Qatar’s Election Interference in Israel is a Warning to U.S.

Is the Muslim Brotherhood using foreign money to interfere in our elections?

The close Israeli election was rocked by the arrest of seven Muslims, most of them activists with the Islamic ‘Ra’am’ or United Arab List’ party who were reportedly caught with envelopes containing tens of thousands of shekels that were allegedly being used to bribe voters.

At the same time, Central Elections Committee chair Noam Sohlberg, who is also a Supreme Court justice, asked the head of Israel’s domestic security agency, the Shin Bet, to investigate foreign funding reportedly coming from Qatar that fueled a record turnout by Muslim voters.

“Serious suspicions have been brought before me concerning improper influence on the elections through foreign funding provided by external entities acting against Israel’s interests,” Sohlberg said.

The real-world implications of this are easy to see as in some Jerusalem neighborhoods under Islamic occupation since the Arab Muslim invasion, occupation and attempted genocide of 1948, turnout shot up from 16% to 55% in one neighborhood and from 37% to 68% in another. In Umm al-Fahm, a major Arab Muslim settler city near Haifa, turnout went from 38% to 75%.

This led to record results for Ra’am, a branch of the Southern Islamic Movement, which, like Hamas, is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, and some of whose candidates have defended Hamas and celebrated Oct 7. While liberals have hailed Ra’am’s participation in Israeli politics as proof that coexistence is possible, like most Brotherhood operations, the group just functions as the political wing of a Muslim Brotherhood operation to take over Israel by any means.

The original military wing of the movement was Usrat al-Jihad. When that was broken up, Ra’am came under the wing of the Islamic Support Committee, which was shut down for supporting Hamas, and was replaced by Igatha 48: a non-profit where key figures support Hamas, and whose senior figure was one of those arrested in the alleged election bribery case.

Igatha 48 was supposed to have been dissolved after it was caught passing money to a Hamas operation in Turkey. The foreign funds used for election bribes came through Qatar and Turkey.

Qatar is a state sponsor of both Hamas and its Muslim Brotherhood parent organization.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has already described the election as stolen and the controversy serves Qatar’s interests. Either the left-wing anti-Netanyahu bloc forms a government with the support of the Muslim Brotherhood, giving Qatar a direct role in the Israeli government, or the Brotherhood is shut out, allowing Qatar and its agents of influence to paint Israel as an ‘apartheid state’. Either way, Qatar wins.

But Israel’s election interference crisis also serves as a warning for American elections.

The ‘Uncommitted’ strategy by Islamists seeking to gain leverage over the Democratic Party in the 2024 election mirrored the role that the Muslim Brotherhood plays in Israeli politics by using its minority status to impose a veto on liberal parties, alternately offering and denying them political support, in order to extract concessions and gain influence over them.

Muslim Brotherhood groups have benefited from foreign funding, including from Qatar, groom and fund political candidates, abusing mosques for voter turnout operations, and moving money between ‘charitable’ arms and  ‘political arms’… not to mention the terrorist arms. CAIR, linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, operates a PAC, the Unity and Justice PAC, an ‘Action’ arm, and a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and is an unindicted co-conspirator in terror funding.

Foreign money has been flowing into U.S. elections for some time due to the lack of oversight on non-profits that play political roles, as well as foreign investment capital coming into companies that enrich Muslim donors to PACs. The lack of regulation and enforcement in the United States puts it far more at risk than Israel is for foreign election interference from Qatar.

And we are not ready for it.

But there are things that we can learn from Israel about cutting off financial foreign influence.

A decade ago, Israel passed a law requiring non-profit NGOs that get at least half their money from foreign governments to disclose this fact. The media and international leftist groups campaigned against the law without ever being able to provide a good reason why they opposed having political non-profit groups disclose that they’re funded by foreign nations.

The Washington Post slurred the law, which had been passed by a democratically elected legislature, as “deeply anti-democratic”. The European Union, which had been funding many of these domestic anti-Israel groups, issued a statement, urging Israel to “continue to promote its active NGO sector and to refrain from actions which may complicate the space in which civil society organisations operate.”

Prime Minister Netanyahu, however, pointed out that the law “prevents an absurd situation in which foreign countries interfere in Israel’s internal affairs by funding organizations without the Israeli public’s knowledge.”

That same absurd situation however continues to exist in the United States where groups funded by China, the EU and Qatar are able to freely operate and interfere in our politics.

Israel began stemming the flow of foreign money being moved through non-profits while the United States has allowed not only the Muslim Brotherhood but also Communist China, to operate foreign funded non-profits in the United States. The lack of regulation and oversight means that we don’t know to what extent the Israeli election scenario could repeat in the U.S.

The Muslim donors behind Zohran Mamdani whose PAC, misleadingly named ‘American Priorities’, elected Islamist congressional candidates like Hisham ‘Adam’ Hamawy, a former translator for the Blind Sheikh terror leader, and Dariazila Avila Chevalier, who celebrated the Oct 7 attacks, has been making headlines because three of its key donors came out of AppLovin: an exploitative AI ad-tech surveillance company whose second-largest shareholder has reported ties to Communist China, show what kind of for-profit risks are possible.

And CAIR, whose Unity and Justice PAC, is also a key player, is getting its D.C. HQ financed by the Islamic Development Bank co-owned by Iran, Qatar and the Saudis, is also raising red flags.

While Israel copes with its foreign election interference crisis, it may be worth asking whether the record Muslim turnout in Dearborn, Michigan, which doubled from 2024, to back Abdul El-Sayed was wholly organic, and whether Qatari or any other foreign money played a role.

And what America can do to make sure that foreign enemy money stays out of our elections.