Author Of New York Times Anti-Israel Piece Works For Group Funded By Qatar 3:52 PM 04/02/2019 | World Adelle Nazarian | Contributor
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The author of a New York Times magazine cover story that blasted Israel works for a group that is funded by Qatar, the home base of the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader and anti-Semite Yusuf al Qaradawi.
The revelation exposes a glaring bias in this journalist’s writings.
In his Sunday piece titled, “How the Battle Over Israel and Anti-Semitism Is Fracturing American Politics,” Nathan Thrall pens a scathing indictment of the Democratic Party’s supposed support for Israel, leading with his criticism of Hillary Clinton’s choice of a Jew, Robert Wexler, as her foreign policy expert, versus Bernie Sanders’ choice, James Zogby, an Arab-American.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, which first broke news of Thrall’s ties to Qatar, the author has a long history of writing anti-Israel pieces. The Beacon’s Adam Kredo wrote that Thrall, “who the Times presents as a disinterested expert, serves as director of the Arab-Israeli Project at the International Crisis Group, or ICG, a left-leaning advocacy organization that has received around $4 million from the Qatari government in the just the last year. Qatar’s donations represent around 23 percent of ICG’s total budget.” ICG has reportedly also raised $1 million in the past few years from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which openly and enthusiastically funds the BDS movement in the United States.
Kredo notes that Qatar is not once mentioned in Thrall’s piece.
Qatar is known to support Hamas and Qaradawi, who has called for a Muslim holocaust against Jews, prompting concern about the security of Israelis, Jews, Americans and other “non-believers” during the 2022 World Cup in Doha, Qatar.
In a 2015 interview with Cal State University, San Bernardino Professor Dany Doueiri said the “overwhelming majority of Muslims today in the Middle East” look to scholars like Qaradawi in Qatar for guidance. “There are scholars who really speak for the overwhelming majority of Muslims today in the Middle East like Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who lived in Qatar, or people in Egypt, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and many places who are really respected scholars,” Doueiri said. “And for the Muslims in the United States we do have many very learned scholars who make rulings every years. They meet, they talk about issues on cloning, Islamic banking on non-Islamic banking and trade.”
Qatar’s influence operations are also the subject of a new documentary that is quickly gaining traction among President Donald Trump’s base.
At one point during his Sunday piece, Thrall wrote: “Democrats and Republicans reported similar levels of sympathy for Israel from the late 1970s until the early 2000s. But in the past decade, a series of polls by the Pew Research Center show, a yawning gap has opened between the parties, with nearly three times as many Republicans as Democrats expressing more sympathy for Israel than for the Palestinians.”
He also repeats the false narrative that compares Israel to the South African model of apartheid writing, “The B.D.S. movement casts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a struggle against apartheid.”
On Thursday, Thrall tweeted about his piece and noted that while it is “about BDS, Israel and the Democrats,” it is “also about Black-Palestinian solidarity and the increasing use of a racial justice prism to describe the situation today.”
Poster Comment:
False narrative? I think the author is taking too many hallucinogens.
We must remember the Balfour Declaration by Lord Arthur Balfour declared the Jewish people should have a homeland. This was to be Palestine since this was a part of the old British Mandate in the Middle East. France and Britain split up this area as part of the booty of WW II. Palestine was not theirs to give, and even though it was controlled by the Turks prior to this it made no difference the them.