WarSclerotic

According to Souad Sbai (left), the Moroccan-born president of Italy’s Averroes Studies Center, “Qatar extends its proselytizing network every day, with serious damage to European societies, including Italy”. Daniel Pipes (right) writes that Qatar “works to influence Western policymakers and the public directly… Its English-language stations produce slick propaganda against Qatar’s enemies, dressed up in Western liberal rhetoric… Qatar is now the largest foreign donor to American universities.” (Image sources: Wikimedia Commons/Luke Ford [Pipes])

In October, Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini visited Qatar, the “energy giant“, where he praised the emirate for “not sponsoring extremism anymore“. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. Qatar, “the other Wahhabi state“, apparently is interested not only in its economic relationship with Europe, but also in exporting its brand of political Islam.

According to a new book, Qatar Papers: How the Emirate Finances Islam in France and Europe, by two French journalists, Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot, Qatar has distributed 22 million euros to Islamic projects in Italy alone. This funding has had virtually a single beneficiary: the Union of Islamic Communities and Organizations in Italy (UCOII), accused of closeness to Qatar’s pet organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, the mouthpiece of which is Qatar’s media outlet, Al Jazeera, located in the capital city of Doha.

“Qatar is today a leading funder of Islam in Europe,” Malbrunot said in an interview. His book, an important exposé of the Islamist penetration into Europe, notes that Qatar has funded 140 mosques and Islamic centers in Europe to the tune of €71 million. The country with the most of the projects (50) was Italy, where Rome’s Al Houda Centre received €4 million.

A grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna, Tariq Ramadan, whom several women have accused of rape and sexual abuse, has received €35,000 per month from the Qatar for being a “consultant”. The Muslim Cultural Complex of Lausanne, Switzerland, received $1.6 million. Qatar, in 2015, donated a new £11 million building at Oxford’s St Antony’s College, where Ramadan is a professor.

Qatar has also been extremely active in France. The emirate, according to the book, financed the Islamic Center of Villeneuve-d’Ascq and the Lycée-Collège Averroès, France’s first state-funded Muslim faith school. Lycée-Collège Averroès became the center of a scandal when one of its teachers resigned after writing that the school was “a hotbed of anti-Semitism and ‘promoting Islamism’ to pupils”.

Qatar has also financed other mosques in France. The Great Mosque of Poitiers, for instance, sits in the vicinity of the site of the Battle of Tours (also known as the Battle of Poitiers), where Charles Martel, ruler of the Franks, stopped the advancing Muslim army of Abdul al-Rahman in the year 732. The Assalam mosque in Nantes and the Grand Mosque of Paris are other examples.

In their previous book, “Nos très chers émirs” (“Our Very Dear Emirs”), Chesnot and Malbrunot exposed the close relationship that exists between the French political establishment and the Qatari monarchy. Among Qatar’s beneficiaries were the European Institute of Human Sciences — an Islamic facility close to the French branch of the Muslim Brotherhood — that offers courses in Islamic theology.

Among the Islamists described in the book is the Doha-based cleric, Yusuf al Qaradawi, who condoned suicide bombings during the Second Intifada; endorsed a fatwa for killing Americans in Iraq and encouraged Muslims to travel abroad to fight in civil wars in Syria and Libya. Qaradawi also called for the “conquest of Rome” and announced on Egyptian television in 2013 that without death as a punishment for leaving the religion (apostasy), “Islam wouldn’t exist today”.

“We have been reporting Doha’s ideological and religious penetration for years”, said Souad Sbai, the Moroccan-born president of Italy’s Averroes Studies Center. “In the form of investments and financial operations, Qatar extends its proselytizing network every day, with serious damage to European societies, including Italy”. The newspaper L’Opinione delle Libertà quotes Sbai calling Qatar “a wolf in sheep’s clothing“.

Elzir Izzedin, the imam of Florence and president of UCOII, admitted three years ago: “25 million euros arrived from Qatar”.

