RUTHFULLY YOURS

Qatar’s Foreign Affairs Ministry spokeswoman Lolwah Rashid Al-Khaterused intellectual relativism to assuage fears of Islamic absolutism while speaking last month at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS). “There are always narratives and counter-narratives” and “multiple versions of the truth. That’s why we have different religions,” she proclaimed, in a clever bid to mask Qatar’s role as a Muslim Brotherhood (MB) bastion.

Packed into a conference room, the mostly student audience of about 50 people included John Duke Anthony, the Hamas-apologist founder of the National Council on US-Arab Relations, and Yahya Hendi, a Georgetown Muslim chaplain and former CCAS professor. CCAS Director Rochelle Davis, who supports an academic boycott of Israel, introduced Al-Khater’s lecture on “Defining the Narrative: Media and Politics in the Middle East.” Davis pointed out that Al-Khater is a board member at the Institute for Palestine Studies, an anti-Israel outfit based in Washington, DC.

Al-Khater’s talk resembled a Western academic’s analysis of the modern media — a sad commentary on contemporary academia. Discussing the “public sphere” theories of German sociologist Jürgen Habermas, she noted that modern technology, such as smartphones, allows for “excessive access to information” and means that “all of us can be producers of knowledge.” But “who verifies; who does the fact-checking?” she asked, although she warned not to make combating “hate speech” a trade-off between preserving free speech and fighting prejudice.

Accordingly, her slides asked, “Who controls the media?” and “Can neutrality exist in media?” Tellingly, she did not direct such questions at Qatar’s manifold efforts to promote Islamism, with its state-owned, anti-Western, antisemitic Al-Jazeera television network, and its massive financing of American academia. It took an audience member, answering one of her questions mid-presentation, to point out that he would watch Al-Jazeera if he wanted MB perspectives.

Al-Khater touted Qatar as a beacon of liberty, despite its poor grades for press freedom from the watchdog group Freedom House, thereby echoing the aforementioned John Duke Anthony, who similarly whitewashed Qatar in an Encyclopedia Britannicaentry. He claimed, against all evidence, that Qatar’s “rulers have sought to enhance civil liberties,” that its “press is among the freest in the region,” and that “Qataris pride themselves on their tolerance.” With equal mendacity, Anthony asserted that Al-Jazeera is an “outspoken news channel”; indeed, “one of the most important sources of news in a region where there is little toleration for a free press.”

One of Al-Khater’s slides claimed that, during the Arab Spring, “Islamists had to enter a public reasoning process subjecting their own ‘religiously deliberative’ premises to be negotiated within a ‘national framework.’” She alleged that Egyptian Islamists had argued that democratic majorities should resolve legal questions, such as those concerning women’s dress codes.

In fact, the MB’s brief 2012-2013 rule of Egypt suggested that the party might have taken Egypt the way of theocratic Iran after its 1979 “Islamic revolution.” More realistic was the warning Al-Khater cited from an Egyptian thinker who had stated that “we almost don’t have Arab liberals in the Arab region.” The Egyptian Copt and Hudson Institute expert Samuel Tadros has concurred that Egypt lacks a popular basis for liberal democracy.

Even Al-Khater acknowledged Egypt’s illiberal history, inadvertently providing further reason to doubt her confidence in an indigenous liberalism.

This fluent English-speaker lends Qatar a patina of progressive respectability. Yet the Middle East Forum’s February conference on Qatar demonstrated that such double-talk is the standard operating procedure for a regime that exports Islamism worldwide, supports Palestinian terrorism, aligns with radical Middle Eastern states, propagandizes through Al-Jazeera, and runs well-funded influence campaigns in Washington. Her appearance at CCAS provides a clear example of using academic allies to spread Qatar’s malign designs.

Andrew E. Harrod is a Campus Watch Fellow, freelance researcher, and writer who holds a PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a JD from George Washington University Law School. He is a fellow with the Lawfare Project. Follow him on Twitter @AEHarrod.  

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