In my latest piece, I wrote about western media’s imbalanced coverage of the recent crisis between Gulf states and Qatar.  There are, however, some balanced pieces about Qatar  that are worth reading:

First, here is Richard Spencer’s very detailed piece  published in Britain’s The Times Magazine

“It is this willingness to dally with all sides that has led to the recent rifts with its neighbours, and President Trump’s apparent preference for siding with them against the host of his own Central Command. Despite Qatari denials about terrorist funding, allegations of a relationship with al-Qaeda persist. As the group, now separate from Isis, grew prominent in Syria’s civil war through its local branch known as the Nusra Front, a similar pattern emerged. Its leader gave interviews to Al Jazeera. The group seemed suspiciously well funded – America alleged that some of the money was coming from an influential Qatari called Abdulrahman al-Nuaimi, who has connections with a human rights charity known as al-Karama. Despite his US listing as a terrorist fundraiser, a claim Nuaimi denies, he continues to operate in the country. Nuaimi is a past president of the Qatar Football Association, too: those circles remain small.”

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The second piece is by Gregg Carlstrom on Qatar’s based Al-Jazeera channel published in The Atlantic

“The climate changed in the summer of 2013, after the Egyptian army overthrew Mohamed Morsi, the elected Muslim Brotherhood president. On August 14, as security forces were brutally clearing a pro-Morsi sit-in, an Al Jazeera English presenter asked a Brotherhood spokesperson a valid question: why were women and children still present at a protest that would inevitably be targeted by the authorities? The anchor was almost immediately pulled off the air and reprimanded for being insufficiently sympathetic to the group. For months, she was barred from presenting the news and relegated to a pre-recorded chat show. There was also an internal struggle over how to cover that summer’s protests against Turkey’s Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.”

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