By Richard Landes

It's easy to focus on ideology and lose track of money — but a lot of what shapes both the violence and the narrative around it traces back to a small number of extremely wealthy funders, particularly from Gulf states.

That funding pays for weapons and fighters, but it also pays for media influence, university programs, and messaging operations that shape how the whole conflict gets talked about in the West.

There's a useful comparison here: critics sometimes accuse pro-Israel advocacy groups of buying outsized influence over American policy.

Whatever you think of that claim, it's worth putting it next to the far larger, far less scrutinized scale of Gulf state spending on influence operations in Western media, academia, and politics.

One of these gets constant public scrutiny.

The other mostly doesn't.

Following the money doesn't explain everything about why this violence happens.

But it explains a lot about why certain stories get told, and certain stories don't.