Qatar was also behind the founding of an Islamic university for 5,000 students in the small southern Italian town of Lecce.

Also two years ago, with an investment of over 2.3 million euros, Qatar was carrying out important Islamic projects in Italy’s southern island, Sicily, where Qatar apparently supports about a quarter of the mosques.

According to the president of the Middle East Forum, Daniel Pipes, “Doha does not rely only on the Islamist diaspora in the West to advance its agenda; it also works to influence Western policymakers and the public directly”:

“Its English-language stations produce slick propaganda against Qatar’s enemies, dressed up in Western liberal rhetoric. Al Jazeera’s latest venture – its social media channel, AJ+ – is aimed at young, progressive Americans. Its documentaries on the evils of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the Trump administration are sandwiched between glowing coverage of transgender rights campaigns and emotional appeals for the plight of asylum seekers on America’s southern border – seemingly incongruous topics for a broadcaster controlled by a Wahhabi regime.””Doha also seeks to influence Western educational institutions. The regime-controlled Qatar Foundation hands tens of millions of dollars to schools, colleges and other educational institutions across Europe and North America. Indeed, Qatar is now the largest foreign donor to American universities. Its funds pay for the teaching of Arabic and lessons on Middle Eastern culture and their ideological bent is at times unashamedly apparent, as in the lesson plan in American schools titled, ‘Express Your Loyalty to Qatar.'”

Italy’s largest newspaper, Il Corriere della Sera, described the Qatari activism in the country:

“On May 24th, Sheikh Prince Hamad Bin Nasser Al Thani, a member of the Qatari royal family, was in Piacenza, where he inaugurated the new Islamic center alongside the main city authorities; the same day he moved to Brescia, to cut the ribbon of the enlargement of the local mosque. Two days later and a smiling prince Al Thani reappeared in Mirandola, in the province of Modena, for the inauguration of the new Muslim prayer center, damaged by the 2012 earthquake and put up as new, unlike the local parish church. On May 28, the sheikh was immortalized in Vicenza, again for the opening of an Islamic center. On June 5, another ribbon-cutting ceremony, this time of a complex for prayer and a Koranic school in Saronno (Varese), even flanked by the episcopal vicar”.

An analyst at the Spanish Institute of Strategic Studies of the Ministry of Defense, Colonel Emilio Sánchez de Rojas, charged both Qatar and Saudi Arabia with “campaigns of influence in the West”. Qatar has been funding mega-mosques across Europe. Qatar’s goal is apparently to Islamicize the European diaspora.

As the German MP and Middle East expert, Rolf Mützenich, said in 2016:

“For quite some time we’ve had indications and evidence that German Salafists are getting assistance, which is approved by the governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait, in the form of money, the sending of imams and the building of Koran schools and mosques.”

The Economist has also focused on Qatar’s takeover of Europe’s mosques.

In 2014 the US Treasury Department not only singled out Qatar as a source of funds for al-Qaeda; it seems that Doha has also been, with a few suspensions, a primary supporter of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist organization that is pursuing the destruction of the State of Israel. During the “Arab Spring” in 2011, Qatar, which, through Al Jazeera, has been credited for its role in “participating in creating the environment for the Arab Spring,” supported the Islamists, presumably to replace secular dictators in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt.

Qatar has also been accused of funding the Islamic State (ISIS). General Jonathan Shaw, a former Assistant Chief of Defence Staff in Britain, declared that Qatar and Saudi Arabia are responsible for spread of radical Islam. “This is a time bomb that, under the guise of education, Wahhabi Salafism is igniting under the world really. And it is funded by Saudi and Qatari money and that must stop”, said Gen Shaw.

As Qatar’s ideological spending spree in the West races ahead, many Europeans, still seemingly lost behind a willful blindness, pursue their futile accusations of “hate speech”, “racism” and “Islamophobia”, while radical Muslims infiltrate their democracies and continue to encircle them.

Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.

