by Giulio Meotti
Qatar has given 50 million euros to the Municipality of Venice “to meet the pressing needs of the city in managing a unique and extremely complex heritage, which transcends borders and represents a treasure for humanity”. This is the pact signed by the emirate with the Venetian administration.
A Qatari national pavilion will be created at the Gardens of Biennale. “The pavilion”, they say from the Municipality, “will ensure that Arab voices are represented among the nations present in the Giardini”.
We are talking about a country that has given a billion dollars to Islamist organizations, many in the West. 90-year concession and it is the first new Venetian pavilion since 1995.
Qatar’s influence on Europe can be felt from the Claridge Hotel to Al Jazeera to the 2022 World Cup, from hacking attempts to corruption scandals in Brussels. But there is one area that is very little explored: culture.
And only an ignoramus can fail to see the symbol: the Battle of Lepanto by Venice was the first major victory of a Western Christian army against the Ottoman Empire. Today they want to take over Europe with money and propaganda. And they certainly don’t hide it.
Just take a look at the website of Qatar Charity, the Emir’s NGO: “We have built 9,063 mosques around the world.” Hundreds of these in Europe, 140 in Italy alone, the country where the Emir invests the most.
In Italy, no one raises the issue.
A few years ago, the very weak prime minister Enrico Letta, visiting Qatar, called for the creation of an Islamic museum on the Grand Canal in Venice. Why not a mosque?
The book “Qatar – France, une decennie de diplomatie culturelle” tells how the emir paid for trips and awarded prizes to former ministers of culture and practically all the left-wing intelligentsia: philosophers, writers, journalists.
Le Figaro reported one of these extraordinary evenings: “Dozens of guests crowded into the Place de l’Étoile, at the Landolfo Carcano hotel, home to the Qatari embassy. In the gold-paneled rooms with mosaics and frescoes of languid nymphs, a total of 66 French cultural figures were decorated by Qatar. They all left with a check for 10,000 euros.”
Qatar has become the world’s largest buyer of art. The emir sponsored Damien Hirst and purchased Cézanne’s The Card Players for over 250 million. The highest price ever paid for a work of art. Qatar spends a billion dollars on works of art every year. To give you an idea, the Museum of Modern Art in New York invests 21 million dollars, fifty times less than the Islamic emirate.
A study revealed that from 2001 to 2021, American universities received 4.7 billion dollars from Qatar. These are not free gondola rides: this money is used to influence chairs, teaching subjects, to bring Islamization.
They will sell us submission as a form of inclusion.