Qatar is not a large country, but these days it occupies a surprising amount of space in the imagination of a growing ecosystem of far-right influencers, pseudo-journalists, pro-Israel think tanks, and dubious analysts. They say Qatar is orchestrating various global conspiracies.
Two figures illustrate this pattern well. Laura Loomer, the US-based influencer who acts as US President Donald Trump’s unofficial loyalty enforcer, has reinvented herself as an expert on ‘Qatari infiltration’ and the Muslim Brotherhood. An analysis of her feed shows that in recent months, Loomer has been tweeting about Qatar about twice a day. It found that 35 of the top 100 most shared URLs mentioning both Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood in the past year belonged to her.
Tommy Robinson (also known as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) is a bit less eloquent, but no less acerbic. A British anti-Islam activist has tweeted “fuck Qatar” three times in the past few days, along with a video lamenting Qatar’s investment in the UK.
This fixation is not random. Over the past two years, Qatar has been cast as the overarching villain and hidden architect of Western decline, funding student movements, promoting immigration, manipulating US diplomacy, and promoting the “Islamization” of the West. It is partly a repurposing of Islamophobia, but it is also a systematic influence campaign, weaponizing existing fears to undermine Doha’s mediation role in Gaza, weaken relations with Washington, and revive old “Eurabia” fantasies to use as political leverage.
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Loomer and Robinson have a long history of Islamophobic activity. Loomer brands herself as a “proud Islamophobe,” a stance that has won her support among white supremacists. But while Ms. Loomer’s admiration among traditionally anti-Semitic white supremacists has raised concerns among some members of the American Jewish community, her fiercely pro-Israel politics sometimes outweigh concerns about the extremism she induces.
Despite her history of Islamophobia, Rumer’s obsession with Qatar is relatively new. Before 2025, she only mentioned Qatar about 5 times on X, but after May 2025, she mentioned it 460 times.
Loomer said Qatar secretly funds everything from “BLM[Black Lives Matter movement]to ANTIFA to Islamic violence in America.” She argues that routine diplomacy, such as pilot training in Idaho, is the equivalent of “genocidal Muslims being trained to fly fighter jets on American soil.” She even described injured Palestinian children being flown to the United States for treatment on Qatar Airways planes as “invaders.”
Mr. Loomer has directed much of his anger at conservative figures who do not share his new hatred for Qatar. She referred to conservative commentator Tucker Carlson as “Tucker Caterson” and suggested that podcaster Theo Fung’s change in tone on Israel was due to a “brain-rotten” trip to Doha. She also claimed that most conservative podcast hosts and journalists are “owned by Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Republican leaders have also been drawn into the conspiracy, with unsubstantiated claims that Rep. Lisa McClain and her staff leaked internal questions from a committee hearing on anti-Semitism to the Qatari embassy.
Mr Robinson recently launched a new ‘F**k Qatar’ campaign. He makes a lot of money from the videos he shoots in London. In the video, Robinson accused Qatar of “financing the destruction” of Britain.
Fantastic “Eurasia”
These narrative patterns are an amalgamation of two older conspiratorial narratives. the “Red-Green Alliance” myth, which claims a secret ideological pact between radical leftists (red) and Islamists (green), and the “Eurabia” theory, popular in Islamophobic and pro-Israel hard-line circles in the early 2000s, which claims that European elites secretly colluded with Arab states to Islamize the West.
This combination of ideas has fueled the narrative that a foreign Muslim “horde” is trying to “replace” Western civilization. Ironically, this conspiratorial thinking is rooted in the anti-Semitic “Great Alternative” conspiracy theory espoused by white supremacists.
This Euravian metaphor was transformed into a new storyline. As a puppet of the West’s decline, Qatar is buying influence through the Muslim Brotherhood to smuggle Islamism into the heartlands of Europe and the United States. In this way, Muslims (and Qatar) become the greater of the two “Abrahamic threats”, displacing the old anti-Semitic hierarchy without dismantling the conspiratorial worldview beneath it.
Anti-Muslim tropes are not only popular among white supremacists. It is also often weaponized as a political tool. It’s important to note here that while people like Loomer and Robinson may have established themselves as independent activists, their financial status is often opaque.
One lobbyist based in Washington DC described Loomer as a “paid Tasmanian devil”. In the past, both Robinson and Loomer reportedly received funding from Robert Sillman, an American tech billionaire who also supported anti-Muslim movements in the UK and the US. Mr. Sillman is a former director of Friends of the IDF, a U.S.-based nonprofit that raises funds for Israel’s military, and has long supported hard-line Zionist causes.
Robinson, a convicted fraudster, also receives funding from pro-Israel think tanks, including the Middle East Forum (MEF), run by anti-Islam activist Daniel Pipes.
Robinson has published anti-Qatar content since October 7, 2023, but his interest in Qatar appears to have increased after his recent visit to Israel at the invitation of Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Tsikri. Since his visit in October, Robinson has tweeted about Qatar at least nine times, far more than usual. Rumer met Chikuli last month.
Chikli’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs is important in this story. In 2024, it was revealed that it paid a Tel Aviv-based PR firm to design an anti-Muslim and anti-Arab digital media campaign targeting North America. The crux of the campaign was to incite fear of Muslim immigrants.
Tsikli himself has been described by Haaretz newspaper as having “an interest in neo-Nazis”, as he favors Europe’s far-right politicians and parties, which have historically been anti-Semitic. He appeared at far-flung events and claimed that Europe was financing its “own death” by supporting Islamism.
Think tanks such as MEF, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), and the Israeli-funded Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism Policy (ISGAP) have an increasingly unbridled obsession with Qatar. FDD and ISGAP also have close ties to countries in the Arab region that have “a special attachment to the Brotherhood.”
Black finance is also involved in this campaign. From late 2023 to mid-2024, an unidentified organization ran a multi-million dollar campaign to spread the theory that Qatar planned to destroy Europe by supporting Muslim immigration. Although the perpetrators of the “Qatar conspiracy” remain unknown, parts of the campaign were promoted by prominent evangelicals.
Even now, sponsored videos about how Qatar is “destroying” Western civilization through Islamic immigration are garnering millions of views on YouTube and Facebook.
Why Qatar?
At the heart of the anti-Qatar campaign are multiple objectives. For some, it’s an ideological one. Qatar is a lightning rod and avatar for promoting long-standing Islamophobic fantasies about “Eurasia,” immigration, and the decline of civilization.
For others, it’s geopolitical. Qatar’s role as a mediator with Hamas irritates Israeli hardliners who prefer isolation to negotiation, while other regional powers’ longstanding rivalry over Doha’s influence in the Arab world has fueled hostility and provided incentives to drive a wedge between Qatar and the United States.
More importantly, this narrative allows Israel and its collaborators to position themselves as the defenders of Western civilization against so-called Islamic extremism.
The United States also has domestic political considerations. Casting Qatar as a hidden sponsor of campus protests, left-wing movements, and even conservative opposition gives culture warriors a convenient external enemy to rally around. It should also be lucrative for lobbyists on all sides.
Like any other nation, Qatar’s foreign policy is not free from scrutiny. But the propaganda obsession with portraying Doha as the core of a global Islamist conspiracy is an absurd conspiracy theory aimed at appealing to the Republican Party, which, as Mike Rothschild argues, is increasingly relying on conspiracy theories.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
