Summary
A sharp contradiction has emerged between U.S. policy and global diplomacy: while the United States designated Muslim Brotherhood branches as terrorist organizations, Qatar—widely described as the Brotherhood’s central hub—continues to host major international forums and attract Western political, business, and media elites.
Qatar is simultaneously funding and sheltering Islamist movements, including Hamas, while cultivating legitimacy through soft power: education funding, media influence, diplomatic events, and alliances across the political spectrum.
Drawing on the Muslim Brotherhood’s founding strategy of gradual influence through outreach, education, organization, and action, Qatar has transformed religious da’wa into a modern system of political, academic, and media influence.
This strategy, combined with economic leverage and strategic military partnerships, has enabled Qatar to maintain global acceptance despite allegations of terrorism support, ideological extremism, and systemic labor abuses.
On November 24, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order designating Muslim Brotherhood chapters as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Three weeks later, Qatar—considered the world hub for the Muslim Brotherhood—hosted two major international conferences. The 23rd Doha Forum drew 6,000 participants, including Bill Gates, Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump, Jr., Hillary Clinton, and Tom Barrack. One week later, the United Nations’ Eleventh Conference on Corruption (CoSP11) brought representatives worldwide to discuss transparency and ethical governance in Doha.
The inconsistency is plain. Despite Qatar’s glamorous public image, the state hosts and funds terrorists, serving as the Muslim Brotherhood’s de facto headquarters. In 2012-2013, Qatar provided $8-10 billion to Egypt’s MB government under Mohamed Morsi and hosted Imam Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who justified suicide bombing, until his 2022 death. Qatar maintains Hamas leadership in luxury Doha accommodations and has destabilized Libya, Syria, and Tunisia through support for MB-aligned factions.
While hosting international events for the UN and platforming liberal Western politicians, Qatar continues to operate the kafala system holding hundreds of thousands of its population—migrant workers—in conditions akin to slavery, with wage theft and deportation threats, per the 2025 U.S. State Department Trafficking Report.
The paradox reveals the success of Doha’s da’wa—the Muslim Brotherhood’s nearly century-old methodology for power. Originally an Arabic term meaning “invitation” or “call,” referring to the Islamic practice of inviting people to understand and embrace Islam, often through preaching, teaching, or missionary work, the MB’s political Islam has transformed this concept into a political act. As the Foundation for Defense of Democracies observed in its October 2025 report, the Brotherhood has “matched its rigid Islamist ideology with tactical flexibility.” Beyond its economic power in real estate and business buyouts in the West, Qatar has mechanized soft power there by using sophisticated media, political, and diplomatic operations to capture world leadership and the publics now willfully blind to its da’wa operation.
Al-Banna’s Blueprint: The Three-Stage Strategy
Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in March 1928 with the motto: “Allah is our goal. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Death in the service of Allah is our highest desire.” His 1943 Risālat al-Taʿālīm formalized three stages:
- At-Taʿrīf – Introduction through da’wa (invitation/outreach)
- At-Takwīn – Formation through tarbiya (education) and tanzīm (organization)
- At-Tanfīdh – Execution through ‘amal (action)
Qatar utilizes all three. The Qatar Debate Center (2008) exemplifies ta’rif under the guise of critical thinking. Exemplifying takwīn, Qatar invested $1.07 billion in Georgetown over 20 years. ISGAP’s June 2025 report documents how Qatari-funded education produces Foreign Service Officers with “academic knowledge of Frantz Fanon” and other radical anti-Western texts. Qatar’s investment of $6.5 billion in American higher education since 1986 in Cornell ($1.95B), Carnegie Mellon ($1.05B), Northwestern ($770M), and Harvard ($358M+) was not motivated by charity, but by interest.
Qatar’s educational dawa extends to campus activism itself. Lenny Ben-David documented how Qatar’s Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, who heads the multi-billion-dollar Qatar Foundation, registered as a foreign agent in 2009 to launch campus influence operations. The Sheikha’s Al Fakhoora campaign explicitly targeted American students for “advocacy skills” at Doha conferences—all expenses paid. Justice Department documents revealed goals including “pitching stories to university and mainstream press,” “recruitment of student leaders on U.S. and international campuses,” and “developing a spokesperson and leadership development curriculum.”
Qatar funds Al Jazeera and linked English venues amplifying Islamist narratives globally, while the Doha Forum programs create the appearance of openness, gaining international legitimization. Ben-David’s research reveals Qatar’s influence machine through interlocking institutions. The Arab Center Washington (ACW) and Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Doha, both Qatar Foundation-funded, provide “a steady stream of ‘experts’ to editors, media, publications, and speaking occasions in the United States,” promoting narrative control while maintaining the veneer of independence.
