As the winds of war have stilled, at least for the moment, the Middle East remains roiled in conflict between Iran and its proxies and the Jewish state, with no clear end in sight. A major player in the conflict is Qatar, the headquarters of the Hamas terror group and a longtime supporter of massive anti-American and anti-Israel influence campaigns.
The foreign monarchy, smaller than the state of Connecticut, has spent decades quietly buying its way into American life—into the schools where children learn, the universities where they study, the newsrooms that inform them and the halls of power where their leaders make decisions.
Qatar is energy-rich, ambitious and home to major U.S. military facilities, yet maintains close alliances with Iran and Hamas. A new report reveals its spending inside the United States at $400 billion (about $1.2 million for every Qatari citizen), but it may be as high as $1.2 trillion. The spending appears mostly legal. The only question the regime never answers is what it expects in return for its “donations.”
Qatar tells American universities to fall in line
After Hamas stormed Israel’s borders on Oct. 7, 2023—massacring 1,200 people and kidnapping another 251 back into the Gaza Strip—a liberal arts professor at Northwestern University 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 University even warns visitors to speak respectfully of Qatar’s ruler. Asked about the relationship, its president told Congress that he was “very proud” of the alliance and defended the university’s decision to give its highest medal to a member of the Qatari royal family who had publicly praised the mastermind of the Oct. 7 attacks.
Return on its investment
Qatar is the single largest foreign funder of American higher education, channeling billions to academic institutions of higher education, 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 University 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 has “consistently acted as ringleaders for the antisemitic harassment faced by Jewish students on campus.”
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.
Buying American classrooms
Qatar’s reach extends from higher education to grade schools. In one classroom in Brooklyn, N.Y., young children were taught from a map of the Middle East with Israel wiped off—a lesson paid for by the Qatar Foundation International. QFI is run by a member of Qatar’s ruling family and has spent “more than $65 million on more than 220 programs between 2009 and 2025.”
In Minneapolis, the same foundation quietly provided grants and curriculum to Arabic teachers. The foundation also partnered U.S. classrooms with Palestinian schools run by the United Nations and misrepresented itself as a nonprofit organization.
The exposure forced a response. Qatar Foundation International recently announced that it was winding down, and ISGAP has called for a federal investigation following the release of its report on how Qatar is using “soft power to reshape American education.”
Politicians from both parties have demanded answers. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) called the findings “shocking” for how the American educational system has been “captured by foreign adversaries who seek to control and manipulate it.”
This may finally be changing. A coalition of more than two dozen organizations, including Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Hindu, is pressing Congress to pass the DETERRENT Act to force schools to disclose the foreign funding they receive.
Access, silence, a piece of everything
Classrooms are only part of the story. According to research from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, QatarEnergy and the Qatar Investment Authority have invested more than $20 billion into Texas natural gas, oil and electricity companies. Qatar also owns a stake in Washington’s professional sports teams, a piece of the Empire State Building, and is one of the largest buyers of American weapons. Step by step, a government that bankrolls Hamas terrorists and Al Jazeera has woven itself into the everyday life of American businesses, energy and real estate.
Qatar’s regime has also paid ha also paid hundreds of millions for access to Democrats and Republicans. Qatar has paid lobbyists, funded Washington think tanks, and flown the mayor of Washington and her staff to the Gulf as its guests. The regime has handed the Obamas a pair of gold-plated birds valued at $110,000 each and gifted U.S. President Donald Trump a $400 million luxury jet to be refitted as the new, official Air Force One.
Its television network, Al Jazeera, broadcasts anti-American and anti-Israel propaganda around the world. Qatari money has reached into the technology, shaping what people read and what artificial intelligence tells them, including Wikipedia and Grokipedia.
Points to consider:
1. Qatar’s foreign influence operation is a national security threat to America.
Schools, energy, politicians … a single foreign monarchy has quietly bought into all of it, and almost no one was watching. Qatar has spent more than $400 billion in America: $1.2 million for every Qatari citizen. This is not an ordinary trading partner. As Jonathan Schanzer, executive director at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said, “America is not a charity.” Qatar is making an investment in shaping how students, business leaders and politicians think and behave. The question is no longer what Qatar wants, but how to prevent additional harm.
2. A government that funds Hamas should not fund American schools.
Picture a foreign government that bankrolls a terrorist army deciding what your child reads in second grade. That is not hypothetical; it’s happening from elementary classrooms to the country’s top universities. This money does not arrive out of kindness or charity. It is intended to shape what the next generation believes about America, Israel and other democracies. Hearts and minds are being bought, one classroom at a time.
3. Qatar shapes the news and information Americans consume.
Propaganda works best when you cannot see the hand behind it. Qatar pushes its messaging through Al Jazeera and its American brand AJ+, but its actual reach is well hidden. It is laundered through the “neutral” sources people trust most, from Wikipedia to AI. Millions absorb the same slanted story and never learn where it comes from.
