Michelle’s Dangerous Journey to Qatar

First Lady Michelle Obama, on her first solo trip to the Middle East, is scheduled Wednesday to address a conference at the Qatar Foundation on the topic of tolerance and better education. But only a few days before her visit the mosque that serves the foundation’s educational center hosted a notoriously anti-Semitic sheik who inveighed against “Zionist aggressors” and called upon Allah “to count them in number and kill them completely, do not spare a [single] one of them.”

One day before the White House announced the first lady’s travel plans, the Qatar Foundation’s accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram all promoted the Oct. 30 sermon by the sheik, Tariq al-Hawwas, who has delivered several televised diatribes against Jews, saying in 2013: “if only Hitler had finished them off, thus relieving humanity of them,” according to a translation from the Middle East Media Research Institute, or MEMRI.

The White House had no comment when Politico Magazine asked whether the first lady’s office was aware of Hawwas’s latest sermon or the succession of other intolerant preachers at the mosque, which serves the Foundation’s Education City, home to satellite campuses for six American universities. Obama is scheduled to speak on her “Let Girls Learn” initiative at the 2015 World Innovation Summit for Education, which the Qatar Foundation established in 2009.

However, in an email to Politico, White House spokesman Eric Schultz appeared to question the premise of this article, writing: “You are asking for a response to a statement made about speakers who the First Lady has never referenced, has never met, and nor will be participating in the First Lady’s event?”

Obama’s speech will focus on “the importance of adolescent girls’ education” in countries where there are “cultural and societal barriers around the role of women that particularly keep girls out of school,” her chief of staff, Tina Tchen, told reporters last Friday, the same day as the sheik’s speech. “The First Lady will also have an opportunity to meet Her Highness Sheikah Moza bint Nasser, the mother of the Emir.”

Despite its petroleum wealth and status as a U.S. ally—the first lady also joined comedian Conan O’Brien on a visit to U.S. troops stationed near Doha, which hosts the most important U.S. military base in the Mideast—Qatar has a politically checkered history as a state where support for extremist views continues to thrive. Qatar is still believed to be the political headquarters for Hamas and its leader, Khaled Meshal, and it has declined to punish private financiers of terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda.

In an interview last year, the emir or leader of Qatar, Sheik Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, told CNN, “We don't fund extremists.” But he added that it would be a “big mistake” to consider every Islamic movement to be “extremists.”

While the Education City Mosque has elicited controversy for hosting a slew of Wahhabi preachers who have a record of derogatory statements toward other religions, the Oct. 30 speech represents the first time one of these speakers has been documented voicing such sentiments from the mosque’s own pulpit.

This was also at least the fourth occasion on which Hawwas was allowed to speak at the mosque, despite his record of intolerant public statements in Qatar before.

Last year the Simon Wiesenthal Center raised concerns that Hawwas’s rhetoric from Qatar “surely fans the already rampant Jew-hatred flames” in the region. In particular they pointed to a sermon he delivered in July 2014 carried on Qatar’s state television channel. The sermon in question was delivered at Qatar’s state-controlled Grand Mosque that holds up to 30,000 worshippers and is named after the founder of Wahhabism, the strict form of Islam that predominates in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

According to a translation by MEMRI, Hawwas used a formulation then that was quite similar to his remarks this past week: “Oh, Allah, increase the pressure You exert upon the plundering Jews. … Count them one by one, and kill them to the very last one. Do not spare a single one of them. Oh, Allah, disperse them. Oh Lord, freeze the blood in their veins.”

Qatar invited Hawwas back at least three subsequent times to speak at the Grand Mosque, with at least two of those occasions being broadcast again on local television.

According to MEMRI, in the same series of 2013 remarks in which Hawwas told the pro-Hamas TV station al-Quds, “If only Hitler had finished them off, thus relieving humanity of them,” he called Jews “the slayers of the prophets” and proclaimed that “wickedness, trickery, and deception are ingrained within them. The Jews – with only few exceptions – have a natural disposition toward treachery.”

