July 10 (Bloomberg) -- So, it hasn’t been the best week for
Al Jazeera, the television network owned by Qatar’s despotic
ruling family, for the same reason that it hasn’t been a great
week for the despotic ruling family itself: the ouster of
Egypt’s president, Mohamed Mursi, the bumpkin fundamentalist.
Qatar pumped a lot of money into Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood
government, and for what? The Qatari royal family should sue the
Brotherhood for malfeasance. So much hope was riding on Mursi’s
experiment in political Islam. Although Qatar spreads the risk
around a bit -- it has provided millions of dollars to Islamists
in Syria and to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas (now
there’s an investment in the future) -- Mursi represented its
main chance to advance the cause of Islamic fundamentalism.
