On December 11, Belgian police arrested Eva Kaili—one of the EU parliament’s fourteen vice-presidents—on charges of “criminal organization, corruption, and money laundering” involving accepting funds from Qatar. Such criminal involvement might explain why Kaili recently termed the Gulf emirate, which employs tens of thousands of foreign workers as virtual slaves under appalling conditions, a “frontrunner in labor rights.” The small monarchy’s efforts to buy influence in the West are extensive. And that’s not all, writes Fiamma Nirenstein:

For example, the chair of the European parliament’s subcommittee on human rights, Maria Arena, has now been forced to step down due to corruption accusations, and it is likely no coincidence that she has tweeted militant declarations of support for the Palestinians and vicious attacks on Israel. This is not simple avarice: it aids and abets an enemy of the West that is pursuing a grand strategy that is a threat to us all.

The most public aspect of this strategy is, of course, the Qatari network Al Jazeera, which has the facade of a legitimate news outlet, but is in fact a mélange of disinformation and incitement. [Moreover], Qatar has long supported terrorism. For decades, it has opened its doors to Islamist terrorists, Taliban warlords, and African insurgents who have taken innumerable innocent lives. Qatar also gave sanctuary and succor to the late Muslim Brotherhood leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi, along with a platform to spread his radical message to the entire Muslim world. This shouldn’t have been surprising, given Qatar’s longstanding support for the Brotherhood.

The leaders of the terror group Hamas, a branch of the Brotherhood, are regular guests in Qatar, and one of them, Ismail Haniyeh, has established permanent residence in hotels and villas worthy of a multimillionaire. Millions of Qatari dollars flow into Gaza, no doubt to be diverted towards terrorist purposes. Clearly, Qatar is playing the same game with Hamas as it did with the Taliban, which opened a political office in Doha and used it as a base to take back control of Afghanistan.

The U.S. has also credibly accused the Qataris of harboring members of Iran’s terrorist Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC).

Yesterday, the head of the Shin Bet—Israel’s internal security service—was in Washington meeting with officials from the State Department, CIA, and the White House itself. Among the topics no doubt discussed are rising tensions with Iran and the possibility that the latter, in order to defend its nuclear program, will instruct its network of proxies in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and even Iraq and Yemen to attack the Jewish state. Oved Lobel explores the history of this network, which, he argues, predates Iran’s Islamic Revolution—when Shiite radicals in Lebanon coordinated with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s movement in Iran:

An inextricably linked Iran-Syria-Palestinian axis has actually been in existence since the early 1970s, with Lebanon the geographical fulcrum of the relationship and Damascus serving as the primary operational headquarters. Lebanon, from the 1980s until 2005, was under the direct military control of Syria, which itself slowly transformed from an ally to a client of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The nexus among Damascus, Beirut, and the Palestinian territories should therefore always have been viewed as one front, both geographically and operationally. It’s clear that the multifront-war strategy was already in operation during the first intifada years, from 1987 to 1993.

[An] Iranian-organized conference in 1991, the first of many, . . . established the “Damascus 10”—an alliance of ten Palestinian factions that rejected any peace process with Israel. According to the former Hamas spokesperson and senior official Ibrahim Ghosheh, he spoke to then-Hizballah Secretary-General Abbas al-Musawi at the conference and coordinated Hizballah attacks from Lebanon in support of the intifada. Further important meetings between Hamas and the Iranian regime were held in 1999 and 2000, while the IRGC constantly met with its agents in Damascus to encourage coordinated attacks on Israel.

For some reason, Hizballah’s guerilla war against Israel in Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s was, and often still is, viewed as a separate phenomenon from the first intifada, when they were in fact two fronts in the same battle.

Israel opted for a perilous unconditional withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, which Hamas’s Ghosheh asserts was a “direct factor” in precipitating the start of the second intifada later that same year.