From Syria to Gaza to Iran, Qatar is hijacking the Trump administration.

Syria’s Al Qaeda regime is massacring Kurds to free imprisoned ISIS terrorists, state sponsors of Hamas in Turkey and Qatar are being named to boards running Gaza, and thousands of democracy protesters are being massacred in Iran while Al Jazeera defends the regime.

This isn’t American foreign policy, but it is Qatar’s foreign policy.

The White House’s foreign policy in the Muslim world is now virtually identical to Qatar’s foreign policy apart from Israel. And as thousands die in Iran after empty promises of support, there is a bigger picture here of institutional capture by a tiny and powerful Islamic terrorist state.

Viewed in isolation, the refusal to intervene in Iran might be mistaken for a determination to concentrate on America and China, but that does not explain why the Trump administration has dedicated time and prestige to propping up the Al Qaeda leader of Syria to the point of helping him out by releasing and importing ISIS terrorists to America.

Nor does it explain a convoluted plan for Gaza in which a top Qatari official supportive of Hamas and notorious for his alleged links to spying operations using ex-CIA agents [is appointed] to the ‘Gaza Executive Board’ and the entire plan to reconstruct Gaza. It’s certainly not helping Israel, which has been vocal in opposing Qatar and fellow Hamas state sponsor Turkey from playing a role.

Nor does it even begin to explain why we’re negotiating with the Taliban to go back into Afghanistan with a U.S. military presence for ‘counterterrorism’ purposes when the terrorists whom we’re negotiating with, much as in Syria, are the ones in charge of the country.

There is a consistent throughline here and it isn’t America First, it isn’t ‘isolationism’, it isn’t Israel and it isn’t MAGA, but it very much is Qatar along with its Islamist allies: Turkey and Iran. And this throughline has an ominous similarity to Obama’s New Middle East policy and the way that it consistently empowered Islamist takeovers and protected Iran’s Islamist terror regime.

If we’re not intervening in Iran because we’re non-interventionists, why are we intervening then on behalf of Islamists everywhere from Syria to Gaza? Much as under Obama, who chose to intervene in Libya and Egypt, but not in Iran, the consistent pattern here is one of propping up Islamists, whether through intervention or non-intervention, with inconsistent rationalizations.

Iranian protesters are being massacred, and Hamas and Al Qaeda are being propped up, not because it serves our national interests, but because it serves Qatar’s Jihadist agenda.

Qatar’s foreign policy objectives have been consistent and clear. It elevates and props up Islamic Jihadists and then offers its services in ‘negotiating’ with them. That means bringing an Al Qaeda affiliate to power in Syria, bringing the Taliban to power in Afghanistan through a fake deal during the first Trump administration, helping Hamas maximize its gains from October 7, and preserving the Islamic terrorist regime of the Ayatollahs that it is allied with in Tehran.

The MAGA revolution jettisoned much of the ‘foreign policy blob’ that Qatar had spent billions cultivating through investments in institutions like ‘Brookings’, and what replaced it was a refreshing breath of common sense in some arenas, but by the second term, the National Security Council and elements of the Pentagon had been poisoned by Koch appointees allied with Soros organizations, which were in turn intertwined with Iranian foreign agents.

Qatar may have lost its original foreign policy blob, but it replaced it with a more ramshackle collection of businessmen with special access and special interests who echoed the same old Obama foreign policy of propping up Islamists while pretending they were something new.

The style was different, but the substance has proven to be the same.

President Trump’s foreign policy is good globally, when it confronts China, demands more responsibility from NATO, and challenges Latin American Marxist dictatorships, but that is the official State Department foreign policy as implemented by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. When it comes to the Middle East, however, there is a rogue foreign policy that has little in common with America First or Trump, but looks a whole lot like Obama’s old policies.

When it came to the Middle East, foreign policy was outsourced to shady operators like Tom Barrack and Steven Witkoff, who were seen as having a better handle on the region because they had done business there. No one ever got around to vetting their actual interests.

