Marc Owen Jones: Why the far-right can’t quit Qatar

Tommy Robinson (also known by his real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) is somewhat less eloquent but no less vitriolic. At the start of December, the British anti-Islam activist posted tweets saying “F**k Qatar” three times, along with a video he made lamenting Qatari investments in the UK.

This fixation isn’t random. Over the past two years, Qatar has been cast as a catch-all villain, the hidden architect of Western decay: Bankrolling student protests, driving immigration, manipulating US diplomacy, and advancing the “Islamification” of the West. It’s partly recycled Islamophobia, but also a coordinated influence campaign, one that weaponises pre-existing fears to undermine Doha’s mediation role in Gaza, weaken its relationship with Washington, and resurrect the old “Eurabia” fantasy to use as a political tool.

United by narratives

Loomer and Robinson have long histories of Islamophobic activism. Loomer’s brand is built on being a “proud Islamophobe”, a stance that has won her an audience among white nationalists. Yet while Loomer’s admiration among traditionally anti-Semitic white nationalists has prompted concern from some members of the American Jewish community, her fierce pro-Israel politics sometimes override concerns about the extremism she channels.

Despite her Islamophobic history, Loomer’s obsession with Qatar is relatively new. Before 2025, she only mentioned Qatar about five times on X, but she has done so 460 times since May 2025.

According to Loomer, Qatar is secretly funding anything “from BLM [Black Lives Matter movement], ANTIFA, to Islamic violence in America”. She argues that routine diplomacy, such as pilot training in Idaho, equates to “genocidal Muslims being trained to fly fighter jets on US soil”.  She even described as “invaders” injured Palestinian children being flown for medical treatment to the US on a Qatar Airways flight.

Qatar has been cast as a catch-all villain, the hidden architect of Western decay: Bankrolling student protests, driving immigration, manipulating US diplomacy, and advancing the “Islamification” of the West.

Loomer has directed much of her ire against conservative figures who don’t share her newfound hatred of Qatar. She has called conservative pundit Tucker Carlson “Tucker Qatarlson” and suggested that podcaster Theo Von’s shift in tone on Israel is due to a “brain-rotting” trip to Doha. She has also claimed that most conservative podcast hosts and journalists are “owned by Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood”.

Even Republican leaders are folded into the conspiracy, with baseless claims that Congresswoman Lisa McClain and her staff leaked internal questions from a committee hearing on anti-Semitism to the Qatari embassy.

For his part, Robinson has recently embarked on a new “F**k Qatar” campaign. He is getting a lot of mileage out of a video he filmed in London. In the video, Robinson accuses Qatar of “funding the destruction” of the United Kingdom.

The fantasy of ‘Eurabia’

The pattern in these narratives fuses two older conspiratorial narratives: the “Red-Green alliance” myth – claiming a covert ideological pact between the radical left (red) and Islamists (green) – and the early-2000s “Eurabia” theory popular in Islamophobic and hardline pro-Israel circles, which alleges that European elites had secretly colluded with Arab states to Islamise the West.

The combination of this line of thinking has helped foment narratives that foreign “hordes” of Muslims are seeking to “replace” Western civilisation. Ironically, this conspiratorial thinking is rooted in the anti-Semitic “great replacement” conspiracy theory espoused by white nationalists.

This Eurabia trope has mutated into a new storyline: Qatar, as the puppeteer of Western decline, is buying influence to smuggle Islamism via the Muslim Brotherhood into the heart of Europe and the United States. Thus, Muslims (and Qatar) become the greater of the two “Abrahamic threats”, displacing older anti-Semitic hierarchies without dismantling the conspiratorial worldview beneath them.

Anti-Muslim tropes are not just popular among white nationalists; they are also frequently weaponised as political tools. Here, it is important to point out that the likes of Loomer and Robinson may position themselves as independent activists, but their finances are often opaque.

One DC-based lobbyist described Loomer as a “pay-to-play Tasmanian devil”. In the past, both Robinson and Loomer have reportedly been financed by Robert Shillman, a US tech billionaire who also backed anti-Islam movements in the UK and the US. Shillman, a former board member of Friends of the IDF, a US-based nonprofit that fundraises for the Israeli army, has long supported hardline Zionist causes.

Robinson, a convicted fraudster, has also received financial support from pro-Israel think tanks, including the Middle East Forum (MEF), run by anti-Islam activist Daniel Pipes.

Although Robinson put out anti-Qatar content after October 7, 2023, his interest in Qatar appeared to intensify after a recent trip to Israel, at the invitation of Amichai Chikli, Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs. Since the visit in October, Robinson has tweeted about Qatar at least nine times, far more than usual. Loomer met Chikli 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 create an anti-Muslim and anti-Arab digital media campaign targeting North America. The crux of the campaign was to promote fear of Islamic migration.

Chikli himself has been described by Haaretz as “neo-Nazi curious” for courting historically anti-Semitic far-right European politicians and parties. He has appeared at far events and claimed that Europe is financing “its own death” by supporting Islamism.

Think tanks like MEF,  the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), and the Israel-funded Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) have developed an increasingly unhinged obsession with Qatar. Both the FDD and ISGAP also have a close relationship with a regional Arab country that is “uniquely obsessed with the Brotherhood”.

Dark money is also involved in this campaign. From late 2023 through mid-2024, an unknown entity ran a multimillion-dollar campaign to push a narrative that Qatar was plotting the destruction of Europe by supporting Muslim immigration. The “Qatar Plot” remains unattributed, although some parts of the campaign were promoted by prominent evangelical figures.

Even now, sponsored videos about how Qatar is “destroying” Western civilisation through Islamic migration are getting millions of views on YouTube and Facebook.

Why Qatar

At its core, the anti-Qatar campaign serves multiple agendas. For some, it’s ideological: Qatar is the lightning rod and avatar to boost longstanding Islamophobic fantasies about “Eurabia”, immigration and civilisational decline.

For others, it’s geopolitical: Qatar’s role as a mediator with Hamas frustrates Israeli hardliners who would prefer isolation over negotiation, while other regional powers’ longstanding rivalry with Doha’s influence in the Arab world gives an incentive to amplify hostility and drive a wedge between Qatar and the United States.

More importantly, this narrative allows Israel and co to position themselves as defenders of Western civilisation against so-called Islamic extremism.

In the US, there’s also a domestic political calculation: Framing Qatar as the hidden sponsor of campus protests, left-wing movements and even conservative dissenters gives culture warriors a convenient external enemy to rally against. There’s also money to be made, for lobbyists from all sides.

READ: Martin Jay: How EU corruption weakens the West’s Ukraine project

Qatar’s foreign policy, like any state’s, is not beyond scrutiny. But the propaganda obsession with painting Doha as the nucleus of a global Islamist plot is an absurd conspiracy theory designed to appeal to the Republican Party, which, as Mike Rothschild argues, is increasingly beholden to conspiracy theories.