The Art of the Deal vs The Qur'an
No one sees Qatar as an enemy, because no one sees a war. At best, they see a corrupt, hypocritical statelet.
Those who urge US President Donald Trump to reject the gift of a luxury $400 million aircraft from the rulers of Qatar only ever see peace, never war, even when missiles and bullets fly all over the place. How much more so when the offensive object in flight is a gleaming “palace in the sky”. Qatar’s “gift” of a super-opulent Boeing 747-8 was not a peaceful gesture, but a hostile act, an act of psychological war.
Donald Trump is a man extremely easily flattered. Even the charisma-challenged Erdoğan, the gangster-dictator Putin and the shape-shifting terror boss Al-Julani all managed to charm the billionaire real estate mogul. “He’s a great guy. We get along. I like him a lot,” is the US President’s standard response to warnings against the wiles of such scumbags. Even Trump’s most staunch supporters are alarmed that the “palace in the sky” is reward for something or inducement to something. But the billionaire top boss has the magic.
What everyone seems to forget is that there is a war going on in which Qatar’s boys are getting hammered and Donald Trump is supporting the side doing the hammering. Everything that transpired during the President’s visit to the Middle East from the side of Middle Eastern leaders has to be seen in the context of the current Middle East war. While Donald Trump is a man with a golden heart, he is also petulant and fickle, like someone still bearing an early-life resentment.
Qatar plays a high-stakes game on a tightrope. In this bizarre micro-state of fewer than a million citizens, over 2 million foreign quasi-slaves do the work. Here they dismiss those who “bang on” about their horrific working conditions with a glib “Death is part of life.” Qatar sits atop a vast and expensive resource, natural gas, and as an Arab Muslim state, it does with its natural resources what Arab Muslims have traditionally done: they plunder them. The spoils go on conspicuous consumption, hand-outs to citizens and jihad.
Qatar is a major force in jihad, yet with only a few hundred thousand citizens, it has hardly any armed forces to speak of. Who does its fighting for it, or deters its enemies? Answer: its principal enemy, the United States of America. How does Qatar pull off such a feat? By having its principal enemy maintain a vast airbase, Al-Udeid, on its tiny territory! Its lesser enemies are all deterred; and for its principal enemy, the base projects kinetic power over a region many thousand times larger than Qatar. To the United States, Qatar effectively ceases to be an enemy and becomes an ally, or, more accurately, a facility. This is Qur’an 3:28 at its finest:
Let not the believers take unbelievers for their friends in preference to believers. Whoever does that has no connection with Allah unless you are guarding yourselves against them, taking security. Allah bids you to beware of him. To Allah is the journeying. (My emphasis)
Hate them all, even as you smile at them, or flatter them with $400 million jets. Ibn Kathir, in his exegesis of Qur’an 3:28, makes clear that Muslims who fear the kufaar:
Are allowed to show friendship to the disbelievers outwardly, but never inwardly. For instance, Al-Bukhari recorded that Abu Ad-Darda' said, “We smile in the face of some people although our hearts curse them.” Al-Bukhari said that Al-Hasan said, “The Tuqyah [Taqiyya, AP] is allowed until the Day of Resurrection,” (Tafsir Ibn Kathir, 3:28)
Qatar’s one security priority above all else is to make sure the Al-Udeid airbase remains. The $400 million aeronautically-themed gift is much more than subliminal. It is a psychological body blow. The President of the greatest kafir power the world has ever known costs $400 million, the kind of money we give away. Of all the Americans we’ve got eating out of our hands, this one’s the biggest. There is no one who will not eat out of our hands.
The Western mind is a curious thing. Gregg Roman, Executive Director of Middle East Forum, says of Benjamin Baird’s “America for Sale: Qatar’s $40 Billion Spending Spree Buys Influence and Control of Elite Institutions” on Middle East Forum:
The numbers speak plainly: $33.4 billion into businesses and real estate; $6.25 billion to universities; $72 million to lobbyists. Qatar purchases access to our corridors of power while simultaneously funding Hamas terrorists who seek our destruction.
If the Qataris are "funding Hamas terrorists who seek our destruction," are they not themselves seeking our destruction? Roman lines up the dots, but fails to connect them despite going on to say:
The pattern is clear: Qatar targets critical infrastructure, including our energy grid. It bankrolls academic departments that foment campus unrest, buys Manhattan skyscrapers, and infiltrates Silicon Valley. Its capital flows to Washington insiders who shape Middle East policy.
