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Qatar’s War for Young American Minds Eli Lake

Published

9 months ago

October 24, 2023

A student at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar. The emirate has spent billions encouraging top U.S. colleges to build campuses on its “education city.” (Photo via Qatar Foundation)

Right now, senior leaders of Hamas, the perpetrators of the worst atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust, are huddled in Qatar. They’ve been there for years. But American foreign policy has turned a blind eye. Why? One reason might be that for the last 25 years, this small, energy-rich state has pumped billions into America to purchase influence and good favor.

The Qataris have spent their lavish fortune at American law firms, on lobbying contracts with former senior officials, and on junkets and partnerships with big media companies. The biggest recipients of Qatari largesse, though, have been major universities and think tanks.

The numbers are staggering. According to a 2022 study from the National Association of Scholars, Qatar today is the largest foreign donor to American universities. The study found that between 2001 and 2021, the petrostate donated a whopping $4.7 billion to U.S. colleges. The largest recipients are some of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning. These schools have partnered with the regime to build campuses in Doha’s “education city,” a special district of the capital that hosts satellite colleges for American universities:

Since 1997, Qatar has donated more than $103 million to Virginia Commonwealth University for a fine arts campus.

Since 2001, Qatar has donated $1.8 billion to Cornell for a medical school.

Since 2003, Qatar has donated nearly $700 million to Texas A&M for an engineering campus.

Since 2004, Qatar has donated $740 million to Carnegie Mellon University for a computer science campus.

Since 2005, Qatar has donated $760 million to Georgetown University for a school of politics.

Since 2008, Qatar has donated nearly $602 million to Northwestern University for a school of journalism.

One might expect that scholarly institutions that have benefited from this autocracy’s money would rethink their partnership after Qatar’s foreign minister said that “Israel alone is responsible” for the pogrom perpetrated by Hamas terrorists. Or after Qatar’s prime minister on Friday declined to close the office Hamas maintains in its capital. But these universities have given no indication that they will end their profitable partnership with Qatar.

All but one university on the list declined to comment on the future of their Doha campuses when contacted by The Free Press. Kelly Brown, a spokeswoman for Texas A&M, gave the following statement:

Maintaining relationships with countries like Qatar serve a broader purpose, including fostering international dialogue and cooperation. Texas A&M’s relationship with Qatar is focused on educational and research activities, which contribute to the academic and intellectual development of both countries. That, in turn, hopefully will one day lead to peaceful resolutions rather than conflict.

She added that Texas A&M has clear and transparent agreements with Qatar that accord with U.S. and international laws. “No public funds are spent toward the Qatar campus,” she said.

Texas A&M building in Qatar. (Photo via Qatar Foundation)

In the last 25 years the universities have justified these joint ventures with Qatar as a way to liberalize an autocratic society and bring American soft power to the Middle East. Indeed, Qatari officials have themselves given lip service to this goal.

In 2015, Hunter R. Rawlings III, who was Cornell’s president when it opened its medical school in “education city,” told The Washington Post: “Part of our thinking was, most American involvement in the Middle East has to do with guns and oil. This project seems to have to do with medicine and education. It’s such a different message. Why don’t we try it?”

The reality, though, is much different. Many of these schools have had to compromise their values on their campuses in Doha. For example, in 2014 Qatar censored Love Comes Later, a romance novel set in London and Qatar by Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar, an English professor at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Doha campus.

In some cases, the universities cooperated with Qatar’s strategic interests. The Qatar campus of Northwestern, whose U.S. journalism school is ranked as one of the best in the world, signed a memorandum of understanding with Al Jazeera, the Qatari-funded news channel that has provided a sympathetic platform for Hamas and other Islamist groups over the years, to help train its reporters.

In 2013, Sheikh Ahmed bin Jassim al-Thani, then director general of Al Jazeera, said of the new partnership: “Al Jazeera Network places the development of its team’s skills at the top of its priorities, to stay par with the great media-related feats Qatar has accomplished regionally and internationally.”

