Netanyahu Warns of China, Qatar Buying Western Media
Plus, on political violence in the U.S., an update
China and Qatar are influencing Western media against Israel, Prime Minister Netanyahu is warning.
Netanyahu made the point directly in recent days.
On Monday September 15, speaking to a delegation of visiting state legislators from the U.S. that organizers described as the largest delegation of American legislators to ever visit Israel, Netanyahu said that there is an “active effort to erode” U.S. support for Israel.
“We will have to do several things to break loose from this siege that is organized by a few states. One is China, and the other is Qatar. And they are organizing an attack on Israel, legitimacy, in the social media of the Western world and the United States. We will have to counter it, and we will counter it with our own efforts,” Netanyahu said.
(Another transcript of the comments had them as, “we also know that there is now an attempt to impose a blockade on Israel, by various bodies and by various countries, led by Qatar. First of all, a media blockade, a media blockade that is financed with huge money, both by Qatar and by other countries like China, and they are also operating in the West and no less so in the US.”)
The prime minister sounded a similar theme at an annual conference of Israel’s finance ministry, according to an account published September 15 in Globes, an Israeli business newspaper:
“Countries like Qatar and China are investing huge sums to influence Western media with an anti-Israel agenda," Netanyahu said. "This puts us in a kind of isolation." According to the Prime Minister, Israel will have to spend a lot of money to improve its image in the face of the well-funded campaigns against it.
Netanyahu did not provide specifics. However, for example, one Washington-area consultant was paid a $180,000 monthly retainer by the embassy of Qatar for services that included contacting media personality Tucker Carlson on February 26, 2025, in connection with Carlson interviewing the prime minister of Qatar on the topic “War With Iran? The Prime Minister of Qatar Is Being Attacked in the Media for Wanting to Stop It.”
And Qatar has been sending “reporters” from a network it controls, Al Jazeera, to pester pro-Israel senators such as Tom Cotton.
Other publicly reported media-related spending by Qatar and China has had less clear outcomes. The North Road Company, led by media executive Peter Chernin, in January 2023 announced a $150 million investment from the Qatar Investment Authority. When Substack announced $100 million in Series C funding in July 2025, it said the investment round had been co-led by The Chernin Group. A China-based fund, Zhen Fund, was one of the earliest Substack investors.
The Qatar Investment Authority also said earlier this month that it had invested in Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company that developed “the Claude family of AI models.”
The Trump administration has been negotiating with China about a forced sale of TikTok that is required by a U.S. law passed in response to congressional concerns about Chinese influence on that video platform.
Netanyahu also attributed some of the moves against Israel by European governments to the influence of extremist Muslim minorities. “Western Europe has large Islamist minorities. They’re vocal. Many of them are politically motivated. They align with Hamas, they align with Iran. They pressure the governments of Western Europe, many of whom are kindly disposed to Israel, but they see that they are being overtaken, really, by campaigns of violent protest and constant intimidation,” the prime minister said to the visiting U.S. legislators.
Critics will doubtless assert that Netanyahu is pointing at the influence of Qatar and China as a way to deflect blame from what the prime minister himself has described as “the public diplomacy damage” stemming from the war in Gaza and Israel. That may be, but some of the outlets controlled by Qatar or with ties to China were pumping out or algorithmically amplifying anti-Israel content well before the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023 that led Israel to take military action against terrorists in Gaza.
Yet the view about Qatar’s malevolent influence is widely held in Israel across the political spectrum. Even Tal Becker, a vice president of Israel’s center-left Shalom Hartman Institute and a longtime Israeli peace negotiator and legal adviser—not at all a Netanyahu apologist or cheerleader—this morning described Qatar as “an engine for Muslim Brotherhood ideology” and “quite toxic.” He said, “putting a light on that is helpful.”
Political violence: The September 10 post here titled “Political Violence Comes to America, Again” was written on a tight deadline and not intended to be a comprehensive listing of cases. However, two cases that I omitted then do seem worth adding.
A July 15, 2025 press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota describes “the stalking and murders of Minnesota House of Representatives Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark Hortman, the stalking and shooting of Minnesota State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette Hoffman, and the attempted shooting of their daughter Hope Hoffman” as “targeted political assassinations.” The man charged has pleaded not guilty.
And in April 2025, Nicholas Roske pleaded guilty to attempting to murder Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh.
Most- and least-religious U.S. states: The Pew Research Center has posted an online infographic that shows the 50 states and the District of Columbia ranked in terms of “overall religiousness,” “religious attendance,” “belief in God,” and “frequency of prayer.” There are a wide range of responses, and there’s significant correlation between the answers and the political leanings of the states. Here’s the link, for those interested.
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