Qatar, the Muslim Brotherhood and the information war

I often say—I think I was just saying at the end of last week’s show—we don’t tend to make foreign policy issues and international relations issues the most sexiest of things when it comes to public policy and political campaigns, but we ignore them at our peril, because they tend to surprise us and dominate everything when we do ignore them. And that’s why it’s a delight to bring back our good friend David Reaboi and talk about and mention his brand new book, Qatar’s Shadow War: The Islamist Emirate and Its Information Operations in the United States. You can get it on Kindle or paperback through Amazon, Qatar’s Shadow War. David, congrats on your book and welcome back.

Thank you so much. It’s great to be here. I just want to mention you can get signed copies at my new website.

Oh, good.

Just my name, DaveReaboi.com, D-A-V-E-R-E-A-B-O-I, and you’ll be able to get a signed and inscribed copy.

DaveReaboi.com, and Reaboi is spelled R-E-A-B-O-I. I’ll give that out a few times. Do me a favor, Dave, as I congratulate you on your new book, again, Qatar’s Shadow War. Fix me. Help me. I have been told to pronounce that country’s name three or four different ways. Tell me the right way to say it. I remember when I first learned about it, people were telling me, call it “gutter,” “gutter,” something like that. How do we say it?

Yeah, I mean, anything is fine with me as long as it sounds like Muslim Brotherhood, which is really the bottom line.

Yeah, let’s get into that. That is the bottom line. That is the purpose of this. Qatar’s Shadow War: The Islamist Emirate and Its Information Operations in the United States. When you go right into the book, we get right to Brotherhood Islamism, or the Muslim Brotherhood, which we haven’t talked about in a long time, and it is still one of the great growth movements—one of the great, by great I mean big, I should say noxious, growth movements in the world. Qatar, a country from where Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood are able to use tremendous oil and natural gas wealth to promote the Brotherhood’s ideology around the world. For those who haven’t talked about the Brotherhood in a long time, tell us what it is, and then tell us of its relationship to Qatar.

Sure. The Muslim Brotherhood is kind of the most famous and well-organized Islamist movement in the world. It was started in 1928 in Egypt as a direct response to the fall of the Caliphate a few years earlier. So the problem that the Muslim Brotherhood was trying to solve—and in many ways you can think of it as one of the first real community organizing projects—was how do you bring the Muslim community in various countries sort of back to the virtuousness of the first generation of Muslims under Muhammad? And it would result necessarily in a caliphate. So it was created in response to the dissolution of the caliphate, and their main project is restoring that caliphate. So under Islamic law, everywhere in the world. So that’s the project.

And the Brotherhood is a very sophisticated operation, because they’re not the al-Qaeda or the Taliban-type Islamists that we’re used to fighting over the last 20 years of the war on terror. They have think tanks. They write journal articles. They are community organizers. That’s the one thing they know how to do, is they know how to sort of do the radicalization process, as it’s kind of known here in the West. So that’s what they do.

And they briefly held control over Egypt. They are now fighting the Assad government in Syria. They are fighting in Yemen. And they’re fighting in many places all over the world. But interestingly enough, they are most powerful today in the West. That was not always the case. But really, since they were defeated in Egypt and they’ve been on the run from the Saudis and on the run from the Emiratis, really their home base is the United States and Europe especially.

And it’s interesting in its own way. A couple points—you correct me where I’m wrong, or if I’m wrong—but a couple points on this. So if one wants to get a sense of the kind of theology it can spawn, the current head of al-Qaeda, the famous physician al-Zawahiri, he grew up in the Muslim Brotherhood. Sayyid Qutb, who helped found it, who was really the ideological father of the Muslim Brotherhood, he actually lived in America at one point. Colorado, if I’m not mistaken, right? There are these Western ties and experiences we still have to this day, going back to Qutb’s experiences in Colorado and the decadence of the West that he saw as the reason, in part, for launching this movement, right?