But are Northwestern’s interests really aligned with Qatar? Al Jazeera aired a weekly program hosted by Muslim Brotherhood cleric, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, between 1996 and 2013. al-Qaradawi was denounced by the Anti-Defamation League in 2013—the same year that Northwestern signed its agreement with Al Jazeera—as the “theologian of terror.” In one 2009 sermon aired on the network, he said: “I will shoot Allah’s enemies, the Jews, and they will throw a bomb at me, and thus I will seal my life with martyrdom.”

In 2015, Stephen Eisenman, who was then president of Northwestern’s faculty senate, concluded in a report on his school’s Doha campus that professors there enjoyed only “limited academic freedom.” He said this was not so much because professors feared the state’s strict censorship regime, but because they lacked tenure and were answerable only to the dean of Northwestern’s Qatar campus.

Eisenman also acknowledged that “the ethics of establishing a campus in an authoritarian country are murky, especially when it inhibits free expression, and counts among its allies several oppressive regimes or groups.”

That glancing reference to Qatar’s alliance with Hamas and Iran is the only mention of the state’s funding and support for political Islam. Eisenman concludes that countries that export oil and natural gas are bad for the environment, and are often marred by “social and racial inequality.” Not to worry. Eisenman notes, “those characteristics describe the United States no less than Qatar and don’t prevent Northwestern from maintaining campuses in Evanston and Chicago.”

Eisenman, now an emeritus professor, declined an interview request. In an email he told me, “Now more than ever, we need sincere efforts to achieve rapprochement between Muslims and Jews and between Palestinians and Israelis. If universities can help with this by means of educational exchanges, then I am all for them.”

Charles Asher Small, executive director of the Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism and Policy, told me the funding of universities by Qatar is part of a much larger effort to exert soft power in the West. His institute estimates that the regime holds between $750 billion to $1 trillion worth assets throughout the world. “They are investing in major Fortune 500 corporations, Heathrow Airport [in London], the Empire State Building,” he said.

One reason why Qatar has been able to invest so much in American institutions is because U.S. foreign policy has embraced the country since the war on terror began after 9/11. Even though Qatar is aligned with Hamas, and to a lesser extent, Iran, it also hosts the Al Udeid Air Base. The Qataris are an important interlocutor between America and Iran. After President Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, Qatar agreed to process more Afghan refugees than any other Arab ally. Today Qatar holds the $6 billion in Iranian oil revenues that America unfroze in September and refroze after the October 7 Hamas pogrom.

One of Qatar’s soft power aims is to advance the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement that spawned Hamas and the ruling party in Turkey. According to a 2021 analysis from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Qatar funds the International Union of Muslim Scholars, the clerical arm of the Brotherhood. In 2017 Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates imposed a trade and travel embargo on Qatar in response to its support of the Muslim Brotherhood. Doha’s embrace of political Islam is one factor that distinguishes it from its Gulf Arab neighbors who turned on the movement after the Arab Spring in 2010 and 2011.

Small, of the Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism and Policy, said one consequence of Qatar’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood in its soft power operation abroad was to make Israel toxic in Western political and intellectual discourse. “Their soft power is aimed at demonizing Israel as well as promoting anti-Western and anti-Democratic discourse to weaken the West. Antisemitism is the fuel to light that fire,” Small said.

Northwestern’s campus in Qatar. (Photo via Northwestern University)

If colleges think doing business with Qatar is worth the risk, they should pay closer attention to the story of the Brookings Institution.

Until 2021, the highest profile recipient of Qatari money in Washington was the Brookings Institution. In 2013, it received a four-year, $14.8 million grant to establish the Brookings Doha Center. Brookings received another four-year grant in 2017 from Qatar, but the exact amount is unknown. The think tank doesn’t provide the precise amount its foreign patrons provide. In 2021 the institute ended its relationship with the Doha Center, claiming it was focusing in the future on “digital and global engagement.”

The closing of the Doha Center overlapped with an FBI investigation into retired Marine general John Allen, who was the president of Brookings between November 2017 and June 2022. Allen was forced out when the Associated Press disclosed the probe into Allen’s unregistered lobbying for Qatar. According to court papers, Allen pressed the White House to oppose the Saudi-led diplomatic blockade of Qatar, which the Trump administration initially supported. In January, the Justice Department closed the investigation into Allen and brought no charges.

