Qatar: lots of big, shiny buildings and rich sheiks, but actually a cesspool

David Blair and Richard Spencer at the UK Telegraph go into hair-raising detail on how the tiny Mideast nation is abetting jihad.

It's behind Libya's descent into failed-state status, for instance:

Qatar, the owner of Harrods, has dispatched cargo planes laden with weapons to the victorious Islamist coalition, styling itself "Libya Dawn".

Western officials have tracked the Qatari arms flights as they land in the city of Misrata, about 100 miles east of Tripoli, where the Islamist militias have their stronghold. Even after the fall of the capital and the removal of Libya's government, Qatar is "still flying in weapons straight to Misrata airport", said a senior Western official.

So it is that Qatar buys London property while working against British interests in Libya and arming friends of the jihadists who tried to kill one of our ambassadors. A state that partly owns 1 Hyde Park, London's most expensive apartment block, and the Shard, the city's tallest building, is working with people who would gladly destroy Western society. 

There are other recipients of Qatar's support:

Take Syria, where Qatar has been sponsoring the rebellion against Bashar al-Assad's regime. In itself, that policy places Qatar alongside the leading Western powers and much of the Arab world.
But Qatar has deliberately channelled guns and cash towards Islamist rebels, notably a group styling itself Ahrar al-Sham, or "Free Men of Syria". Only last week, Khalid al-Attiyah, the Qatari foreign minister, praised this movement as "purely" Syrian.
He added that its fighters had suffered heavy losses while combating the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), the group behind the murder of David Haines, the British aid worker, and which is holding John Cantlie and Alan Henning hostage.
Far from being a force for moderation, Ahrar al-Sham played a key role in transforming the anti-Assad revolt into an Islamist uprising. Its men fought alongside Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaeda affiliate, during the battle for Aleppo and they were accused of at least one sectarian massacre.
Instead of fighting Isil, Ahrar al-Sham helped the jihadists to run Raqqa, the town in eastern Syria that is now the capital of the self-proclaimed "Caliphate". This cooperation with Isil happened for some months until the two groups fell out last year.
Last December, the US Treasury designated a Qatari academic and businessman, Abdul Rahman al-Nuaimi, as a "global terrorist". The US accused him of sending nearly £366,000 to "al-Qaeda's representative in Syria", named as Abu Khalid al-Suri.
Suri has also been a senior commander of Ahrar al-Sham. If America was right to describe him as "al-Qaeda's representative", then there was an overlap between the leadership of the two groups.

Mr Nuaimi is also accused by the US treasury of transferring as much as $2 million per month to "al-Qaeda in Iraq" and $250,000 to al-Shabaab, the movement's affiliate in Somalia. Mr Nuaimi denies the allegations, saying they are motivated by his own criticism of US policy. 

It definitely knows how to play both sides of the fence:

Last month, Gerd Müller, the German international development minister, implicated Qatar in the rise of Isil. "You have to ask who is arming, who is financing Isil troops. The keyword there is Qatar," he said.
Yet a state endowed with large reserves of gas and oil and one of the world's biggest sovereign wealth funds can wield immense influence, even over Berlin. Qatar was duly able to secure a formal withdrawal of this charge from the German government.
On Wednesday, the 34-year-old Emir of Qatar, who was educated at Harrow and Sandhurst, took pains to deny the accusation while standing alongside Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor. "What is happening in Iraq and Syria is extremism and such organisations are partly financed from abroad, but Qatar has never supported and will never support terrorist organisations," he said.
The credibility of that denial depends partly on how you define a "terrorist organisation". Qatar has let Hamas, the armed Palestinian movement, base its political leadership in Doha since 2012. Qatar's government has funded Hamas and the previous Emir paid an official visit to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip in 2012.
As a small country with relatively weak armed forces and 250,000 citizens, Qatar is trying to guarantee its security by reaching in every direction. As well as providing an office for Hamas, Qatar also hosts the forward headquarters of US Central Command and the al-Udeid military airbase, serving as the hub for all American air operations in the region.
Qatar has not completely ignored the concerns of its Western allies. When it transferred surplus arms from Libya to rebels in Syria, Qatari officials weeded out any surface-to-air missiles, in obedience to America's demand to prevent the supply of this particular category of weapon.

But Qatar's willingness to support extremists has caused private dismay. "It's a puzzle and, to be honest, it's a distasteful one," said a former Western official who has dealt with Qatar. 

What a pickle Western civilization finds itself in.  There is no way, for a variety of reasons, it can extricate itself from this region, this den of cutthroats, but maneuvering through the web of double-crossing is as daunting a foreign-policy challenge as it's ever been faced with.

It would help if we Westerners had a leader interested in at least trying.