Even so, the Qatar Foundation expressed high praise for him when announcing one of his appearances at the Education City Mosque earlier this year.

The Foundation issued a press release this June stating that “the Qatar Foundation… is organizing a group of religious lectures during the blessed month of Ramadan presented by an elite group of Islam’s most prominent scholars in Education City Mosque,” noting that an English translation and local transportation would be provided. The press release clarified that this “elite group of the most prominent Muslim scholars includes His Excellence Sheik Dr. Omar Abdelkafi, His Excellence Sheik Dr. Aidh al-Qarni, and His Excellence Sheik Dr. Tariq al-Hawwas.”

Qarni made headlines last week for publicly endorsing terrorist knife attacks against Israelis while on a speaking tour in Qatar and is alleged to have previously declared that “throats must be slit and skulls must be shattered” during a sermon praising Hamas. Omar Abdelkafi has reportedly proclaimed that Muslims should refuse to shake hands with Christians or to share sidewalks with them; he also derided 9/11 as a “comedy film” and the Charlie Hebdo attacks as its “sequel.”

Hosting such extremists is unfortunately part of a broader trend, both at this mosque and at other top Qatari religious establishments.

Obama’s speech is expected to focus on reforms for women. But the Education City Mosque, which opened only in March, hosted an inaugural event featuring Saleh al-Moghamsy, a cleric who has previously declared that “Allah created woman as an ornament in the eyes of men” and that Osama bin Laden died with more sanctity and honor in the eyes of God than any “Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, apostates, or atheists” because he was a Muslim, not an “infidel.” Moghamsy’s March appearance was promoted by the Qatar Foundation on social media, carried live on local television, and described by articles in the Foundation’s newspaper and on its website.

In addition to Hawwas, Abdelkafi, Qarni, and Moghamsy, the mosque has hosted several other preachers with a record of propagating religious intolerance, such as Mohammed al-Arifi, Salman al-Oudah, and Abdulaziz al-Fawzan. All three of these preachers’ appearances were promoted on the Qatar Foundation’s Twitter account.

Fawzan, a Saudi preacher with a record of fiery intolerance toward Shi’ites, spoke at the mosque only a week after the Islamic State carried out a bombing in Saudi Arabia that killed twenty-two Shi’ite worshippers and injured over 100. On the day of his lecture, there was another such attack.

Invitations to intolerant speakers by several of Qatar’s prominent venues have even raised concerns among some of the microstate’s closest supporters.

On the same day as Hawwas’s hateful lecture last week, Al Jazeera English aired an interview with Qatar’s foreign minister in which its interviewer asked, “what are people supposed to make of Qatar when a nonviolent poet, Mohammed al-Ajmi, is locked up there for fifteen years for simply reciting a poem that the government didn’t like, while a Saudi preacher, Saad bin Ateeq al-Ateeq, is invited into Doha’s Grand Mosque and onto Qatari state TV to say that Christians, Jews, Alawites, Shi’as should be destroyed? You arrest the poet, but not the preacher of hate.” Upon repeated questioning the minister revealed that Ateeq has since been banned from Qatari state television.

Unfortunately, that commitment only goes so far. Ateeq made virtually identical remarks from the Grand Mosque in years past, but it took public exposure of his January remarks to elicit the recent ban. Further, it appears that Ateeq has been allowed back into the country at least twice since then. In July he gave a lecture at the mosque in Katara, a district of the capital devoted to showcasing Qatari culture.

Ateeq evidently visited again in October, reportedly meeting officials from a Salafist charity founded by a member of the royal family. Within a day after the charity announced it met with Ateeq, Qatar’s police academy posted a video to its Facebook and Instagram pages that it identified as a clip of Ateeq lecturing its students with the school’s chairman attending. The school was founded by Emir Tamim in 2013. It is legally subordinated to the Interior Ministry, which has hosted Ateeq before.

When Michelle Obama addresses the Qatar Foundation’s education summit, will she address the extremism in her midst?

David Andrew Weinberg is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on Twitter @DavidAWeinberg