Qatar and the Fifth Column Grassroots of the West

Before we come to the threat that my native Qatar poses to the West, I think it is helpful to understand how Western culture opened the door to its enemies.

Lionel Shriver, the author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, has written A Better Life, the controversial novel of the year, about how Westerners fail to defend a privilege that they feel they haven’t earned, thus becoming all giving of their cultural inheritance to foreign cultures, which are all taking. The New York Times and others are enraged and doing their best to dismiss A Better Life as a mean, racist, and bigoted tirade about immigration. It is not.

A Better Life focuses on a wealthy Brooklyn divorcee, Gloria Bonaventura, who preens her social virtues by going on serial street protests in defence of human rights, which she believes is the obligation of wealthy societies to uphold. Gloria takes the side of Palestinians in the Middle East and lashes out in wrath against nebulous figures of oppression (ICE, Trump, the patriarchy, Israel etc.). Her compassion does not, however, extend to her own family, whom she holds to the standards of the harsh Protestant work ethic that built the wealthy societies in the first place.

In lieu of balancing the score for what she perceives as her own gross privilege, Gloria takes a Honduran ‘refugee’ into her home, and the problems that unfold from this simple act of charity (if ‘charity’ is really what it is) are, depending upon the reader, either totally predictable or a hideous distortion of human nature which left-wing reviews of the novel attempt to dismiss as “satire.” It is not satire. The results of Gloria’s behaviour are writ large in Western politics, academia, media, and even the ability to respond to serious military threats.

To prove it, I can show you what happens when the wealth dynamic is reversed. I am a wealthy exile from Qatar—arguably the wealthiest nation per capita on earth. I lead Qatar’s democratic opposition and have been forced out of my homeland, fleeing from the same sort of persecution which millions of others claim to have suffered when seeking asylum in the West. But because my type of refugee does not need the charity of our host nation, the Gloria Bonaventuras of the West do not notice or care how abusive, corrupt, and insidious the Qatari regime is.  

The Qatar sovereign investment fund pours hundreds of billions of dollars into culture, sport, and academia across Europe and the West, while, at home, they imprison critics of their radical Wahhabi regime, ban expression of any religion other than their own radical version of Islam, play host to the Muslim Brotherhood and other terrorist organisations, and lock people up for homosexuality. Qatar’s purpose in buying up Western media and influence is to create a smokescreen for the regimes that create the very problems which drive millions of refugees to seek the charity of generous Western states and the people who vote for liberal, socialist, governments.  

It is refreshing to see some civil protests starting up against this corruption. A recent billboard campaign shamed Brussels elites for taking bribes from a nation that opposes virtually all Western democratic values and denounced the Qatari-owned Al Jazeera network for their collaboration with terrorists.

Very little notice was taken of Qatar’s behavior until their scandalous coercion of politics and narratives reached the highest levels of Western government—which it now has—and I hope that the public will begin to realise that the political corruption scandals involving cash for silence over Qatar’s human rights record are just the tip of a very large iceberg.  

This Wahhabi dictatorship, whose money bubbles out of the Persian Gulf in the form of natural gas, uses people like Gloria Bonaventura as the grassroots of their fifth column in the democratic world.

At no point does the West as a whole benefit from doing business with Qatar, even if the intelligentsia and shady political figures receive a certain kickback. Qatar destabilises the institutional wealth of the West and aggravates the wars and refugee situations, which elicit liberals’ telescopic compassion—and it gains more from the goodwill of the West than any Latin American country on the receiving end of federal development budgets.  

It seems that America is further behind than Europe when it comes to self-preservation—and the furious attitude towards Shriver’s book shows why: as civic campaigns start to address the problem in Brussels, protecting the great inheritance of the West against infiltration is seen as taboo and elitist.

Europe and America are on the shoulders of giants. No genuine refugee from persecution resents that you inherited nearly everything you have from centuries of stable and gradual growth. Please stop abusing your patronage and giving away what you didn’t earn to people who have no intention of building a peaceful, inclusive society for themselves. Nobody else is going to step up and save you if you carelessly give away what your ancestors handed down, and there will be nowhere left for the persecuted refugees of the world to run to if you do.