Qatar's masked ball

Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, who was the emir of Qatar for 18 years, until 2013, once shared his philosophy on life in his small country with an interviewer from CBS' famed "60 Minutes" current events program -- a willingness to talk to everyone: "They [the Americans] didn't like our relations with Iran, with Hamas, with Hezbollah. But maybe if you go to the other side, the Iranian, they don't like to see our relation with Israel. Hamas, they don't want to see our relation with Israel. So it's ... completely mixed."

"Don't you think this is a good policy for a small country-" the emir asked the interviewer.

Until this week, Qatar -- currently ruled by Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani -- managed to enjoy the best of all worlds. But after Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates announced this week that they were severing diplomatic ties with it, Qatar might be forced to choose more carefully whether it wants to have its cake or eat it.

For years, Qatar's foreign policy was a lesson in opportunism. The country -- home to 350,000 citizens and 2.3 million foreign laborers, which sits on some 25 billion barrels of oil reserves and also owns some of the world's largest natural gas fields -- kept all the balls in the air, waltzing with the wolf of terrorism while flirting with the Western democracies that are hunting that wolf.

Qatar has signed enormous weapons deals worth billions with the U.S., in effect underwriting the American weapons industry. It built large bases for the U.S. military within its territory, a kind of deterrence against the Iranian superpower, its neighbor to the north. At the same time, it still shares one of the biggest natural gas deposits in the world -- South Pars -- with Iran, and is fostering good relations with the Islamic Republic.

Until 2009, Qatar maintained diplomatic relations with Israel, and still keeps up informal ties, while also consistently funding the Hamas terrorist group in the Gaza Strip to the tune of $100 million a year. The annual financial support does not include special disbursals such as the hundreds of millions of dollars transferred to Hamas political leader Khaled Mashaal in 2013, or to the Muslim Brotherhood after the movement and its president, Mohammed Morsi, were ousted from power in Egypt.

Israeli security officials believe that some of that money was used by Hamas to construct attack and smuggling tunnels and acquire the rockets it has been firing at Israel for years. That didn't stop Qatar from trying to step into the role of the mediator at the end of Operation Protective Edge in 2014, an attempt that Israel and Egypt torpedoed.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

For years now, Qatar has provided a haven for exiled members of the Muslim Brotherhood after they lost their grip on various places, especially those from Egypt and Syria. Qatar's Al Jazeera network has been promoting the Muslim Brotherhood agenda for years.

Qatar is quartering Sheikh Yousuf al-Qaradawi, one of the leading religious mentors of the Muslim Brotherhood, the same man who used to talk about "the coming occupation of Europe," the man who celebrated in Tahrir Square in Cairo when former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was ousted. But it is also hosting the quadrennial World Cup soccer tournament in 2022. Britain's Daily Telegraph paper claimed that Qatar secured the World Cup by bribing FIFA officials with a payoff of $2 million. It wants to host the 2024 Olympic Games, as well.

The tiny country's investment fund manages close to $210 billion. It invests in buying successful soccer franchises worldwide, in profitable banks, and in well-known fashion retailers. And it invests in politicians. Qatar openly supported Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton for U.S. president, and donated $1 million to the Clinton Foundation. Qatar is also sheltering former Knesset member Azmi Bishara, founder of the Balad Party, who fled Israel after suspicions arose that he had aided and abetted Hezbollah during the 2006 Second Lebanon War.

Until recently, Salah al-Aruri, head of Hamas' international bureau, also called the Qatari capital of Doha home. This week, he decamped to Turkey. Al-Aruri is openly trying to operate Hamas terrorist cells in Judea and Samaria, encourage their activity there, and establish a rocket-launching infrastructure in the West Bank. He was one of the founders of the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas' military wing, and has admitted that Hamas was behind the kidnapping and murder of three Jewish teens in Gush Etzion in June 2014.

In recent years the Al Jazeera network has provided extensive coverage of human rights issues in neighboring Arab states or in "looted Palestine," but has refrained from touching on the issue in the context of Qatar itself, where it is illegal to criticize the regime.

Qatar and its rulers' ties to the more radical terrorist organization, its consistent support of the Muslim Brotherhood and its fingers in pies all over the world allow it to simultaneously act the part of the mediator who is called in to solve crises. Sometimes it's the rational Dr. Jekyll, and sometimes it's the dark Mr. Hyde. Qatar's links to terrorist groups also allow it to put pressure on them, and play the part of the savior.

According to various reports, some of which have been confirmed by western intelligence officials, Qatar used to support not only terrorism by Hamas, but also Islamist terrorist organizations in Libya, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, including Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (formerly the Nusra Front) and al-Qaida. Qatar, which maintains relations with Iran, also used to be in contact with the Taliban, which had offices in Doha, and even with Hezbollah. Qatar openly backed Hamas, but nevertheless did not refrain from interfering with Hamas' biggest Palestinian rival -- Fatah. Qatar had a hand in the last PA election, and embraced Fatah officials Jibril Rajoub and Marwan Barghouti, who is serving five life sentences for terrorist activity.

Qatar's web of contacts with the most extreme terrorist groups in existence allowed it to try and help Lebanon secure the release of Christian religious leaders being held in prison by the Islamic State in Syria. Qatar successfully engineered the release of 16 Lebanese soldiers who were being held by Jabhat Fateh al-Sham in exchange for the release of a few jihadi terrorists who were in prison in Lebanon.

According to researchers from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Qatari mediation led to the release in 2014 of an American citizen and a few Greek Orthodox nuns who were being held captive by Jabhat Fateh al-Sham in Syria.

Qatari efforts also freed an American military officer from Taliban captivity, and a Swiss citizen who was being held captive by a group identified with al-Qaida. In another case, Qatari intervention extracted five nurses and a Belgian doctor from prison in Libya, where they had been sentenced to death on the charge of infecting hundreds of children with the HIV virus.

An end to playing both sides of the field

However, there is plenty of proof of how deep Qatar's ties to terrorism run. Egyptian intelligence has claimed more than once that terrorist attacks are planned out on Qatari soil. Egypt claims that the mass casualty suicide bombing at the main Coptic church in Cairo last Christmas was planned in Qatar, and Egypt says that the bombing was carried out by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic State together in an attempt to shake up the regime of Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi.

There is more evidence of Qatari involvement in terrorism from other places. Last May, the Saudi newspaper Okaz published information on a meeting between Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman Al Thani and Ghasem Soleimani, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force, which helps execute terrorist attacks all over the world.

John Hannah, who served as an adviser to former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney on Middle East affairs, wrote an article in the U.S. journal Foreign Policy in May accusing Qatar of inciting to the murder of Americans in Iraq and providing money and weapons to Islamist terrorist groups in Syria.

Hannah even claimed that Qatar offered safe haven to al-Qaida terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, believed to be one of the masterminds of the 9/11 attacks. Hannah said that the terrorist was offered haven after the U.S. served an indictment against him for his involvement in the first attempt to blow up one of the twin towers in 1993.

Documents published by Wikileaks also point to strong Qatari ties to terrorism, and show that Qatar sheltered Sheikh Mohammed at one time. Messages from the American Embassy in Qatar published on Wikileaks supposedly prove that the Americans basically knew about Qatar's role in funding terrorism and proved apathetic to it, both under President George W. Bush and during both of President Barack Obama's terms. Is President Donald Trump the one behind the decision of seven Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, to cut ties with Qatar? Is he the one who decided to put a long overdue end to Qatar playing both sides of the field-

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