From Hitler to Hamas
Al-Banna openly admired totalitarian power, having Hitler’s Mein Kampf translated into Arabic as My Jihad. He adapted Der Stürmer, Julius Streicher’s antisemitic newspaper, for Arab audiences with cartoons intact. From 1935, the Brotherhood sent delegations to Nazi rallies. In October 1938, they hosted the Parliamentary Conference for Arab and Muslim Countries in Cairo, distributing Mein Kampf and the Russian origin forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In 1939, MB bombed a Cairo synagogue.
When King Farouk granted Nazi war criminal and British Mandate “Grand Mufti” Haj Amin al-Husseini asylum in June 1946, al-Banna hailed him as “hero and great jihadist.” Hamas’s 1987 covenant as MB’s armed wing demonstrated an unbroken ideological chain of eliminationist antisemitism fused with Islamist theology.
Dissimulation: The Refusal to “Stay Put”
Historian Martin Kramer identified a fatal Western flaw: “Fundamentalist Islam remains an enigma precisely because it has confounded all attempts to divide it into tidy categories. ‘Revivalist’ becomes ‘extremist’ (and vice versa) with such rapidity and frequency that the actual classification of any movement or leader has little predictive power. They will not stay put.”
This unpredictability appears in the Brotherhood’s “simultaneous resort to political and violent means, through the creation of political and military wings—the classic strategy of the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the Arab world.” The movements use “bullets and ballots” simultaneously in Kramer’s words.
The FDD report reinforces this: “Some branches engage in domestic politics, others maintain armed wings, and many operate in the gray zone between activism and militancy.” As FDD notes, “Since its early days, the Muslim Brotherhood has deflected blame for violence committed by its members or affiliates,” maintaining plausible deniability while pursuing the same goals.
Qatar operates at this intersection of flexibility and principle. As Kramer warns: “For dissimulation to succeed, it must be consistent and seamless.” Qatar achieves this through compartmentalization—funding left-wing academics while backing Tucker Carlson; hosting Al Udeid Air Base while sheltering Hamas leadership; hosting anti-corruption conferences while operating kafala slavery.
Da’wa in Doha: Winning Both Sides
The 2025 forum theme—”Justice in Action”—appeals to the Left. Nearly half the panels referenced Israeli “crimes” with no mention of Qatar-backed Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre that killed over 1,200 Israelis.
Forum attendees validated Qatar’s power: Hillary Clinton, Tucker Carlson, Bill Gates, Donald Trump Jr., Saudi Foreign Minister (ending a four-year boycott), Syria’s Islamist president, Iran’s former foreign minister, and Turkey’s current foreign minister. The forum epitomized al-Banna’s tanfīdh—following decades of dawa, tarbiya, and tanzīm, Western elites signal legitimacy through presence.
The “Red-Green Alliance” between Left and Islamists seemed to merge with MAGA’s “woke right”—isolationists and Israel critics. Tom Barrack, Trump’s ambassador to Turkey and Syria envoy, declared: “I don’t see a democracy” in the Middle East. “Israel can claim to be a democracy, but in this region, what has worked best is a benevolent monarchy.” He argued against imposing democracy: “Every time we intervene…it has not been successful.” Tucker Carlson interviewed the Qatari foreign minister onstage, deflected claims Qatar supported terrorism, announced plans to buy Qatari property, and later posted that Qatar—not Israel—should be America’s primary Middle Eastern ally. Ironically, in Doha, Donald Trump Jr. discussed “patriotic capitalism” weeks after his father’s MB terrorist designation.
Why No One Stops Qatar
Qatar hosts both the U.S. military and Hamas. It aligns with Iran despite being a Sunni monarchy. Al Udeid Air Base houses 8,000 U.S. military personnel—America’s largest Middle Eastern installation. The $500 billion sovereign wealth fund and natural gas reserves make Qatar indispensable. Yet Qatar and Turkey, both seeking F-35 fighter jets from Washington, also “host Hamas leaders and offices and have both been vocally opposed to Israel’s war in Gaza,” as reported recently. Qatar’s renewed request for F-35s—after a similar bid was rejected in 2020—now proceeds with “contacts between Qatari and US officials already underway.” The paradox is complete: the Muslim Brotherhood’s unofficial headquarters is now negotiating for America’s most advanced weapons while hosting the terrorist organization Trump just proscribed.
Qatar follows al-Banna’s methodology: pursuing power through any means, refusing to be pinned down, using dissimulation as doctrine. Qatar transformed da’wa into soft power, tarbiya into institutional capture, tanzīm into media empire, and tanfīdh into diplomatic theater where Western elites legitimize the Brotherhood by their presence at international diplomatic events. Qatar has achieved the willful blindness of the West due to its updated MB methodology. Twenty-first century da’wa is not conversion, but capture; not force, but influence; not overnight, but methodically—over decades, billions in academic funding, diplomatic forums, and F-35 negotiations that continue even as the U.S. designates the MB as terrorists.
Sources
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