Whatever their agendas are, there is little doubt about what they’ve done and who benefits.

What ISIS couldn’t accomplish in Syria with suicide bombings, it managed to pull off by putting Al-Jolani, now Ahmed Al-Sharaa, in a suit, and the world watched while ISIS terrorists were sprung from their jails, much as the Taliban had freed Al Qaeda and ISIS terrorists after Qatar masterminded a deal with the Taliban that, much like Hamas, they were never going to keep.

The path to Al Qaeda’s Syria hegemony was paved with ‘Ambassador’ Tom Barrack lecturing on the importance of allowing the Sunni Islamists to consolidate control over Syria. This was obviously in the interests of Turkey’s Islamist terrorist regime, which was obsessed with crushing the Kurds, and of Qatar’s Jihadist ambitions, but it has never been explained why any of this is in our interest any more than the Islamist takeovers of Egypt, Libya and other nations in the region had become the objective of our foreign policy under Obama.

There are areas around the world where an America First policy couldn’t be any clearer, but that is not remotely true in the Middle East, where our foreign policy is wildly inconsistent. Indeed, the best way to understand our foreign policy in the Middle East is that Qatar has gotten its way on everything except Israel, where it only gets 60% of its way, and is scrambling to do away with it.

Much of the current hysteria about Jews and Israel among MAGA influencers can be understood as a Qatari campaign to consolidate its control over foreign policy in the region.

Leftists, libertarians and members of the woke right who shared little except hostility toward America fused together into their own ideological blob in which Tucker Carlson can interview anti-Trump UN officials like Jeffrey Sachs and Muslim dictators, while Robert Malley, Obama’s disgraced Soros Iran negotiator whose scandal involving the mishandling of classified information was covered up by the Biden administration, can stop by to be interviewed by a veteran of a Soros pro-terrorist site at American Conservative, a ‘conservative media’ outlet which had also claimed that creating a ‘Palestinian’ state was in America’s national interest.

This isn’t MAGA and it’s not America First; it’s Obama sneaking back in wearing a red cap. And the same domestic and foreign enemies who were behind that one are behind this one too.

The question of Israel is a distraction from the real subject, the one that we’re not talking about, of why we’re propping up Al Qaeda and Iran, and what it really means about who’s in control of foreign policy. No amount of fulminating about the vanished ‘neoconservatives’, a group that only exists in the editorial section of the Washington Post, by the guilty can distract us forever.

The real question is why are we supporting Islamic terrorists and who’s calling the shots?

Iran and Gaza are a fault line. They mark the fracture between America First and Qatar. Qatar has won and lost battles over the air strikes on Iran and Gaza, but now it’s winning the war on both. And that’s bad news not just for Iranian protesters or Israel, it’s bad news for America.

Al Qaeda’s consolidation of control over Syria will cost us, as will the survival of the Iranian regime. American foreign policy had two points, defeating terrorists and keeping the Persian Gulf clear, and the Qatar First foreign policy is wrecking both of our interests in the region.

While the Pentagon chases phantom ISIS encampments, Jihadists in suits are once again taking power as they did under Obama’s Middle East, and it won’t be long before we pay the price once again as we did back then and after Qatar negotiated a deal with the Taliban.

The Trump administration is not the first administration to be torn apart by malicious factions, and the best evidence of that is how different Trump’s great foreign policy in Asia, Europe and Latin America is from his policy in the Middle East. The president is being badly served by infiltrators acting on behalf of special interests, and it’s time to clean Qatar out of MAGA.

Before the Islamic terrorists being unleashed by our Qatari foreign policy don’t just kill 3 Americans in Syria, as they recently did, but once again kill 3,000 Americans in the United States. Qatar harbored Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11 attacks.

Rather than learning our lesson from 9/11, we let Qatar control our policy. And the only question is how many have to die this time before we take back our foreign policy from the terrorists?

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Reprinted by kind permission of the Center’s Front Page Magazine.