Qatar, the Israel-Hamas War, and the Corruption of U.S. Higher Education
(All with the help of the mainstream media)
In 2020, the U.S. Department of Education released a study on undisclosed foreign donations to universities to address noncompliance with reporting requirements. Qatar came out at #1, having donated over $2 billion to various institutions between 2014–2019. Complicating this reporting is the fact that Qatar hosts satellite campuses of several American universities at its Doha-based Education City, which include Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, and even public institutions such as Texas A&M.*1 Northwestern University’s prestigious Medill School of Journalism boasts a state-of-the-art campus there, despite Qatar’s known assaults on free press. But it would be fair to say that if the Qataris use some of this money to maintain those campuses in Doha, it might be considered an investment in their own infrastructure.
Why should this matter in the context of the reporting on the Israel-Hamas conflict? Because since the outbreak of the war, Qatar has been in the news as one of the principal negotiators in the brokering of a ceasefire deal to have the Israeli hostages kidnapped to Gaza released in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. Mainstream news has presented Qatar’s role as that of a neutral mediator attempting to act in the best interests of both Israelis and Palestinians. But nearly a year into the war, those negotiations appear to have gone nowhere.
What this narrative has conveniently omitted is that Qatar has gladly housed Hamas leadership in its luxurious hotels (between their travels on private jets) during the entirety of the war. As Hamas’s leadership hid away from the dangers that they created 1200 miles away from the land they have been charged with governing for the last 17 years, their lower-level peons carried out the October 7th massacres that started the war. Nearly a year later, they continue to use Gazan civilians as human shields during the IDF’s ground invasion while many of their leaders are nowhere to be found.
Shortly after the war started, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) and NCRI released a study suggesting that universities in receipt of foreign donations from authoritarian regimes have higher rates of antisemitic incidents than those that do not. It’s important to note that while some of the foreign donations are reported as coming directly from the countries’ governments, the vast majority are private donations from unidentified donors. For whatever reason, the Department of Education does not mandate disclosure of the specific donor names; universities are simply required to report the amount, the country of origin, and whether or not the donation is governmental or private. A complete search by institution can be found here.
Another interesting fact is that at first glance, the list of foreign countries with the highest donation totals does not appear to contain mostly authoritarian regimes; in fact, the country currently #2 to Qatar is England. The list of top-10 countries also includes Bermuda. Why would Bermuda, a relatively tiny nation widely known as a tax haven, donate such significant amounts of money to U.S. universities? Why would England, which already has its own robust university system in which to invest its treasure, be #2? Could it be that, most likely, much of the money from non-authoritarian countries is really just from offshore accounts owned by the same wealthy dictatorships on this list?
What would be the American response if, say, Afghanistan decided to donate billions to U.S. institutions while actively hiding the leaders of al-Qaeda after the attacks of 9/11? Qatar has voluntarily sheltered the leaders of an organization whose attacks over a single day killed more than 12x of the target country’s population proportionally to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in the United States. As a result thousands of civilians, both Israeli and Palestinian, are now dead or in danger. The sheltering of top-level Hamas officials during this conflict makes Qatar an accomplice in these crimes. The United States should regard them as an enemy state no different than Afghanistan during the aftermath of 9/11.
What the Qatari government is doing — and doing so effectively with the help of the international press and the West’s most prestigious institutions — is a form of image laundering in their attempts to avoid criticism for their various abuses, not the least of which is their support of Hamas’s top leaders. Qatar is not a neutral actor, and the western press should not be reporting on them as if their actions are genuine attempts to broker peace between the parties in this conflict. They have deliberately entangled themselves with western institutions as a way to shield themselves from this criticism.
All of this is easy enough when the western actors in this story believe they are performing a public service as opposed to sanctioning a dictatorship. Northwestern University’s administrators have described their Medill School of Journalism campus on Al Jazeera’s turf as having “the potential to transform a whole society” in a place where “freedom of expression abuts tradition and religion at every corner.” The last year has featured journalistic coverage of the Israel-Hamas War dominating every mainstream news outlet day and night while antisemitic incidents throughout the West, especially on college campuses, have risen considerably.
The international press seems obsessed with reporting on this war while conveniently omitting key details about other regional actors keeping this machine going. This pattern appears to be a feature, not a bug. The stewards of American higher education must acknowledge their own role in this charade.
In early 2024, the Texas A&M Board of Regents voted to shut down its Qatar campus by 2028.
This is so corrupt and no one in the West has the guts to delve in to and report on this. They’re probably worried about getting their heads whacked off.
This piece is short sighted.
Qatar is the most importantly US ally in the Middle East. We have a huge ground and air presence there and it is, for all practical purposes, home of US Central Command, the largest of
American combatant commands.
And that US military presence in Qatar, across a narrow
Persian Gulf from Iran, is the biggest thing that stands between Iran and Israel. Add to that the substantial U.S. Navy presence in Bahrain. All of this is critical to America’s several critical allies in the region, of which Israel is one.
One would think Americans would welcome the initiative taken by some of our finest universities to impart Western thought and democratic values to this key ally. Every country in the region, including Israel, could benefit from such a U.S. educational presence, purely secular.
Perhaps Israel could elect to host several US Air Force squadrons and a division of ground forces to make this defense easier while perhaps slowing Israeli territorial expansion?
Finally, the United States has an array of very complex interests in the Middle East. All are important. Israel is important, but it is one among several and it is critical that all of us Americans recognize that.