Steven Witkoff, the Trump administration’s official envoy who had past business ties to Qatar, sat down with Tucker Carlson, the former FOX News talking head turned Qatari apologist who had recently featured Qatar’s leader, to talk about how wonderful Qatar is.
“Sheikh Mohammed… is a good man,” Witkoff gushed.
“He certainly is,” Tucker Carlson agreed.
“He’s a special guy. He really is,” Witkoff said.
“In the case of the Qataris, they’re criticized for not being well motivated. It’s preposterous. They are well motivated. They’re good, decent people. What they want is a mediation that’s effective, that gets to a peace goal. And why? Because they’re a small nation and they want to be acknowledged as a peacemaker.” Witkoff said of a country that serves as a state sponsor of every Islamic terrorist group from the Taliban to Hamas, and which harbored the mastermind of 9/11.
Tucker complained that Witkoff was being attacked for working for Qatar by the “news media and social media.” The truth is that the news media praises Witkoff, he’s being condemned on social media.
Witkoff replied by defending Qatar. “I’ve had a couple of experiences where first I was attacked as being pro Qatari sympathizer. By the way, Qatar is a mediator here. They’re not a party to the conflict, they’re a mediator. So I am—how could I not collaborate with the mediator? And if I’m not collaborating with the mediator, I’m bound to be ineffective. It’s not even possible that I could do the job. I had to know everything that they knew. So that means collaboration.”
Qatar is not a mediator. It’s a state sponsor of Hamas and other Islamic terrorist groups. By collaborating with Qatar, Witkoff is by definition collaborating with Hamas.
Witkoff praised Biden envoy Brett McGurk. According to Witkoff, McGurk told him, “this is where I want to get to, Steve.”
And that’s what led to the first disastrous deal with Hamas.
Tucker Carlson then lied that this approach of appeasing Islamic terrorists was “so different from the posture that the last couple of generations of diplomats have taken, which is like, here’s what we want. Shut up and do it. And I just don’t think, leaving aside moral considerations, I don’t think it’s been very effective.”
In reality, trying to win over terrorists is exactly what Bush, Obama and Biden did.
And it never worked.
Tucker knows it. He’s talked about it back when he wasn’t acting like an employee for the Gulf Muslim oil states.
Tucker Carlson then lied that Qatar are “often accused, almost universally accused in the US Media of being agents of Iran.” In fact the media bends over backward and promotes anything that Qatar and its Al Jazeera media outlet say. There’s virtually no criticism of Qatar in the media here. Tucker knows it. He’s propagandizing for Qatar to his conservative audience by making it seem like it’s at odds with the media.
In reality, the media is in Qatar’s pocket.
“They’re a Muslim nation. In the past, they’ve had some views that are a little bit more radical,” Witkoff claimed. “From an Islamist standpoint than they are today, but it’s moderated quite a bit. There’s no doubt that they’re an ally of the United States. There’s no doubt about that.”
Tucker agreed with Witkoff at every turn about how wonderfully moderate Qatar is.
Witkoff told Tucker that he had never spoken to Hamas, but “I think you have to trust the Qataris. If I didn’t trust the Qataris, then that would be really problematic, not meeting with Hamas.”
After the Qatari propaganda, Witkoff and Tucker turned to Hamas.
Witkoff then made an argument for the UN’s 15-20 year reconstruction plan for Gaza.
“What’s acceptable to us is they need to demilitarize. Then maybe they could stay there a little bit. Be involved politically. But they can’t be involved militarily. We can’t have a terrorist organization running Gaza because that won’t be acceptable to Israel,” Witkoff said.
So from a starting point of expelling Hamas and Gazans, we’re now down to Hamas getting to be “politically involved” in running Gaza as long as it goes through some show of disarming.
“You know, what we heard in the beginning of this conflict is Hamas is ideological. They’re prepared to die for a whole variety of reasons,” Witkoff told Tucker. “I don’t think that they are as ideologically locked in. They’re not ideologically intractable. I don’t. I never believe that.”
The contention that Hamas is not really ideological and is willing to make a deal was a feature of both the Bush and Obama administrations.
“Smart. Smart. That is total. That is smart. But it’s. How hard was it to come to that conclusion?” Tucker cheered.
The rest of the conversation essentially had Tucker Carlson channeling the Saudi line, claiming that “looming over all of these countries and their remarkable success both economically and socially, there’s like great countries, in my opinion is the conflict in Gaza. And not just Gaza, but the idea that, wow, this could all blow up tomorrow because we don’t know what the Israeli plan is.”
During the conversation, Tucker repeatedly demonstrated that he knew nothing about the region except whatever the Saudis and whoever else in the Gulf oil states was feeding him, leading him to say at one point that, Turkey’s “Erdogan is seen by some in his country as a tool of Israel.” In reality, Erdogan recently threatened war against Israel and praised Hamas.
Tucker claimed “that the conflict in Gaza, which is of course streamed in everyone’s iPhone, a lot of people killed in Gaza, a lot of kids. And that’s inflaming the populations of some of these countries again, specifically Egypt and Jordan.”
Tucker complained to Witkoff that the ‘two-state solution’ has become controversial.
Witkoff said that “the Israelis going in is in some respects unfortunate and in some respects falls into the “had to be” bucket. It kind of had to be. Hamas was not responding. And their responses were unreasonable.”
Then Witkoff recycled most of the Bush/Obama calls for “real elections in Gaza”.
That’s how Hamas took over Gaza in the first place.
One of Tucker’s parting remarks to Witkoff was, “I hope for our sake you wind up in Tehran.”
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