Right. And rather than being, you know, kind of, let’s say, rich bin Laden type—rich inheritance trust fund guys like bin Laden—or being illiterate goat herders, like a lot of the Taliban guys, these guys—the most common profession for the Muslim Brotherhood people is engineer. So these guys really understand systems and methodology and pedagogy.

This is one of the great lies and great fictions of so many modern-day experts on terrorism prevention when they say, well, if we could just educate them. These are some of the most educated people in the world. I mean, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had a degree in engineering, a master’s degree in engineering, right? Al-Zawahiri is a physician.

Right. So getting to how all this kind of links into the state of Qatar, which is a tiny country sort of geographically located between Iran and Saudi Arabia, separated from Iran via the Gulf. They’re a small country, and as a small country is kind of wanted to do, they looked around for some kind of legitimacy to appeal to, and they found the Muslim Brotherhood. And when the Brotherhood was kicked out of Egypt in the ‘50s and ‘60s, they spread all around the world. They came to the United States, they came to Europe, but primarily they came to Qatar, and it was only in Qatar that they sort of got the blessing of the ruling family there, and the Qatari state became a kind of ideological Muslim Brotherhood outpost.

So right now, all of Qatar’s massive oil wealth and natural gas wealth can be put to the service of Brotherhood ideology. For example, Al Jazeera is a great example. You can make the case very easily that the whole Arab Spring was just an Al Jazeera slash Muslim Brotherhood operation to overthrow dictatorships that were opposed to Islamism in the region. You have universities and an entire infrastructure—media outlet, an entire infrastructure of information and influence operations that I deal with in the book, that have sort of penetrated the United States, among other places, and how I believe it’s detrimental to U.S. national security.

This is the kind of siren that has been sounded from time to time, again, ignored by most media professionals, by most scholars. I was first awakened to it, oh, probably in the 1980s, when I was learning a little bit about it from the works of people like Steve Emerson. He was early on on some of this stuff. Frank Gaffney later would pick up that flag and try and explain it to the rest of the world. Jim Woolsey has done some work. I’ve tried in my own way to do some work on this. But it’s been forgotten. It’s been dropped. And I suppose, in a sense, it’s a result of so much of our success. The irony of disrupting so much of ISIS and al-Qaeda has been, perhaps, that kind of success has had us forget about it. But it is still there. And I wonder if you can stay with me one more segment, David, and talk to me about its information operations in the United States, the second part of the book’s title. Do you have time for a little bit more?

Absolutely.

Wonderful. We’re talking to David Reaboi, Qatar’s Shadow War: The Islamist Emirate and Its Information Operations in the United States. You can get a signed copy by going to his website, DaveReaboi.com, and Reaboi is spelled R-E-A-B-O-I. The book is Qatar’s Shadow War.

Welcome back to the Seth Leibsohn Show. It’s a delight to have my good friend David Reaboi with us. He is, among other things, author of a brand new book, Qatar’s Shadow War: The Islamist Emirate and Its Information Operations in the United States. You can get autographed copies at his website, DaveReaboi.com, and he spells his last name R-E-A-B-O-I. Also a must-follow on Twitter. He always puts up interesting things several times a day.

Dave, let me try and combine two questions, and you can unwind them however you want or handle them however you want. I was saying earlier, it’s an interesting thing. We don’t tend to talk about the Muslim Brotherhood as much as some of us used to. It’s a little bit fallen off the wayside, or off the grid of discussion. On the other hand, you talk about its information operations in the United States. Perhaps that’s related, perhaps not. But what’s your theory on why we don’t talk about them as much? Is it related to the fact that it has such an information operation in the United States?

Yeah, I think these two things are almost separate issues.

Okay, good. Separate them then. Perfect.

Yeah, I think they’re separate issues. We don’t hear so much about the problem of Islamist terrorism anymore, really because—the high water mark was around the time of the Arab Spring during the Obama administration. And yeah, I mean, of course, as I said in the last segment, there is a Qatar link there. The Arab Spring was pushed and nurtured and enthusiastically promoted by Qatari state media, especially Al Jazeera.