Under the subheading, “Masters of Soft Power Strategies”, Baird reports:
The State of Qatar—a tiny, gas-rich emirate with just 300,000 citizens—projects prestige and influence well beyond its borders. The Persian Gulf powerhouse uses its abundant cash resources as a geopolitical force multiplier, purchasing prestige and influence where other countries rely on military strength, diplomatic alliances, and cultural exports to earn their global standing.
Qatar’s state agents have developed a sophisticated arsenal of soft power strategies to project influence on the global stage, often advancing an agenda that conflicts with Western values, particularly concerning human rights, democracy, and religious extremism. From hosting billionaire Hamas terrorist leaders in Doha’s high-rise hotels and luxury villas, to bankrolling jihadist militias in Syria and Libya, Qatar remains a prolific state sponsor of terror. Furthermore, the emirate’s record of labor and immigration abuses, history of bribery and corruption, and support for extreme Islamist organizations and causes stands in direct contrast to the image that Doha seeks to cultivate on the international stage.
As a master of soft power stratagems, Qatar burnishes its image by employing mass media manipulation through its Al Jazeera news conglomerate, while buying up professional sports teams around the world and hosting the 2022 World Cup in a practice called “sportswashing,” all to distract the public from Qatar’s reactionary ideology [not Islam? AP] and authoritarian leadership. Doha’s financial support for global education initiatives provides access to intellectual elites and the opportunity to influence academic views on a wide range of sensitive political topics.
Qatar’s not-so-soft power tools—from bribery to espionage to corruption—offer insights into its true identity as an unscrupulous middle-power micro-state. Doha’s recent misdeeds include bribing soccer officials ahead of the World Cup, planting agents in the Israeli prime minister’s office, and hiring a former CIA officer to discredit Senate Republicans who sought to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group. (My emphasis)
Why would “an unscrupulous middle-power micro-state,” go to the trouble of “hiring a former CIA officer to discredit Senate Republicans who sought to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group”? Baird finds no hint anywhere, not even in:
...often advancing an agenda that conflicts with Western values, particularly concerning human rights, democracy, and religious extremism. From hosting billionaire Hamas terrorist leaders in Doha’s high-rise hotels and luxury villas, to bankrolling jihadist militias in Syria and Libya, Qatar remains a prolific state sponsor of terror.
This entire litany of infiltration and ideological subversion amounts to one thing and one thing alone: destroy their enemy’s will to fight. This has to be the most elaborate psychological warfare operation since the heyday of the KGB. But no one sees Qatar as an enemy, because no one sees a war. At best, they see a corrupt, hypocritical statelet. Even with those who perceive Qatar’s “palace in the sky” gift to the President as a Trojan horse, the implications of what they discern do not sink in. Right-wing Trump supporters are watching this movie, but see only a random alarming frames. FactCheck.org summarises these responses as follows:
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas told CNBC that use of an aircraft from Qatar “poses significant espionage and surveillance problems.”
He also said, “I’m not a fan of Qatar. I think they have a really disturbing pattern of funding theocratic lunatics who want to murder us, funding Hamas and Hezbollah. And that’s a real problem.”
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, noting Qatar’s past financial support for terrorist organizations while currying the favor of American politicians, called Trump’s decision to accept the jet “shady behavior” that “undermines his agenda and credibility,” according to The Wrap.
Staunch Trump ally Laura Loomer also condemned accepting the aircraft from Qatar.
Trump himself in 2017 referred to Qatar as a sponsor of “Radical Ideology,” and he supported an economic and diplomatic blockade of the nation.
At his May 12 press conference, however, when he spoke about the gift of the luxury jet, Trump said, “I have a lot of respect for the leadership and for the leader of Qatar.”
In recent years, the Trump Organization and members of the president’s family have reached deals with businesses in Qatar, including a Trump International Golf Club and villas near Doha, Axios reported. (“Unwrapping Qatar’s $400 Million Winged Gift to Trump” on FactCheck.org)
Qatar is the nexus of a vast global jihad machine, one predicated on a fitting psychological warfare campaign against the free world, or what remains of it. And its latest salvo was aimed straight at Donald Trump’s greatest psychological weakness: his susceptibility to flattery. He knows stuff, because he’s a billionaire, and told the world all about in The Art of the Deal. From this, the Qataris know Trump's greatest ideological weakness: deals mean peace.
