Elements close to Qatar criticize its apparent ‘normalization’ with Israel
When Israeli athlete Alexander Shatilov won a gold
medal at the Artistic Gymnastics World Cup in Doha, Qatar, in March, the
Israeli national anthem was played and the Israeli flag flown.
This sparked outrage in the Arab media and on Arab
social networks, including among Qatari media figures, some of them employed by
the Qatari state press and the state-owned Al Jazeera channel.
These figures wrote, in articles and especially on
Twitter, that any display of normalization with Israel was wrong and a stain on
Qatar’s honor.
The International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS)
issued a statement which was, unusually, critical of Qatar’s policies. The
statement did praise Qatar for supporting the Palestinian cause, but slammed it
for allowing displays of normalization with Israel in sports competitions held
on its soil, clarifying that such normalization contravened Islamic law.
The IUMS was founded by Sheikh Yousuf Al-Qaradawi,
who also headed it until recently. Al-Qaradawi lives in Qatar and is close to
its regime, and the Qatari state supports his IUMS.
A tweet by Al Jazeera commentator Jamal Rayyan where
he defended Qatar’s hosting of the Israeli athletes sparked furious responses
from Qatari journalists and social-media users. They rejected all normalization
and accused Rayyan of hypocrisy because in the past he has spoken against
normalization.
