By Peter Fernandez

Fox, Asia, Christian News, and Gatestone Institute report that Qatar and other authoritarian governments funneled $19 billion to the Ivy League and other US universities between 2001 and 2021. According to the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), many of those billions went unreported to the Department of Education. ‘Dark Money Nightmare’: How Qatar Bought the Ivy League: Gatestone Institute

MSN reports that top American Ivy League universities, including Cornell and Harvard, have received over $8 billion in the last 35 years from Arab countries. According to a report by the Executive Director of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, Cornell University received over $1.5 billion from the Middle East. The report, authored by Dr. Mitchell Brad, was originally released in 2021 and showed how the Ivy League school received 127 gifts totaling $1,513,778,660.

“While there’s nothing inherently inappropriate about foreign-sourced gifts,” writes former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos in February 2023, “there is a significant reason for concern if these gifts are not disclosed, as required by law.”  DeVos also stated that the higher-ed lobby “has not made it a secret that it opposes true trans- parency. 

The American Council on Education, a lobbying organization for colleges and universities, praised the Biden administration in a March 2022 open letter for ending the investigations launched into schools that were skirting the law and failing to report sources of foreign money.” Microsoft Word – Community-Statement-on-Free-and-Open-Academic-Inquiry-030322.docx (acenet.edu)

A November 2023 Institute for Study of Global Antisemitism report also states, “At least 100 American colleges and universities illegally withheld information on approximately 13$ billion in undocumented contributions from foreign governments, many of which are authoritarian.”

The inept testimony given by three Ivy League university presidents from Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania before the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce appears directly related to Qatar and its criminal campaign to purchase influence in US academia. The result has been the deterioration of free speech and a rise in antisemitism. ISGAP also reported that institutions that accepted funds from Middle Eastern donors experienced  300% more antisemitic incidents than those that did not accept such funding.

For decades, this oil-rich Arab nation of only 2.5 million has nurtured a comradeship with the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, whose motto is: “Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

Qatar is by far the largest foreign donor to American universities, and Hamas, a subsidiary of the Muslim Brotherhood, has Qatar to thank for annually donating $360 million. According to a Gatestone Institute article, “In 2012, Ismail Haniyeh, head of the terrorist group’s political bureau, Mousa Abu Marzook, and Khaled Mashaal, among others, moved to Qatar for a life of luxury.” But soon after October 7th, when Israel announced that it would hunt them down, these terrorist officials fled to other countries.

According to MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute),” Hamad bin Jassim, the former Prime Minister of Qatar, said in a February 2022 interview, “We had journalists on our payroll. In many countries, we could pay them. Some of them have become MPs now. others have become patriots. I know them. We would pay (journalists) in many countries. We would pay them every year. Some of them received salaries. All the Arab countries were doing this. If not all, then most of them.” What Jassim is really saying is that they are investing in people to pose as “journalists” and spread the official Islamist line against America/Israel.  Patriots and journalists sound like propagandists.

Michelle Steel (R- CA) is tired of Hamas allies on American college campuses receiving unaccounted billions from authoritarian regimes:  “Make no mistake, this is a big issue,” writes the conservative Congresswoman. “The tiny, oil- and natural-gas-rich country of Qatar is one of the most profligate Hamas-supporting nations in the world.”   Make Pro-Hamas Countries That Fund American Universities Fess Up | Representative Michelle Steel (house.gov)

Steel observes that current law requires universities to disclose foreign donations and contracts,” but we know, “she continues, “that based on a Department of Education investigation in 2020, there has been massive under-compliance with the law…No one before Education Secretary Betsy DeVos had ever attempted to enforce the law, and the current penalty for noncompliance merely requires paying the government’s attorneys’ fees. In essence, compliance with the law is voluntary.”

Sadly, we Vermonters have the likes of Bernie Sanders and Becca Balint, who did not, like Steel, grow up in South Korea,  to be educated in the shadow of one of the world’s worst totalitarian dictatorships. UVM has not yet reported receiving any donations from Qatar or any other questionable government, but that may have something to do with the Biden administration’s rewards for non-compliance.

The author is a children’s book author and Vermont resident.