While Brookings has ended its relationship with Qatar, other think tanks remain on the take. According to a 2020 report from the Center for International Policy, the Stimson Center has also received Qatari funding.

In 2022, the Stimson Center received $615,000 from the Qatari Embassy for a program described as “protecting people.” Caitlin Goodman, a spokeswoman for the center, would not tell me whether it was reconsidering its relationship with Qatar. “The integrity and independence of Stimson scholars and their research is central to the trust that policymakers and the public put in our work,” she said. “Our work does not reflect the views and motives of any individual funder.”

The challenge of foreign adversaries funding our universities is not limited to Qatar.

On Monday, House Select Committee on China Chairman Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) warned leaders at top American colleges the Chinese Communist party was exerting “coercive influence” on campuses all over the country. According to Fox News, Gallagher warned dozens of university presidents to be clear-eyed about the Chinese threat.

“The question—as I see it—is how do we respond in a way that preserves our free and open society—including our higher education system with all its natural strengths—while maintaining our moral, intellectual, and financial integrity?” Gallagher asked. His question applies not only to China. It should also be asked of the universities that have partnered with a country that protects the leaders of Hamas and makes deals with Iran.

Eli Lake is a Free Press columnist and host of The Re-Education podcast. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) at @EliLake. Read his last Free Press piece “Delusion in the White House. Bloodshed in Israel.”

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Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

11 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Substacks

TGIF: The Week Unburdened by the Week That Has Been Suzy Weiss

Published

18 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Pro-Palestinian protesters gather outside of Union Station to protest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States. (Probal Rashid via Getty Images)

Oh, no, it’s the sister again, for another slow news week. Let’s get to it.

→ Biden dropped out: Six years ago emotionally, but technically this past Sunday, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. He did it via X and promptly threw his support (and cash) behind Vice President Kamala Harris. Then he got Covid and hunkered down in Delaware—or depending on what hooch you’ve been drinking, died and was reanimated so he could appear before the cameras on Wednesday to address the nation. Joe’s family, including Hunter, sat along the wall of the Oval Office as he spoke. The president talked about the cancer moonshot, ending the war in Gaza, putting the party over himself, and Kamala’s tenacity, as Kamala’s pistol dug ever-so-slightly harder into his back. Right after, Jill, the First Lady of passive aggression, who apparently wanted to outdo her heart emoji, tweeted a handwritten note “to those who never wavered, to those who refused to doubt, to those who always believed.” I respect a First Lady who stands by her man and her energetic stepson. A First Lady who sees the high road way up there and says to herself, “If they want us out of here so bad, they can clean out the fridge and strip the beds themselves!”

→ Kamala is brat, Biden is boots, please God send the asteroid today: I’ve learned the hard way—and by that I mean my parents once asked me what “WAP” meant—that certain things should never be explained with words. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it embarrasses everyone.

That’s how I feel about the whole Kamala-is-brat thing. Brat is a good album about partying and getting older and having anxiety that was released earlier this summer by Charli XCX. But it’s since been adopted by too-online and very young people as a personality, and by Kamala Harris’s campaign as a mode to relate to those very young people. Her campaign is leaning into the whole green look of the album to try and win over Gen Z, and generally recasting her many viral moments—“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” “I love Venn diagrams” “What can be, unburdened but what has been”—as calling cards. It’s like when Hillary went on Broad City, only this time more cringe.

And now we have Jake Tapper and Greg Gutfeld grappling with the “essence” and the “aesthetic” and overall vibe of brat girl summer. We used to be a serious country. We used to make things.

Here’s the thing about Kamla: she is hilarious and campy, but unintentionally so. Any goodwill that her goofy dances or weird turns of phrase garner should be considered bonus points, not game play. Was there ever any doubt that Fire Island would go blue? We’ve been debating whether Kamala’s meme campaign is a good move for her prospects in the Free Press Slack, and here I’ll borrow from my older and wiser colleague Peter Savodnik: “There is nothing more pathetic than an older person who cares what a younger person thinks is cool.”

