance against Iran and normalise relations with Israel.

Qatar's emir has denounced all of the attempts to infringe on the Gulf nation's sovereignty and rejected all of their demands.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/08/rex-tillerson-stopped-saudi-uae-attacking-qatar-180801125651449.html

Salaam

*sigh*

Gargash: Qatar's attempt to block Hajj pilgrims is 'disgraceful'

The Minister of State for Foreign Affairs says Qatari rulers have shown mistrust in its own people

Dr Anwar Gargash described an attempt by Doha to prevent Qatari citizens from performing Hajj as "disgraceful" and said its rulers had shown mistrust in its own people.

In a strongly worded statement on Twitter on Friday, the UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs suggested that with time Qatar's move will not be forgotten. Doha is believed to have blocked a website set up by the Saudi Ministry for Hajj and Umrah for those wishing to make the holy pilgrimage to Makkah from Qatar.

Embedded Tweet

"As soon as the Qatar crisis subsides and years pass by, the Qatari government's call to restrain its citizens from performing hajj will remain pinned because such a perverse and unorthodox call is widely unsupported by states which find it disgraceful to their year-long stand and political approach," Dr Gargash said.

In a separate tweet, he questioned Qatar's priorities and ability to distinguish between political matters and the wishes of its citizens to visit Saudi Arabia to fulfill their religious duties.

"The Qatari government’s decision bars its citizens from performing the rituals of hajj, and regardless of all the justifications it touted, it shows a clear absence of informed vision that can differentiate between what is political and what is more important. Not to mention that the politicisation and enticing fear against your own citizens’ performance of hajj is a sign of mistrusting them, their priorities and their choices," he said.

Last month Saudi Arabia relaunched an online portal for Qataris to register for Hajj after Doha appeared to block local access to the old one.

The site is intended to help Qataris perform the holy pilgrimage despite Saudi Arabia being embroiled in a diplomatic standoff with its neighbour.

https://www.thenational.ae/world/gargash-qatar-s-attempt-to-block-hajj-pilgrims-is-disgraceful-1.756727

Salaam

Another update

The Saudi-Qatari media war



For such a small country, the Gulf emirate of Qatar has had a large influence over Arabic media. Beginning back in 1996, the renowned 24/7 satellite TV channel Al Jazeera began to carve out a unique and influential place for itself among Arab viewers.

For the first time, the Arab world could watch a wide variety of modern, vibrant news programming, from breaking news, to deep-diving historical documentaries, to in-depth investigative journalism. And viewers lapped it up. Before Al Jazeera, the biggest Arabic TV channels were all tired, bland regime outlets which tended to parrot the line of the powers that be, and mostly propped up the US-imposed regional order.

For a long time, Al Jazeera seemed different. Of course, it never bit the hand that fed it – you could not look to the channel for critical coverage of human rights violations in Qatar. But by giving its talented journalists a relatively free reign to report on and criticise the US and Israeli imposed regional order, the channel seemed to offer something different.

The US under George W. Bush infamously bombed Al Jazeera’s Baghdad bureau during the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq – so threatening to the US empire was the channel’s journalism considered.

A decade later, Qatar launched Al Jazeera English. By pouring in large amounts of cash to hire some of the best broadcasting talent in the world, the gas-rich emirate was able to launch a credible alternative to the BBC News channel and CNN aimed at internationally-focused English language viewers.

Al Jazeera’s investigative unit, in particular, has pulled off some of the biggest scoops of the last decade.

But since the so-called “Arab Spring” uprisings of 2011, something shifted in Al Jazeera. As Qatar began to get more and more involved in exporting and imposing its foreign policy throughout the region, so the coverage of both channels (but far more so the Arabic language one) began to more and more reflect the interests of its financial backers.

This reached its nadir in 2013, with a series of fawning interviews with Abu Mohammed Al-Joulani, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Syria.

Seen as being responsible for openly backing a side in a regional war – the same one supported by the Qatari government – Al Jazeera began to lose popularity, credibility and viewers.

Qatar sought to extend its media influence further in the west by financing and founding a series of websites and think tanks. These in turn fed into the western media, via often willingly naive correspondents reliant on regime-friendly fixers, pundits and lackeys.

As the Lebanese-American professor and commentator As’ad AbuKhalil recently explained, both Qatar and Saudi Arabia “have been able to control or influence the narratives of Western journalists and pundits through heavy investments in the elite Washington foreign policy community, especially through think tanks and PR firms. Think tanks in Washington, such as the Brookings Institution, the Middle East Institute, and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, are notoriously awash in funding from Gulf regimes and thus, reflect their agenda.”

And so we come onto Saudi Arabia – a far bigger Gulf regime, which is completely hostile to democracy, has an atrocious human rights record, has zero freedom of expression and is even more involved in imposing its foreign policy agenda on the region than Qatar.

Saudi Arabia has been slow off the mark in moving into the modern media realm as compared to Qatar, but it has more recently been playing catch up.

It launched Al Arabiya in 2003 as a kind of competition to Al Jazeera, but never matched the latter’s successes. Aside from Al Jazeera, Saudi Arabia, however (along with the UAE) have a death-like grip on the Arabic media across the region. Many of the region’s newspapers and websites are controlled by Saudi interests.

But now the Saudis are moving into the western media too. With public trust in the UK’s news media at an all-time low, and print titles in seemingly terminal decline, they may be viewed as low-hanging fruit by the oil-rich kleptocracy.

