Qatar, the country that funds Hamas and harbors its leadership, has paid U.S. universities nearly a billion dollars since 2021 — including many of the same universities that have turned a blind eye as their faculty and staff take the side of terrorists attacking Israel.
Qatar has only 300,000 citizens, making it half the size of the District of Columbia. Yet, rich with oil money and intent on shaping global politics, it showered more money on American universities than any other country, according to a Daily Wire analysis of disclosures that colleges are required to make to the U.S. government.
Its funding totaled $842 million between 2021 and April 2023, vastly outpacing interests linked to mammoth countries like Germany, China, Japan, and England.
Qatar’s university beneficiaries include the likes of George Washington University, where someone this week projected giant text on the wall of the school library saying “Glory to our martyrs,” “Free Palestine from the river to the sea,” and “Divestment from Zionist genocide now.”
George Washington University’s president issued a vague statement saying the “projections on the university’s library violated university policies,” but did not say whether it would divest from the $521,000 it took from Hamas’ benefactors since 2021.
While the universities have often weighed in on perceived injustices in the United States, such as the death of George Floyd, they have often been slow to take a stance on the conflict in the Middle East after Hamas terrorists killed thousands of Israelis in the largest Jew-killing since the Holocaust.
In that way, they have mirrored Al Jazeera, Qatar’s state-funded media that often parrots liberal criticism of the United States — even though it is flagrantly disingenuous since Qatar is a conservative religious fundamentalist country that outlaws homosexuality and exploits minorities for slave-like labor — in addition to opposing Israel.
Beneficiaries also include Harvard, at $4.4 million. Thirty Harvard groups wrote that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
In January 2021, Qatar gave Bard College, a private liberal arts college in New York, more than $4 million to bring Palestinian students to campus and instill a “strong sense of civic engagement.”
“The objective of the Qatar Scholarship – EAA and Al Quds Bard College program is to provide marginalized Palestinian youth and adults, refugees and students from historically underserved communities with access to high-quality US-accredited and Palestinian-accredited undergraduate and graduate education,” Bard said in government disclosures.
Bard entered into an agreement with the Al Quds university over “complaints from some American Jews unhappy because Al Quds is a Palestinian institution partly in Jerusalem — which many Jews consider the indivisible capital of Israel — and because Al Quds is no stranger to radical Palestinian politics,” the New York Times reported in 2009.
Qatar has paid six universities to open campus outposts inside the country, where Qatari students can graduate with U.S. diplomas and U.S. students can study abroad to absorb the nation’s values.
Those universities include Northwestern University, known for its journalism school — a prime way for shaping public opinion — and has received $647 million since 2007. Students at the Illinois campus distributed a fake newspaper that falsely claimed that Israel had bombed a hospital.
Qatar overtly tried to use the financial relationship to essentially turn American students into unregistered foreign lobbyists. On Instagram “faculty and Staff members at NU-Q published a statement condemning the war crimes and genocide committed against Gaza.”
“We further call on university staff, students, and faculty in Evanston to put pressure on our administration to apologize for its recent ill-conceived one-sided statements and to join us in pressuring the Israeli state to end its war on Gaza and pressure the US government to block all weapons shipments and military funding to Israel,” they wrote.
Some seemed to take heed. Keira Leneman, an assistant professor in the education school, excused students from class to take part in a protest and said she wished she could join them against “Israeli oppression and apartheid.”
Nabil Alshurafa, a Northwestern professor, said on CNN that, “This is Israel performing genocide on the Palestinian people.”
Another with a foreign campus is Virginia Commonwealth University, a public school which has received a quarter-billion dollars from Qatar since 2002. Nearly 1,000 professors and students signed a petition urging VCU not to condemn Hamas’ terrorist attack, saying any condemnation would violate “values of diversity, equity, inclusion.”
Though at first glance this might seem to convey that Virginians held this belief, it was actually largely because the partnership with Qatar allows people at that campus to claim association with the state university. Signatories overwhelmingly came from the Qatar campus, or “VCUQ,” and included:
- Rola Khayyat, Assistant Professor, VCUQ
- Aissa Deebi, Associate Professor, VCUQ
- Michael Perrone, Assistant Professor, VCUQ
- Peter Welz, Assistant Professor, VCUQ
- Mariah Dekkenga, VCUQ Family
- HH Hiaasen, Assistant Professor, VCUarts
- Hana Al-Saadi, Adjunct Professor, VCUQ
- Zainab AlShibani, Alumni, Teaching Assistant , VCUQ
- Habeeb M. Abu-Futtaim, Junior Faculty, Artist in Residence, Alumni, VCUQ
Yet their views also permeated the undergrad campus in Virginia as well, where a student was filmed ripping down posters of kidnapped Israeli children.
Other universities which have effectively licensed their names to Qatar include Cornell, which has received $443 million since 2021 for a school of medicine; Texas A&M University; Carnegie Mellon; and Georgetown University, where students held a vigil for terrorists. All have received hundreds of millions of dollars since the partnerships began.
Money from Qatar since 2021
- Cornell University: $443 million
- Texas A&M University: $182 million
- Carnegie Mellon University: $150 million
- Virginia Commonwealth University: $40 million
- Georgetown University: $7 million
- Bard College: $4.7 million
- Harvard University: $4.5 million
- George Mason University: $2 million
- Stanford University: $1.8 million
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