→ Boomer behavior: While Kamala’s campaign is being run by a 24-year-old twink with an Adderall prescription, J.D. Vance’s speechwriter seems to be a drunk Boomer who just got kicked out of a 7-11. Vance, appearing this week at a rally in Middletown, Ohio, riffed, “Democrats say that it is racist to believe. . . well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too.” Crickets. Horror. Major “Thanks, Obama” energy. There was also a bit on fried bologna sandwiches and a lot of “lemme tell you another story.” The guy is 39 but sounds older than Biden.

Fresher, 35-to-60-year-old blood is exactly what we’ve been begging for. Let the Boomers boom, let the Zoomers zoom. Kamala and J.D.: act your age.

Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

22 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Momentum continues to build behind Vice President Kamala Harris to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, and the national narrative as a whole has shifted.

Democrats appear to be generating significant enthusiasm among younger Americans. Yesterday, for the first time in their history, the March for Our Lives organization endorsed a presidential candidate: Kamala Harris. Students from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, organized March for Our Lives after the shooting there in 2018. Executive director Natalie Fall said that the organization “will work to mobilize young people across the country to support Vice President Harris and other down-ballot candidates, with a particular focus on the states and races where we can make up the margin of victory—in Arizona, New York, Michigan, and Florida.”

Andrea Hailey of Vote.org announced that in the 48 hours after President Biden said he would not accept the Democratic nomination, nearly 40,000 people registered to vote. That meant a daily increase in new registrations of almost 700%.

People are turning out for Harris in impressive numbers. In the hours after she launched her campaign, Win With Black Women rallied 44,000 Black women on Zoom and raised $1.6 million. On Monday, around 20,000 Black men rallied to raise $1.2 million. Tonight, challenged to “answer the call,” 164,000 white women joined an event that “broke Zoom” and raised more than $2 million and tens of thousands of new volunteers.

Another significant endorsement for Harris came yesterday from Geoff Duncan, the Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, who wrote on social media: “I’m committed to beating Donald Trump. The only vehicle left for me to do that with is the Democratic Party. If that requires me to vote for, speak for, or endorse [Kamala Harris] then count me in!” Duncan’s public announcement offers permission for other Georgia Republicans to make a similar shift. In 1964, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond similarly paved the way for southern Democrats to vote for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

Harris’s appearances are generating such enthusiasm from audiences that when she delivered the keynote address this morning at the convention of the American Federation of Teachers in Houston, Texas, the applause delayed her ability to begin. After a speech defending education and calling out the cuts to it in Project 2025, Harris ended by demonstrating that after decades of Democrats being accused of being anti-American, Trump’s denigration of the country has enabled the party to claim the position of being America’s defenders.

“When we vote, we make our voices heard,” Harris said. “So today, I ask you, AFT, are you ready to make your voices heard? Do we believe in freedom? Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it? And when we fight, we win! God bless you and God bless the United States of America.”

Today the Commerce Department reported that economic growth in the second quarter was higher than expected, coming in at 2.8%, thanks to higher spending driven by higher wages. The country’s changing momentum is showing in media stories hyping the booming economy Biden’s team tried for years to get traction on. “Full Employment is Joe Biden’s True Legacy” was the title of a story by Zachary Carter that appeared yesterday in Slate; CNN responded to today’s good economic news with an article by Bryan Mena titled: “The US economy is pulling off something historic.”

With Harris appearing to have sewn up the nomination, the question has turned to her vice presidential pick. That question is fueling the sense of excitement as potential choices are in front of cameras and on social media advocating Democratic positions and defending the United States from Trump’s denigration. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro listed the economic gains of the past years, and said: “Trump, you’ve got to stop sh*t talking America. We’ve got to start standing tall and being patriotic and showing how much we love this amazing nation.”

The vice presidential hopefuls appear to be having some fun with showcasing their personalities, as Minnesota governor Tim Walz did in his video from the Minnesota State Fair where he and his daughter went on an extreme ride. So are social media users who have dug up old videos of, for example, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg explaining how he would pilot a small starfighter that had lost its auxiliary shields, or Arizona senator Mark Kelly’s identical twin brother Scott pranking a fellow astronaut on the Space Station with a gorilla suit Mark smuggled on board.

That sense of fun is an enormous relief after years of political weight, and it has spilled over into making fun of the Republican ticket, most notably with a false story that vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance wrote about—and I cannot believe I am typing this—having sex with a couch. The story is stupid, but worse are the denials of it, which have spread the story into populations that otherwise would likely not have seen it.

