Qatar Spreads Its Wealth from Sea to Shining Sea

Qatar is the fabulously rich little land where only 10% of the population is Qatari, who need do no work to live on the government’s cradle-to-grave support, while all the real work, from cooks and construction workers at the bottom, to doctors and engineers and bankers at the top, is done by foreigners. Of the 2.76 million people living in Qatar, only 0.36 million are Qataris..

Meanwhile, Qatar has deployed tens of billions of dollars to buy it influence abroad, especially in the United States — which Qatar sees as the guarantor of its security — and within the United States, it has spent the most on our universities.

More on Qatar’s influence-buying can be found here: “Universities Are Selling Out to Qatar, and Selling Off Their Integrity,” by Mitchell Bard, Algemeiner, May 18, 2025:

If you ever doubted that universities care more about money than principles, look no further than their willingness to accept donations from Qatar.

For those unaware, Qatar is a hereditary autocracy that bans political parties, criminalizes dissent, censors the press and has a long record of human-rights abuses, including labor exploitation and human trafficking. Its state-run media network, Al Jazeera, is the principal media source of anti-Israel propaganda in the Middle East. Qatar has also long funded and hosted terrorist groups that are sworn enemies of the West, including the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and ISIS.

Right now, even as it cozies up to the Trump administration, offering as a token of its esteem for President Trump a $400-million plane, Qatar continues to provide refuge to several of the leaders of Hamas, including Khaled Meshaal. Another Hamas leader, the late Ismail Haniyeh, also lived in Qatar until the IDF caught up with him when he was visiting Iran, staying at a guest house in Tehran. Qatar has for years been helping, along with Iran, to finance Hamas and pay for its weapons. In addition to Hamas, Qatar has also financed Al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Taliban. Yet none of this appears to have made an impression in Washington, that treats Qatar almost as a protectorate keeping its largest military base in the Middle East —Al-Udeid Air Base — in Qatar, a symbol of our commitment to enduring Qatar’s security.

“Qatar’s ideological alignment directly contradicts the values of Western nations that recognize these groups as terrorist organizations,” observed Michael Milshtein of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies. Yet that has not stopped American universities from cozying up to Qatar for cash.

Doha has poured nearly $6 billion into American universities since 1981, making it the largest Arab donor in US higher education. In just one year, between 2023 and 2024, it donated $527 million. Much of this money is funneled through the Qatar Foundation, chaired by Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, mother of the current emir and wife of the former one. In the words of its founders, the foundation exists to “realize their ambitions for the future of Qatar.”

“Qatar’s goal is not to promote antisemitic or pro-Palestinian messages,” Gulf expert Ariel Admoni says, “but antisemitism and pro-Palestinian sentiments are byproducts of policies convenient for them.”

He added that “in Western countries, particularly within educated circles, the pro-Palestinian struggle is perceived as a ‘convenient’ cause. Consequently, from the Qatari perspective, this portrayal positions them favorably on what they consider to be the right side of public opinion, especially among the youth.”

Qatar has made 1,143 donations to 63 American universities. In the US Department of Education (DoE) database, only 101—just 9%—disclose what the money was used for.

Why are those universities so loath to disclose what they did with the money they received from Qatar? Might it be because so much of it has been use to pay for professors, or whole departments of them, devoted to promoting a pro-Palestinian narrative? Or could they be paying a particular university to gain access to work on weapons development, or even on nuclear projects that, while they are about peaceful uses of nuclear energy, could be transformed into programs for nuclear weapons? And how many universities took Qatari money to help fund projects that powerful Americans wanted funded — a way for Qatar to win the hearts of those Americans? How much money, do you think, went to help fund the presidential libraries or the pet projects of our last few presidents? How much Qatari money funded pet projects of influential congressmen? Until the government of Qatar is compelled to reveal exactly to whom its money was given, and for exactly what purposes, Qatar’s swashbuckling influence-buying will continue.