Last year, interests close to the Saudi regime bought a 30 per cent stake in the Independent, the liberal UK news website which was until 2016 a daily newspaper. And this month it was disclosed that the Saudis have decided to use this financial interest to expand globally, launching four new news sites in Turkish, Urdu, Persian and Arabic – reportedly arriving later this year.

Embedded Tweet

AbuKhalil wrote that it was part of the “demise of Western media”.

As well as being a further attempt to spread its questionable influence and foreign policy around the world, the expansion is no doubt a further attempt to push back against Qatari influence – the latest move in the two ruling families’ regional competition.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20...ari-media-war/

Salaam

Another update

Blurb

For the second time since the blockade on Qatar by Saudi Arabia and three other countries more than a year ago, both Qatari citizens and expatriates have been unable to travel to Saudi Arabia to perform Hajj, the five-day annual pilgrimage undertaken by Muslims to the holy city of Mecca, which is one of the five pillars of the Islamic faith. Saudi Arabia has been accused of using Hajj as a tool of pressure in its foreign politics.

Salaam

Another update

Saudi Arabia may dig canal to turn Qatar into an island

Plan takes shape amid bitter dispute that led the Saudis, UAE, Bahrain and Egypt to cut ties with small peninsula nation

A Saudi official hinted on Friday the kingdom was moving forward with a plan to dig a canal that would turn the neighbouring Qatari peninsula into an island, amid a diplomatic feud between the Gulf nations.

“I am impatiently waiting for details on the implementation of the Salwa island project, a great, historic project that will change the geography of the region,” Saud al-Qahtani, a senior adviser to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, said on Twitter.

The plan, which would physically separate the Qatari peninsula from the Saudi mainland, is the latest stress point in a fractious 14-month long dispute between the two states.

Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt cut diplomatic and trade ties with Qatar in June 2017, accusing it of supporting terrorism and being too close to Riyadh’s arch rival, Iran – charges Doha denies.

In April the pro-government Sabq news website reported government plans to build a channel 60km long and 200m wide stretching across Saudi Arabia’s border with Qatar.

Part of the canal, which would cost up to 2.8 billion riyals ($750m), would be reserved for a nuclear waste facility, it said.

Five unnamed companies that specialised in digging canals had been invited to bid for the project and the winner would be announced in September, Makkah newspaper reported in June.

Saudi authorities did not respond to requests for comment and there was no immediate reaction on the plan from Qatar.

After the dispute erupted last year, Qatar – a small peninsula nation – found its only land border closed, its state-owned airline barred from using its neighbours’ airspace and Qatari residents expelled from the boycotting countries.

Mediation efforts led by Kuwait and the US, which has its largest Middle East air base in Qatar, have failed to resolve the dispute.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/01/saudi-arabia-may-dig-canal-to-turn-qatar-into-an-island

Salaam

So much for 'brotherhood'.

UAE fans throw shoes at Qatar players after losing 4-0 in Asian Cup semi-finals

The United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) football fans threw shoes and drink bottles at Qatar players after an embarrassing 4-0 defeat in the Asian Cup semi-finals.

The Qatari national anthem was also loudly booed by fans of the host nation in Abu Dhabi amid political tensions between the two Gulf monarchies.

Qatar has been boycotted by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE and other Arab countries over its support for the Islamic political movement, the Muslim Brotherhood.

Qatar’s coach Felix Sanchez told the BBC: “It wasn’t an easy situation.

“The players were aware there was going to be a lot of pressure but they managed their emotions quite well. I’m very proud of them.”

Boualem Khoukhi put Qatar in the lead with his eighth minute goal before Almoez Ali increased the lead in the first half with his eighth goal of the tournament.

Hassan Al-Haydos and Hamid Ismail made it 4-0 after the break as Qatar reached the Asian Cup final for the first time.

They will play four-time winners Japan in the final on Friday 1 February.

Qatar will be hosting the 2022 World Cup football.

https://5pillarsuk.com/2019/01/30/ua...p-semi-finals/

Related

British man detained in UAE after wearing Qatar football shirt to match

Ali Issa Ahmad held over ‘false allegations against security officials’ after initial arrest

A British football fan has been arrested and detained in the United Arab Emirates after he wore a Qatar national team shirt to a match.

Ali Issa Ahmad, 26, a British Arsenal fan who lives in Wolverhampton, travelled to the UAE for a holiday in January. While he was there he got a ticket for an Asian Cup match between Qatar and Iraq on 22 January. The tournament took place in the UAE between 5 January and 1 February and was won by Qatar.

Ahmad wore a Qatar shirt to the match not knowing that doing so in the UAE is an offence punishable with a large fine and an extended period of imprisonment.

After his initial arrest he was held over claims that he had made false allegations about security officials, a friend of Ahmad told the Guardian.

The UAE embassy said it was investigating the circumstances of the arrest and the Foreign Office (FCO) said it was offering support.

The FCO website in its section containing information for travellers to the UAE warns: “The UAE authorities announced on 7 June 2017 that showing sympathy for Qatar on social media or by any other means of communication is an offence. Offenders could be imprisoned and subject to a substantial fine.”

Its advice adds: “You should respect local traditions, customs, laws and religions at all times. There may be serious penalties for doing something that might not be illegal in the UK.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...shirt-to-match

Salaam

Another update, new faultlines are emerging within the Ummah.

Embedded Tweet

Embedded Tweet

Embedded Tweet

Embedded Tweet

Embedded Tweet