Report: Al Jazeera Paying for Exiled Muslim Brotherhood Leaders’ Hotel Rooms

Al Jazeera officials are keeping quiet following reports that the Qatari-owned news organization is funding hotel suites for the exiled senior leaders of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.

Following the ouster of Muslim Brotherhood-backed President Mohamed Morsi in July, many of the Islamist organization’s high ranking officials fled to Qatar, where they are now being hosted by Al Jazeera, according to theWashington Post.

“Several of the [Brotherhood’s] exiles are living temporarily in hotel suites paid for by Qatar’s state-run Arabic satellite network Al Jazeera—and it is in those suites and hotel lobbies that the future of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and, more broadly, the strategy and ideology of political Islam in the country may well be charted,” the Postreported Wednesday.

Al Jazeera and Al Jazeera America officials have kept quiet following the report, declining to respond to multiple requests for comment from the Washington Free Beacon.

Experts said the entanglement reflects the ongoing problems that Al Jazeera—and particularly Al Jazeera America—faces as both a news gathering organization and official arm of the Qatari government, which also funds the Muslim Brotherhood.

“It’s a channel dedicated to the Muslim Brotherhood,” said terrorism expert and Foundation for Defense of Democracies scholar Khairi Abaza. “They fund the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s their anchor. So this is natural.”

…

Abaza said that while Al Jazeera could have helped the Muslim Brotherhood official “in a more discreet” way, “this is what it is. They do it and they don’t care. And the Muslim Brotherhood doesn’t care as long as they’re getting what they want.”

…

“Qatar is the ATM of the Muslim Brotherhood movement and its associated groups. And Hamas is of course a splinter of the Muslim Brotherhood,” former U.S. Treasury Department terrorism finance analyst Jonathan Schanzer said to the Free Beacon in August.

Read the full article here.