Qatar is buying influence at Georgetown University and reshaping the Jesuit school’s academic mission, hiring practices and campus culture, according to a new report from the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.
“The big takeaway is that we found $1 billion of soft power from the Qatari regime that goes into one of the most important universities in the United States, and if not the world,” Charles Asher Small, founding director and president of the nonprofit, told JNS.
“Muslim Brotherhood ideologues have had an influence in the academic world,” he said. “Not just in Georgetown but throughout the United States.”
According to the 135-page report, decades of “substantial” funding from Oman, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan and Qatar have changed Georgetown in the past 50 years from “a prestigious academic institution rooted in Jesuit traditions into a pivotal nexus where radical ideologies, academic inquiry and geopolitical influence converge.”
Those funders have steered the Washington private school “toward a distinctive pro-Islamist and anti-Israel orientation,” according to the report. The foreign donors, of which Qatar is the principal, have also shaped a school that is “a training ground for U.S. foreign service professionals,” according to the report.
“It’s all open-source information that we have seen,” Small told JNS. “Just imagine what we couldn’t find.”
‘Blur the lines’
In 2005, the school opened a campus in Doha that is “an extension of the university that operates under a distinctly different set of political and academic constraints,” according to the report.
The Qatar campus, Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and its Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding—the latter two of which are parts of its School of Foreign Service in Washington—are “conduits through which external capital and ideological impulses converge to promote narratives that challenge the traditional American bipartisan consensus on international relations and cultural understanding,” according to the report.
“By fostering environments that often blur the lines between academic freedom and ideological advocacy, these centers have not only influenced scholarly discourse but have also played a significant role in the formation of activist networks and policy-oriented debates,” it states.
The Muslim Brotherhood is a driving force behind the Qatari belief system, which Small described as a “fusion of European genocidal antisemitism and even Nazism fused with a perversion of Islam.” It aims to “alienate and weaken Israel, to fragment and weaken the United States and Europe and to fragment the ‘great Satan,’” he said.
By infiltrating elite North American and European universities, the brotherhood and its allies are shaping the values and ideas of future leaders, with the effects now visible “from the classroom to the encampment to our streets,” Small said.
In Doha, Georgetown’s campus depends financially on the Qatar Foundation, which the royal family and the government control. Events organized on the campus and scholars invited to them have ties to extremism.
Small told JNS he had “particular shock” that Georgetown awarded its president’s medal to Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, chair of the Qatar Foundation and a public supporter of Hamas. (Jewish Insider noted that she posted, “O Allah, we entrust Palestine to you,” in Arabic on Oct. 8, 2023.)
“Here’s Georgetown giving a medal to a woman who supports Hamas, applauds Hamas’s activities when it comes to murdering Israelis and Jews,” he said. “This, to me, is astounding. It’s almost like it’s prime and plain sight.”
Since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, there have been more antisemitic incidents, pro-Hamas demonstrations and harassment of Jewish students at Georgetown, according to the report.
“Universities have a sacred mission,” Small told JNS. “You’re educating young people on how to be citizens in a democracy. When liberal educational institutions are taking money from regimes that want to exterminate Jews, subjugate women, murder gay people, destroy democracy, this is really a threat to our stability and to our democracy and our democratic principles.”
He added that other research from the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy has found that Qatar funds U.S. institutions to the tune of $100 billion.
“It’s probably only the tip of an iceberg,” Small told JNS. “Now, we’re extending our research into Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and South Africa.”
“We’re very concerned that Qatar has excellent relations with Iran,” he said. The Qataris “understand our culture and our language and our political institutions, and we in the West remain ignorant and oblivious.”