As President Trump continues his whirlwind trip of the Middle East, inking multiple business deals with countries including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, concerns are mounting among experts who caution that human rights issues such as religious persecution and the threat of Islamist terrorism should not be overlooked by the White House.

On Tuesday in Riyadh, Trump announced a “$600 billion commitment from Saudi Arabia to invest in the U.S.,” signing “an agreement covering energy, defense, mining and other areas” with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In addition, the U.S. agreed to terms for selling the Saudis an arms package worth almost $142 billion. The agreement “covers deals with more than a dozen U.S. defense companies for areas including air and missile defense, air force and space, maritime security and communications.”

The deals were signed without any mention by the Trump administration of the human rights concerns that persist in Saudi Arabia. A 2023 report from the U.S. Department of State details a laundry list of “significant human rights issues,” including extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, torture, and “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by government agents,” among many other issues. In 2018, Saudi journalist and bin Salman critic Jamal Khashoggi, who at the time worked as a columnist for The Washington Post, was murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. Investigations later found that bin Salman had ordered the killing.

In addition, freedom of religion is virtually nonexistent in Saudi Arabia. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom reports that “the public practice of any religion other than Islam is prohibited, and no houses of worship other than mosques are allowed in the kingdom.”

On Wednesday, Trump arrived in Qatar, where he met with Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani and announced a $200 billion deal in which Qatar will acquire 160 Boeing jets for Qatar Airways. The arrangement comes despite Qatar’s extensive ties with the terrorist group Hamas, with the country being described as Hamas’s “most important financial backer and foreign ally.” Since 2012, Qatar has hosted Hamas’s political bureau in Doha and has given the terrorist group at least $1.8 billion.

Middle East experts like Dr. A.J. Nolte, who serves as director of the Institute for Israel Studies at Regent University, are expressing serious qualms about the increasingly close relationship that the Trump administration is forming with Qatar.

“I am more than a bit concerned,” he conveyed during “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” Tuesday. “[T]he Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism program in Oxford has done studies of Qatar and has basically estimated that they’ve spent about $1 billion funding anti-Semitic and anti-Israel bias on U.S. campuses. … [I]n addition to [their] supporting [of] Hamas and every other Muslim Brotherhood-aligned organ they could think of, Al Jazeera Arabic [funded by and based in Qatar] has basically been the platform and spokesperson for Hamas since the conflict started.”

Nolte continued, “Additionally, Qatar has also aligned itself in the past with [Turkey’s] Erdogan and [is] opposed to the other Gulf countries, to the point where they … blockaded Qatar for a long time because they were so antithetical to the interests of even our Gulf allies. So Qatar is a very dangerous country in many ways. They will try to have their cake and eat it too. I would be very cautious about trusting them.”

Nolte went on to highlight his unease about Trump’s business ties to the region. “One of the biggest concerns that I have about the Trump administration is there [are] a lot of folks with ties and investments and things like that in Qatar. Now, I understand business is business, but keep in mind that business and politics are separate, and that somebody who might be a good business partner when you’re investing isn’t necessarily a loyal ally with the United States. I think we’ve learned this lesson painfully about China in the past decade, and we need to not forget that lesson as we engage with Qatar.”

Experts are pointing to another potential pitfall exemplified by the $400 million Boeing 747 that Qatar has reportedly offered to the U.S. as a gift, which Trump is insisting is not a gift to him but “to the United States Air Force/Department of Defense” which “will be used by our Government as a temporary Air Force One, until such time as our new Boeings, which are very late on delivery, arrive.” As National Review has noted, the president has seemingly dispensed with his past caution about Qatar, having stated in 2017 that the country “has historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level. … The time [has] come to call on Qatar to end its funding — they have to end that funding — and its extremist ideology.”

Nolte echoed the concerns, urging Trump to decline the plane offer. “My advice to the president would be to say, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ It’s just too much entanglement. It’s too complicated. It raises too many questions. … [I]magine Democrats with the House Oversight gavel investigating this whole thing, and you could actually lose ground to them on national security. So I just wouldn’t touch it.”