Doha Is the New Paris

By Rich Lowry

Thursday, December 11, 2025

 

Literary exiles flocked to Paris in the 1920s, drawn to its literary scene.

 

Draft dodgers headed to Canada during the Vietnam War.

 

A splinter faction of social conservatives left for Franco’s Spain in the 1970s, believing it offered a superior cultural model.

 

Now, if Tucker Carlson has anything to say about it, a little gas station of a kingdom in the Persian Gulf will be added to the list of those previous destinations for seekers and malcontents — Qatar.

 

It must be said that Carlson isn’t moving there, but he’s buying property as a gesture of defiance and freedom.

 

What the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood of Paris was to James Baldwin — who represented a different generation of literary exiles in the 1950s — perhaps the West Bay or the Pearl Island in Doha will be to Tucker Carlson.

 

It’s passing strange that a self-styled defender of Western civilization and scathing critic of the persecution of Christians would find so much to like about Qatar, which is not part of the West and suppresses Christianity (apostasy from Islam is illegal, and so is proselytizing for a non-Islamic faith, while public worship is restricted for non-Islamic faiths).

 

Also, it doesn’t make sense for a free man making a stirring statement about freedom to do it by cozying up to an unfree country like Qatar.

 

In fact, Qatar is as inapt a location for making such a statement . . . as Russia (although Doha’s grocery stores are probably even better than Moscow’s).

 

For a pro-Western defender of Christianity who loves freedom, buying property in Qatar in 2025 is, on the surface, as senseless as James Baldwin, say, renting an apartment in Johannesburg in 1956.

 

The Freedom House summary on Qatar says:

 

Qatar’s hereditary emir holds all executive and legislative authority and ultimately controls the judiciary. Political parties are not permitted, and public participation in the political arena is extremely limited. While Qatari citizens are among the wealthiest in the world, most of the population consists of noncitizens with no political rights, few civil liberties, and limited access to economic opportunity.

 

Most of us don’t read that and instinctively say, “That’s the country for me!”

 

So, what’s going on? What’s the appeal (besides any financial inducements, which Carlson denies he’s taking)?

 

Well, Qatar hates Israel, is hostile to Judaism, and rejects small-l Western liberalism root and branch. Now, if you put it that way, Qatar begins to sound much more alluring — idyllic even — if you are of Tucker Carlson’s persuasion.

 

We’ve all heard of the horseshoe theory, where extremes on the left and the right meet on common ground. This is plainly evident regarding populist economics, but there’s an anti-Israel horseshoe, too.

 

The radical left hates Israel on “anti-racism” grounds — Israelis are settler colonialists and white, or “white.” The woke right hates Israel on purported patriotic grounds — it is undermining our national interest and distorting our politics.

 

There is apparently a civilizational element of this horseshoe as well. Both Tucker Carlson and the Qataris consider Judaism inimical to their faiths and their most abiding beliefs, even though Carlson is supposedly a defender of Christian civilization, and Qatar is a fierce advocate for its version of Islamic civilization, up to and including backing jihadists.

 

And if that hostility to Judaism is as important to you as (or maybe more than) any of your other priorities, then, of course, when you’re interviewing the prime minister of Qatar and tell him you’re buying property in the country, you don’t add, “And, by the way, my friends and I are planning on having a Bible reading down at the local park on Sunday morning. That’s okay, right?”

 

Such impertinence is reserved for true enemies like a conservative senator from the state of Texas, not an ally like a high-ranking official of an Islamic state.

 

This last point gets to a deeper commonality, which is an aversion to Western liberalism. Tucker Carlson is a most unusual figure in that he is a Christian admirer of sharia law. The early appeal of fascism was said to be that it could make the trains run on time; the appeal of Islamic law for Carlson is that it can keep the streets clean.

 

Never mind that Islam is not a religion that is part of the Western tradition; that sharia doesn’t partake of any of the assumptions of Western law as it has developed for a thousand years or more; or that Islamic states like Qatar systematically discriminate against Christians and other non-Muslims.

 

Carlson will make a big deal of Israel accidentally striking a church in the course of the Gaza war, but the country that believes in de jure discrimination against Christians? Well, it’s beautiful there this time of year.

 

The aforementioned Russia is another country that Carlson puffs up, and it, too, is illiberal and hostile to the West.

 

All this just speaks to how deeply disaffected Tucker Carlson is with the West as it exists now and its course over the last 80 years or maybe more. It says it all that he is much more prone to attack Winston Churchill than the emir of Qatar.

 

For pilgrims and dissenters, the embrace of a place outside America with a different culture and different system always involves an implicit, and often explicit, critique of America.

 

So it is with Carlson and Qatar. The kingdom may trample on basic human rights, but it is orderly, illiberal, and not in any danger of being talked into becoming allies with Israel by the Jewish lobby.

 

What’s not to like?