Also known as Al Jazeera, right, yeah.

Right. And you had Al Jazeera broadcasting throughout the region trying to spin people up for revolution, and knowing, of course, that the beneficiaries of those revolutions all around the region would be the Muslim Brotherhood themselves. So that was one of the reasons why in the summer of 2017, the Saudis and Emiratis and the Egyptians, but primarily the first two, got together and they said to Qatar, look, you’ve got to stop your fondness for Iran, our regional enemy, and you’ve got to stop your efforts to undermine us through use of the media, meaning Al Jazeera. And in response to that, Qatar said no. And in response to that, there was a blockade of Qatar that is now sort of—it’s finally now being resolved a few years after it started.

But what that means is the Arab states in the region put their foot down, and they put their foot down against the Brotherhood, and they put their foot down against these revolutions. And they had the support of their people, who looked around, and they saw the complete failure of the Brotherhood in terms of how it was able to govern or not govern Egypt. It turned Egypt into an absolute mess, where the people cried out for the military to take control—anybody but the Brotherhood. And then, of course, you had ISIS committing horrible crimes against humanity and rampaging around the region. And the appeal of groups like ISIS, it’s not like the appeal of the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood can come off as touchy-feely Islamists. ISIS has a hard time coming off as touchy-feely.

Sure, sure.

There are a certain number of people who can join ISIS.

The Brotherhood recruits with a new way of life. ISIS recruits by ending life.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And as someone said, the Brotherhood guy is not the guy with the AK-47. He’s the guy in the suit who’s now told your government and the media network not to criticize anything Islamic.

Right.

And it’s my contention that actually the latter is more dangerous, which brings us to Qatar.

Okay.

And it brings us also to information operations, which are really—I mean, it’s a fancy term for the ability to use the product of information, mostly in media, to get your desired political end. So there’s always a policy goal in mind, and it’s like, okay, how are we going to shape the battlefield? How are we going to tell the people that need—the decision makers, the people that need to act—a story that they’ll believe that will force them to conclude in our favor? And it’s the kind of thing that’s been done throughout history, but the Qataris over the last several years have really, really perfected it in the United States. I mean, again, they’re not the only ones, but they’re the ones that I focus on in the book.

I did also draw contrast in the book—and maybe not contrast—the similarities between the media’s role in the Russia hoax for four years, and the Iran deal, pushing a fake Iran deal through media that was completely slanted and biased, and would jump at the opportunity to present views in a way that supported their allies and harmed their enemies.

So all of it is in that service, isn’t it, of undermining threats that come at America, but really more than just America, come at the West, right? I’m also in mind of the Gaza Strip, of Gaza, which is run by Hamas, which is a Muslim Brotherhood organization as well, is it not?

It is. Hamas is reformed and still it has its charter. It calls itself the Muslim Brotherhood of Gaza, or in Palestine.

Right, right. So when you look at the Muslim Brotherhood, when you look at Iran, you look at the two previous administrations—the Obama administration, they nurtured both. They nurtured the Muslim Brotherhood by trying to foment it and by directly telling Mubarak he had to go, knowing what would come next. You had the Obama administration undermining the Iranian students, which looked like actually a much better alternative than the Iranian regime itself. And you have a lot of these same players coming back in the Biden administration right now. It’s effectively the same team. Even John Kerry is having a hard time staying in his lane of environment and wants to deal with Iran. Scale of 1 to 10, how worried are you about this administration and its foreign policy, David?

I’m extremely worried. On the foreign policy side, I’m more worried about our friends, in countries like Israel, Saudi Arabia, Hungary, Poland, Brazil, because they’re under the gun now.

You got it. Well, I appreciate you spending some time with us, David, and what a great thing. Qatar’s Shadow War: The Islamist Emirate and Its Information Operations in the United States. Also his website, DaveReaboi.com, where you can get an autographed copy. David, thanks and congratulations again.

Thank you so much.

Absolutely. We’ll talk soon.