Senior US policy and security experts have called for greater enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) as well as other measures to promote transparency in foreign funding to counter the war of widespread influence the Qatari regime is waging against US citizens and others around the world.

“Qatar: U.S. Ally or Global Menace?” — a conference on the Gulf state’s “malign influence” that was hosted by Middle East Forum think tank in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 6 — addressed the revelations in recent months of unprecedented Qatari lobbying, cyber espionage, and disinformation efforts on American soil, including a historically large government-led hacking operation that reportedly affected more than 1,500 people in 20 countries.

“Money talks. It’s part of Qatar’s way of hedging and influencing everyone, their soft power,” said counter-terrorism expert Ronald Sandee, a former senior analyst for the Dutch Military Intelligence and himself an alleged victim of Qatari hacking. “Qatar has no real power, so they need soft power. How do you get soft power? You invest, you bribe, you work with people.”

“They go after everyone who is opposition, everyone who is with them – Muslim Brotherhood operators as well – and they are following a bunch of Arab soccer players,” Sandee said.

Sandee was joined on a panel discussion dubbed “Qatar’s New Influence War” by Oren Litwin, head of the Middle East Forum’s Islamist Money in Politics Project, and Jim Hanson, president of the Security Studies Group and a veteran of the U.S. Army Special Forces.