|
Qatar Tells American Universities to Fall in Line
After Hamas stormed Israel’s borders on Oct. 7, 2023 – and massacred more than 1,200 people – a liberal arts professor at Northwestern Univ. in Qatar went on radio and questioned whether Hamas had really murdered Israeli civilians. Professor Khaled Al-Hroub focuses on the Arab-Israeli conflict and previously hosted a weekly book review program on Qatar’s Al Jazeera for seven years.
When his American colleagues at Northwestern’s main campus near Chicago drafted a statement condemning him, the dean of the university’s Qatar campus refused to sign. The dean had reason to be careful. The Qatari foundation that pays for American universities to locate satellite campuses in Qatar’s capital city told American schools after Oct. 7 to stay “aligned and in touch.”
Universities that operate inside Qatar are bound by contract to obey Qatari law, where insulting the government is a crime. Georgetown Univ. even warns visitors to speak respectfully of Qatar’s ruler. Asked about the relationship, Georgetown’s president told Congress he was “very proud” of the alliance and defended Georgetown’s decision to give its highest medal to a member of the Qatari royal family that had publicly praised the mastermind of the Oct. 7 attacks.
Qatar’s Return on Investment
Qatar is the single largest foreign funder of American higher education, channeling billions to schools including Texas A&M, Cornell, Georgetown and Northwestern. Researchers found that Texas A&M alone was gifted more than $1 billion from a Qatari government foundation – much of it never properly disclosed to the federal government.
Texas A&M is one of the nation’s premier nuclear-engineering schools, helping manage the Los Alamos lab where U.S. nuclear weapons are designed. Under contract with the government-controlled Qatar Foundation the country owns all the research and intellectual property produced at the school’s Qatar campus. Experts warn that the technology could benefit Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Qatar fought in court for five years to keep the deal secret – and hundreds of millions of dollars went unreported to the federal government, despite a legal duty to disclose the payments.
Israeli ambassador to France Joshua Zarka recently called Qatar the “enemy of the Jewish people” for funding infrastructure – including American universities – that fuels anti-Jewish hate. Earlier this year, a federal judge warned that “Qatar and its affiliates could be a source of antisemitic influence” at Carnegie Mellon Univ. and that a “reasonable jury could find the university’s reliance on Qatari funding affected how it handled Jewish civil-rights complaints.” A former student at the Pittsburgh school filed a Title VI Civil Rights lawsuit for antisemitic harassment and retaliation.
Qatar’s reach is not limited to elite campuses. The Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development recently signed study-abroad deals with three Historically Black Colleges and Universities – Hampton, Xavier of Louisiana and Prairie View A&M – to bring their students to Doha’s Education City. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee recently warned that foreign influence in schools is driving young evangelicals away from the Jewish state.
Many of these revelations came from a U.S. House committee report, The Rise of Radical Antisemitism on College Campuses. One of the report’s conclusions is that Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has “consistently acted as ringleaders for the antisemitic harassment faced by Jewish students on campus.”
Qatari Money Helped Build the Anti-Israel Campus Activist Movement
Groups like SJP present themselves as the conscience of idealistic students – a grassroots, organic movement. They are not. SJP was founded by Hatem Bazian who also started American Muslims for Palestine. AMP is tied to organizations that U.S. federal courts found helped fund Hamas – the same terror group that Qatar funds. The campus movement that celebrates Hamas is tied to the same network. Researchers at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) found that where funding from Qatar and other Gulf Arab countries pours in, SJP chapters tend to follow.
| 
