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Qatar's State-of-the-Art Foreign Lobbying Campaign

(Tablet) Lee Smith - Over the past decade, Qatar, with a population of little more than 300,000 native Qataris, has implemented the single most sophisticated, sustained, successful effort by any foreign nation or interest group to shape Western policymaking - especially American opinion - in its favor. The amount of money that Qatar has poured into local governments, universities, schools, educational organizations, think tanks, and media across America, and the number of initiatives, like the anti-Israel BDS movement, that Qatar uses to influence American opinion, is nearly overwhelming. The country gave more than $1 billion to U.S. universities between 2011-2017. "Qatar is a profoundly menacing influence to core U.S. interests," says a U.S. expert on Gulf affairs. "The issue is that they're structurally promiscuous - they're always trying to buy protection everywhere, that they give money to U.S. enemies - like the Muslim Brotherhood or Hizbullah or Hamas or the Nusra Front in Syria. The Qataris are supposed to be allies of the United States, yet they're funding and dealing with groups and countries that are inimical to American interests." The writer is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
2020-04-01 00:00:00
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