Just two weeks ago, Vance appeared to be the leader of the next generation of extremist MAGA Republicans, but now that calculation seems to have been hasty. Vance is a staunch opponent of abortion—the key issue in 2024—and he has been vocal in his disdain of women who have not given birth, saying in 2021, for example, that the U.S. was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He went on to say that people who don’t have children “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country.

Republican commentator Meghan McCain noted that Vance’s “comments are activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump supporting friends. These comments have caused real pain and are just innately unchristian.” Actor Jennifer Aniston, who tends to stay out of politics, posted: “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States.” Vance had called out Harris by name in those 2021 comments, and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife Kerstin Emhoff took to social media to defend Harris from Vance’s attacks on her as “childless,” calling her “a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.” Harris’s stepdaughter chimed in: “I love my three parents.”

Vance also ties the Republican ticket firmly to Project 2025. The Trump camp has worked to distance itself from Project 2025—not convincingly, since the two are obviously closely tied, but it turns out that Vance wrote the introduction for a forthcoming book by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who was the lead author of Project 2025. The book appears to popularize that plan, right down to its endorsement of a “Second American Revolution,” and according to the book deal report, proceeds from the book will go to the Heritage Foundation “and aligned nonprofits.”

Now Vance’s words praising Project 2025 will be in print, just in time for the election. Yesterday, Trump posted: “I have nothing to do with, and know nothing about, Project 25 [sic]. The fact that I do is merely disinformation put out by the Radical Left Democrat Thugs. Do not believe them!”

Trump is clearly aware of, and concerned about, the changing narrative. This morning, he called in to Fox & Friends, saying, “We don’t need the votes. I have so many votes. I’m in Florida now…and every house has a Trump-Vance sign on it. Every single house…. It’s amazing the spirit…. This election has more spirit than I’ve ever seen ever before.” Tonight the Trump campaign proved their worry by backing out of debates with Harris, saying debates can’t be scheduled until she is the official nominee, although Biden was not the official nominee when they met in June.

The larger narrative shift has affected the media approach to Trump, who is accustomed to shaping perceptions as he wishes. Now, 12 days after the mass shooting at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, there is increasing media attention to the fact that there has still been no medical report on Trump’s injuries, although he wore a large bandage on his ear at the Republican National Convention and said at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Saturday that he “took a bullet for democracy.”

Yesterday, FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress that it is not clear whether Trump was “grazed” by a bullet or by shrapnel, words that former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance called “FBI speak for, ‘it’s unlikely it was a bullet.’”

CNN chief medical consultant Dr. Sanjay Gupta noted last week that the people need a real medical evaluation of Trump’s injuries, explaining that “gunshot blasts near the head can cause injuries that aren’t immediately noticeable, such as bleeding in or on the brain, damage to the inner ear or even psychological trauma.” But, as Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has noted, much of the press has kept mum about the story.

Media outlets have reported Wray’s testimony, though, and in a social media post today, Trump called on Wray, whom he appointed to head the FBI, to resign from his post for “LYING TO CONGRESS.” Tonight, he reiterated that “it was…a bullet that hit my ear, and hit it hard.”

Perhaps eager to get back to their districts, House Republicans canceled their expected votes on appropriations bills scheduled for next week and left town today for their August recess. The House will not reconvene until early September. The government’s fiscal year 2025 begins on October 1.

—

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/opinion/trump-lies-charts-data.html

https://marchforourlives.org/in-a-first-ever-endorsement-march-for-our-lives-endorses-kamala-harris-for-president/

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-economic-growth-regains-steam-second-quarter-inflation-slows-2024-07-25/

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/07/biden-economy-employment-inflation.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/entertainment/jennifer-aniston-jd-vance/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/economy/us-economy-gdp-second-quarter/index.html

https://www.mediamatters.org/heritage-foundation/jd-vance-wrote-foreword-book-project-2025-architect-kevin-roberts-and-proceeds

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-might-not-shot-1930037

https://people.com/was-trump-struck-by-bullet-or-shrapnel-fbi-director-testifies-8683340

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-wants-fbi-director-resign-immediately-chris-wray-rcna163641