Iran recently handed down a sentence of 33 years in prison and 148 lashes to a prominent Iranian lawyer, Nasrin Sotoudeh, who dared to defend girls who were protesting Iran’s forced veiling laws. Pictured: Nasrin Sotoudeh. (Image source: Hosseinronaghi/Wikimedia Commons)

The Islamic Republic of Iran today, through its terror proxies and puppet regimes, has been extending its hegemony to many capitals of the Middle East: Tehran, Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, Sanaa. Iran continues to threaten the Middle East, the Mediterranean basin and potentially Europe. Forty years after its theocratic revolution in 1979, the mullahs speak (wishfully, one assumes) of a “declining” America.

“America cannot manage its own affairs now”, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, the secretary of the powerful Guardian Council, said on state television. “Millions of people are hungry there and America’s power is in decline”. Such declarations may be intended to hide Iran’s own terrible decline, fleeing reality and crumbling from within.

Iran was the first country, in 1979, to bring down a secular, pro-Western government and replace it with an Islamic theocracy. The experiment, however, seems to have failed. Instead of bringing prosperity and freedom, it brought poverty and repression. Even without considering the terrible persecution of women, journalists, academics dissidents and sexual minorities, the Iranian regime is crumbling.

Statistics published by the World Bank note that Iran has had an appalling economic meltdown over the past 40 years since the Islamic clerics came to power. Its drop in economic rankings relative to other countries has been “one of the steepest declines in modern history“. According to World Bank data:

“Using GDP ranking as another metric of economic importance, in 1960, Iran was the world’s 29th largest economy. Turkey ranked 13th and South Korea ranked 33nd. By 1977, Iran had climbed to 18th place, Turkey was 20th, and Korea 28th. In 2017, Iran was 27th, Turkey hovered around 18th, and Korea had by now become the 13th largest economy in the world.”

The average per capita GDP based on the Iranian currency’s real purchasing power from 1976 to 2017 shows that since the revolution, the average Iranian became 30% poorer.

“One country chose openness, democracy and innovation,” tweeted U.S. Ambassador Carla Sands about the different paths taken by South Korea and Iran. “The other one didn’t”.

According to Mohsen Delaviz of the Iran Fuel Conservation Company, “Iran with its 80 million population annually spends $45 billion for energy subsides, while this figure stands at $38 billion in China with population of 1.5 billion.”

Unfortunately, Europe has now chosen to appease Iran’s regime rather than to increase pressure on it. That view possibly accounts for the absence of foreign ministers from major European powers, such as Germany and France, at the recent Warsaw meeting, called by the US and other allies to pressure Iran. A few days after the Warsaw meeting, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier sent a shameful congratulatory telegram to Iran’s leaders on the 40^th anniversary of their revolution.

Iran’s oil production has yet to recover to pre-1979 levels. According to Bloomberg:

“Even if the U.S. lifted sanctions, Iran would be hard-pressed to pump near 6 million barrels a day like it did just before the 1979 revolution. It produced less than half that amount — 2.74 million a day — in January, data compiled by Bloomberg show.”

“The economy is even worse than they let on,” commented Alireza Nader, the CEO of New Iran, a research and advocacy organization in Washington, D.C. Yet despite its economic crisis, Iran continues to provide hundreds of millions of dollars every year to terrorists across the world.

“Iran provides Hezbollah alone some $700 million a year”, said Nathan A. Sales, the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large and Coordinator for Counterterrorism.

“It gives another $100 million to various Palestinian terrorist groups. When you throw in the money provided to other terrorists, the total comes close to one billion dollars. Let’s pause to consider that, because it bears repeating: The Iranian regime spends nearly a billion dollars a year just to support terrorism”.

Iran, however, does boast numerous records. According to Amnesty International, “more than half (51%) of all recorded executions in 2017 were carried out in Iran”. In relation to its population, Iran holds the world record for executions per capita. There was an increase of 333% in prisoners between 1985 and 2017 in Iran. The newly appointed head of the Islamic Republic’s judiciary, Ebrahim Raisi, “was involved in mass executions of political prisoners,” according to U.S. State Department Deputy Spokesperson.

