What explains the unprecedented antisemitism in Australia unleashed on 7 October 2023? When you scratch below the surface, there is a frightening explanation.

Start with the Dr. Abu Muhammad, the Grand Mufti of Australia. On Tuesday, 10 October 2023, he posted a statement on Facebook about the Hamas invasion.

To the civilised world, these were crimes against humanity involving the deliberate targeting of civilians, mass indiscriminate killings, and hostage-taking of men, women, children, and the elderly, on a scale that demonstrated coordination and the intent to terrorise.

For the Grand Mufti, however, ‘the central issue at stake in this bloody iteration of violence’ was not Hamas because ‘resistance against tyranny is a legitimate right for any human being’. It was Israel that the Mufti accused of ‘brutality’. He called on the international community to ‘break free from its selective blindness’ and ‘stop repeating the same false claims about Israel’s right to defend itself’. Inspired by the slaughter, he waxed poetic declaring ‘the blood of the martyrs will smell of musk’.

These views echoed a statement by the Qatari Foreign Ministry on 7 October 2023 that said Israel was ‘solely responsible’ for the violence. No one should be surprised. Qatar is not a neutral mediator in the conflict in Gaza, it is Hamas’ banker. As for the Grand Mufti, he outed himself as a Hamas fan in December 2012 when he led a delegation of Australian sheiks to Gaza, where they met then-Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. The Mufti was so thrilled that he said, ‘We feel like we are on cloud nine; we feel like we are on top of the world.’

Months later, in April 2013, the Mufti went to Qatar to meet Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, designated a terrorist organisation in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Al-Qaradawi claimed he was a ‘moderate’, but his fatwa endorsing suicide bombings as a legitimate form of resistance against Israel gives you an idea of what sort of moderate.

The US, the UK and France banned Al-Qaradawi from entering their countries but that didn’t stop him from spreading his noxious views on Al Jazeera, Qatar’s state-sponsored media mouthpiece. Former Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, described Al Jazeera as ‘the best pulpit that accurately gives voice to our positions’. Fed up with its incitement to violence, Israel and the Palestinian Authority closed it down last year yet it still broadcasts in Australia on taxpayer-funded SBS.

In 2022, a study published by the National Association of Academics in the US showed that between 9/11 and 2021, Qatar donated $4.7 billion to US universities, becoming the largest foreign donor, funding which coincided with a dramatic increase in antisemitism on campuses.

In Australia, over twenty universities are engaged in collaborative projects with Qatari institutions. Professor Mohamad Abdalla, of the University of South Australia, for example, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Qatar University. As the Director of the Centre for Islamic Thought and Education he has contributed to curriculum development for Islamic education and established Islamic Studies programs in several Australian universities. His views have a trademark Qatari tone. An open letter that he coordinated in February 2024 decried ‘scholasticide and plausible genocide’ in Palestine, repeatedly condemned Israel over the war in Gaza and, in a textbook example of moral equivalence, called for the immediate release of Israeli and foreign hostages ‘detained in Gaza’ while calling for the release of ‘all Palestinian hostages abducted from Gaza… who are presently held under arbitrary detention in Israeli camps and prisons’. That this propaganda for Hamas, a terrorist organisation, has been signed by 1,273 people purporting to be academics is testimony to the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of Australian academia.

Against this backdrop, it is hardly surprising that we saw the creation of a hateful caricature called ‘Dutton’s Jew’ – at a Queensland University symposium on anti-racist research – who is ‘anti-immigrant’ ‘hates Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims’, ’thinks of antisemitism as the only form of racism’ and, horror of horrors, ‘promotes “Judeo-Christian” values’ and defends ‘Western civilisation and Australian culture’.

As if all this weren’t enough, Qatar has doubled its investments in Australia in the last two years, acquiring a 25 per cent stake in Virgin Australia (final approval by the Foreign Investment Review Board is scheduled for March/April).

Those hoping President Trump’s ‘revolution of common sense’ might extend to the Middle East have been disappointed. Trump’s hostage envoy – hotel developer Steve Witkoff – is frighteningly naive about Qatar. Shortly after he participated in the Qatar Economic Forum, the Qatar Investment Authority acquired Witkoff’s Park Lane hotel, of Monopoly board fame, for $623 million. Did that create a conflict of interest? Who knows, but Witkoff said of Qatar, that the state was ‘really impressive’ and ‘the hotels here are magnificent’.

No doubt Khaled Mashal, leader of Hamas’ diaspora office in Doha would give the hotels a five-star rating on TripAdvisor. Perhaps Witkoff could ask Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the mastermind of 9/11 and 31 other terrorist attacks including the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. In the 1990s, KSM was employed in Qatar’s Ministry of Electricity and Water while he flew around the world organising terrorist attacks and was tipped off by the Emir of Qatar before the FBI could arrest him.

When Trump wants to hear common sense, he should listen to Yigal Carmon, founder and president of the Middle East Media and Research Institute, who has the melancholy privilege of having publicly predicted, on 31 August 2023, the launching of a war on Israel in September or October 2024 by its terrorist neighbours.

Carmon says the biggest mistake that Israel made was to delude itself that it could buy peace with Hamas by allowing Qatar to fund it. Since 2012, Qatar lavished $1.5 billion on Hamas. This delusion fuelled a deadly complacency. ‘We Israelis thought we could buy Hamas, but we didn’t buy anyone,’ Carmon observes bitterly. ‘Instead, Netanyahu sold out our lives and our security.’

The most extraordinary delusion however is the United States locating its largest Middle East Air Force base in Qatar. Carmon has pointed out repeatedly that all the US has to do to secure the immediate release of the Israeli hostages is tell Qatar that unless Hamas hands them all over the US will move its base to a genuine ally such as the UAE. (The base protects Qatar’s ruling family from overthrow.) Once the hostages are freed, the US must move.

The reality is that super-rich Qatar, even more than its ally Iran, is the worst state sponsor of terrorism. It should be an international pariah.

In the face of this deadly complacency, even by those whose people have suffered the most – the US and Israel – it is hardly surprising that Australia has shown no leadership in cutting ties with Qatar. Yet the record shows that those who turn a blind eye to its creeping Islamism pay a terrible price sooner or later.