Azmi Bishara..Qatar's intellectual puppet

CAIRO 19 June 2017: Known for his close relationship with the Qatari royal family, Azmi Bishara, a former member of the Israeli Knesset (the unicameral parliament of Israel), was the perfect link for converging the point of views between Doha and Tel Aviv, according to Qatari Leaks website.

Azmi Bishara, was born in 1957 in the city of Nazareth, in the Northern District of Israel. In high school, Bishara joined Rakah, the Israeli Communist Party, which implicitly recognizes the right of the Israeli presence on the Arab land. He was then elected a member of the Knesset in 1996.

In 2007, Bishara fled Israel on charges of having a relationship with Hezbollah during the 2006 Lebanon war, according to the Israeli newspaper “Haaretz”. Submitting his resignation from the Knesset to the Israeli consul in Cairo, he then settled in Doha.

In Qatar, Bishara led the Qatari media plan to spread chaos, through Al Jazeera channel, founded by the former Emir Hamad bin Khalifa in 1996, one year after his coup against his father Sheikh Khalifa Al-Thani, to divert attention from the coup and attack all Arab regimes and interfere in their affairs.

After Tamim bin Hamad came to power as the Emir of Qatar, following his father’s, Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, abdication on 25 June 2013, Bishara’s power increased, and according to the website “Qatari Leaks”, he started to give advice to the Amiri Diwan (the governmental headquarters of Qatar), as well as consultations to some of the Qatari media. He currently runs Doha-based Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, a research center funded by Qatar since 2010.

In January 2015, a new television network called “Al-Araby Al-Jadeed” was launched and Bishara was set to head the new Qatari funded TV channel, which was meant to compete with Al Jazeera.

The Qatari opposition coalition in Geneva published a document, on 28 May 2017, of an edict by the Prince of Qatar, Tamim Bin Hamad, to appoint the Palestinian Bishara, who also holds the Israeli citizenship, as an adviser to the Amiri Diwan at the rank of a minister.

Azmi Bishara, who was once leading inciting campaigns against the Arab countries through Al-Jazeera TV screens, realized that his battle was over, after everyone discovered the ugly face of Qatar, so he announced his retirement from politics, which viewed by some as a confession of his service for the Qatari regime for years.

On 3 June, Bishara announced on his Twitter and Facebook accounts his retirement from political work and devoting himself to writing and research as he claimed.