In the last 40 years, the corruption of Iran’s regime and its wretched management of environmental resources have led Iran to a natural disaster. The country is running out of water. “Iran is committing suicide by dehydration.” Foreign Policy recently wrote:

“In 2013, the former head of Iran’s environmental protection agency reported that 85 percent of the country’s groundwater was gone, while the population had doubled in the last 40 years.”

That unpleasant truth may well be why environmental experts are treated as a “security threat” by the Iranian regime. When some scientists tried to identify the problems and offer the solutions, Iranian security forces arrested them. According to the Center for Human Rights in Iran, 40 of these experts were arrested in just one month.

In addition to a scarcity of water, there is also a human brain-drain. According to the U.S. State Department:

“One in 4 of Iran’s most educated citizens leave their country when given the opportunity… Iran has one of the highest rates of citizens leaving their homeland — an estimated 5 million Iranians have left the country since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.”

Chapman University Professor Shahrzad Kamyab wrote:

“According to the International Monetary fund (IMF), which surveyed 91 countries, Iran has the highest rate of brain drain in the world: every year, 150,000 educated Iranians leave their home country…”

Iran’s leading environmentalist, Kaveh Madani, recently fled to London and tweeted:

“Yes, the accused fled from a country where virtual bullies push against science, knowledge and expertise and resort to conspiracy theories to find a scapegoat for all the problems, because they know well that finding an enemy, spy or someone to blame is much easier than accepting responsibility and complicity in a problem.”

World Bank figures put Iran’s youth unemployment at about 30% for 2018.

Iran’s youths are fleeing abroad as the regime is fleeing from reality and the Iranian clerics are getting wealthier. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, controls an empire worth $95 billion, according to a Reuters investigation. As in the Soviet Union, the Iranian government’s budget reportedly comprises 80% of the gross national product. U.S. News & World Report wrote that Iran is ranked third-most corrupt country (by perception) in the world, after Iraq and Pakistan.

The American economist and news analyst David Goldman has compared Iran to the former Soviet Union. From the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia through their invasion of Afghanistan in the 1970s, the Soviet leadership began to act aggressively in foreign policy, as if they understood it was a last chance to push for power in what was clearly an economic and demographic meltdown — just as Iranian mullahs are doing now.

“Iran has experienced one of the fastest fertility reductions in the world” Farnaz Vahidnia explained. “A fertility decline of more than 50% in a single decade is not only unique for a Muslim country but has never been recorded elsewhere”. The South China Morning Post reported:

“In one generation, Iran registered one of the most rapid fertility declines ever recorded in human history,” said Nicholas Eberstadt, a political economist at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, who conducts demographic research. It took Europe 300 years to record a similar drop, he said. “I’m sceptical that this trend can be reversed,” Eberstadt said.

Karim Sadjadpour, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, describes “the essence of Islamist rule in Iran” as: “Dogmatic septuagenarian clerics forcing their own antiquated views on a young, diverse society… It can only be sustained through coercion”.

This impressive decline of the Iranian regime is being accompanied by petty, grotesque and repressive laws. Last month, dog-walking was reportedly banned from public places in Tehran. Previously, the Iranian regime censored even using the word “wine” and the names of “foreign animals” from books published in the Islamic Republic. The Iranian regime, after 1979, tried to control what people could read. Iran recently handed down a sentence of 33 years in prison and 148 lashes to a prominent Iranian lawyer, Nasrin Sotoudeh, who dared to defend girls who were protesting Iran’s forced veiling laws. In another recent incident, an Iranian couple were arrested after their public marriage proposal went viral on social media.

When will this theocratic regime, which terrorizes its own people and destabilizes the region, finally cave in, as the communist Soviet regime did in 1991?

Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.