The people of jihad, though, have a far older book, and one that got them from a lonely desert oasis all the way to the White House, not by deals, but by war. In a straight shoot-out between the Qur’an and The Art of the Deal, the latter stands no chance, because it presumes a desire for peace, whereas the former sanctifies, rationalises and inculcates a desire for war, the war it commands:
Fight against those do not believe in Allah or the last day, and do not forbid what Allah and his messenger have forbidden, and do not follow the religion of truth, even if they are among the people of the book, until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued. (Qur’an 9:29)
It is worth pointing out a few things here: one, “Fight” means kill, as in wage war; two, Muslim apologists describe jizya as a tax in exchange for “protection”, failing to point out that the “protection” is from Muslims killing them and seizing their property. Their lives are forfeit for refusing to become Muslims, an act that Muslims understand as aggression against Muslims. Their execution is stayed as long as they keep paying; three, the Jews and Christians end up in this situation at the end of losing a jihad that the Muslims were waging against them. The phrase “with willing submission and feel themselves subdued” refers to the time commencing with their first jizya payment, and not to the time of losing the war. When they lose the jihad, they do not submit; they surrender, and are therefore prisoners of war. The prisoner of war who chooses to pay jizya, rather than be beheaded on the spot, a dhimmi, is therefore not a second-class citizen. A citizen’s life is not forfeit, whatever his class. A dhimmi’s life is forfeit.
This is what Qatar, and all who pursue jihad, intend for all Christians and Jews who survive jihad. The Muslim Brotherhood is Sunni Islam’s programme to that end. This is why the Muslim Brotherhood must be protected at all costs, and why “an unscrupulous middle-power micro-state, [hires] a former CIA officer to discredit Senate Republicans who sought to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group”.
There are places that The Art of the Deal will just never reach, such as all places in which the Qur’an is hard at work preparing the faithful for jihad. But more especially, in the raison d’être of Muslims, sealed in a deal made before they were even born, and in which Allah exhorts them to rejoice. Whatever deals Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal might have secured for him elsewhere, in the Muslim world, this is what it is up against:
Indeed, Allah has bought from the believers their lives and their wealth, because the garden will be theirs, they will fight in the way of Allah and will kill and be killed. It is a promise that is binding on him in the Torah and the Gospel and the Qur’an. Who fulfils his covenant better than Allah? Rejoice then in your bargain that you have made, for that is the supreme triumph. (Qur’an 9:111)
To this Robert Spencer, in his excellent The Critical Qur’an, offers in a footnote that there is nothing of the sort in either the Torah or the Gospels, further adding:
Ibn Kathir explains: “Allah states that He has compensated His believing servants for their lives and wealth—if they give them up in His cause—with Paradise.” Ibn Juzayy adds significantly that this verse’s “judgment is general to every believer doing jihad in the way of Allah until the Day of Rising.”
“They gotta make a deal. They gotta make a deal.” Sure, Mr President. They already have, and it’s not with you. There is no deal you can offer the Muslims that would be to die for, because Allah already clinched that one. You may think you’ve made a good deal with Muslims, but the deal you’ve made with them is never the deal they’ve made with you. You gotta read the Qur’an. You gotta read the Qur’an.
As for that awkward Boeing 747-8, take it, then donate it to Israel for flying Palestinians out of Gaza. That way, Qatar will finally become a real mediator between Israel and Hamas; mediation that will actually lead to peace. That’s the art of the deal.
Picture credits:
Walters Art Museum: Home page Info about artwork, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18850802
Mostafameraji - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64880050
Rudolf Bruner-Dvořák (1864-1921) - Scheufler Collection, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3713084
Abdullah@xtra.co.nz, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Abhijit Kar Gupta from Kolkata, India - Faith reading, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66543126
Manart - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20526149
Comments:
On 22 May 2025 at 08:42, Ben Dor A. wrote:
Dear Anjuli Pandavar
Thank you for clarifying the cultures of Islam as stipulated in the Quran.
I have shared your opinion with many.
Do not take bribes, for bribes blind the clear-sighted and upset the pleas of those who are in the right. (Exodus.23.8)
Money blinds the eyes of the wise and distorts the words of the righteous. (Deuteronomy 16:19)
The Torah has always known that money is the source of the evil inclination, and therefore, it is said that money blinds the eyes of the wise and distorts the words of the righteous.
This means that even great wise and righteous people do not resist temptation and sin by taking bribes of money because money blinds justice from their eyes and distorts their words from the truth.
Best Regards
Ben Dor A.