As the World Cup gets fully underway, we can review the massive international campaign to make sure it never happened. The campaign was – obviously – not a success, but it involved at least seven countries and a host of lobby groups, PR firms, think tanks, and front groups. The first part of this investigation looks at the role of “Israel” which started the ball rolling back in 2014.
The campaign against Qatar has been in full operation since 2018, and at its culmination involved at least the UK, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and “Israel”.
But its first activities occurred back in 2014. The first sign of a campaign against Qatar as the host nation came in late September 2014. There were two demonstrations outside the Qatari Embassy in London, the first on September 19 both with the slogan “Qatar: stop funding terrorism.” A larger event of reportedly 50-100 people was held on Sunday, September 21.
The first demonstration was advertised as being run by Sussex Friends of “Israel” and an obscure group called the Israeli Forum Task Force, and they were joined by two other groups on Sunday: UK Lawyers for “Israel” and StandWithUs. These groups are all, as one headline put it, “Israel supporters”, but in fact, each one has direct links to the Zionist regime in occupied Palestine.
- Sussex Friends of “Israel” had close links with the Zionist regime including money from an “Israel”-based Zionist faction called Over the Rainbow. Among its key figures is Simon Cobbs. He spoke at the second rally and was an attendee at the “undercover Hasbara Trolls” Ministry of Strategic Affairs event in “Tel Aviv” in 2019.
- StandWithUs is the UK branch of a lobby group headquartered in the US. Financial records show StandWithUs UK is funded by StandWithUs in the US, which, according to the former Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, Danny Ayalon, “Israel” uses to “amplify your power” and “for leverage”. It has reportedly received money directly from the Prime Minister’s Office. The representative of the group who spoke at both demonstrations was Keith Fraser. He is best known for mouthing “terrorist sympathizer” behind then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn at the televised election count in the 2017 election. He had stood for election in Islington for the far-right party UKIP.
- UK Lawyers for “Israel” is closely connected to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and may have been set up directly by the Ministry. Its Director lawyer Mark Lewis reportedly only joined UKLFI “a few days before the rally.” It has been at the heart of campaigns against supporters of Palestine in the UK ever since.
- The Israeli Forum Task Force is an obscure organization that claimed to bring together “Israelis” living in Britain to act as propagandists for “Israel”. It was set up with help from the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization; two of “Israel’s” so-called “national institutions” and has involved a range of existing Zionist (i.e. British not “Israeli”) groups.
In other words, all four of the groups that launched the anti-Qatar protests in September 2014 are linked directly to the Zionist regime. In a hilarious but unsurprising twist to these demonstrations allegedly against “terrorism”, one of the orange boiler-suited “flash-mob” behind the banner at the first small demo was Gemma Sheridan. Sheridan is known in British far-right circles as a supporter of the Jewish “Defense” League, the organization associated with the far-right Rabbi Martin (later “Meir”) Kahane and which was first deemed a “right-wing terrorist group” by the FBI in 2001. Kahane is, of course, the inspiration for the fascist right in “Israel”, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, who will become minister for national security in the new Zionist government.
The central role of “Israel” in the campaign has not diminished over time and we can tell from the slogans adopted back in 2014 what the main issue is; “terrorism”, which is of course the Zionist term for the legitimate resistance to the Israeli occupation as per international law. It might be objected that Qatar’s support for the contra-government forces in Syria post-2011 could also be included in the term “terrorism.” But that would ignore the fact that the Zionist regime gave material support to the terror groups in Syria, including patching up Nusra Front (Al-Qaeda) fighters in an IOF field hospital in the occupied Golan and sending them back to fight.
It is the steadfast support of the Qatari government for the resistance in Palestine that is at the root of all of the vituperation in the public sphere about Qatar, from “terrorism” to “LGBTQ+” issues and “workers’ rights”.
As it happens, the four groups involved in these demonstrations were all key to the campaign against Jeremy Corbyn who was elected as leader of the Labour Party a year later, an indication that “Israel” had the infrastructure to attack Corbyn in place well before the possibility that he could become Labour Leader was conceivable. As one report at the time put it, referring to the Israeli Forum Task Force, “a rowdy new actor has arrived on the British hasbara scene, full of chutzpah and equipped with some very sharp Israeli elbows. It’s still small, … but British Jewish life may be about to become more colorful.”
Later, “Israel” was joined in the anti-Qatar campaign first by the lobby of the United Arab Emirates, both as part of a pre-blockade anti-Qatar strategy and as part of their efforts to cohere and conjoin propaganda assets with the Zionists ahead of announcing normalization. The UAE and its assets in the UK, France, the US, and elsewhere have drawn on key far-right tropes such as the “Eurabia” myth popularized by Zionist writer Gisèle Littman (aka Bat Ye’Or) and the Islamophobic Red-Green alliance – also originated by a Zionist think tank. The campaign was part of a broader Tripartite Alliance effort by to delegitimize, destabilize, and ultimately to invade Qatar. The third and junior partner in this alliance was the Saudi regime, stretching back to at least 2017.
The role of “Israel”, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and a group of European nations in the rest of the campaign against the Qatar World Cup will be examined in the second part of this investigation. Until then, let’s try and remember that the campaign against Qatar is not an innocent matter of “human rights” but – from the beginning – saturated with geopolitical intrigue and the foreign policy interests of a hostile and illegitimate entity.
*The writer is an investigative researcher, broadcaster, and academic. He is the founder and co-director of the lobbying watchdog Spinwatch and editor of Powerbase.info.
(Al Mayadeen English)
December 4, 2022
The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of Aequitas Review.
