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Qatar’s Back Door to Higher Education
Doha, Qatar. Photo: StellarD via Wikimedia Commons.
JNS.org – In an earlier column, I debunked a recent study suggesting that foreign contributions to higher education were responsible for the rise in antisemitism. In my work, I have illustrated some cases where Arab donations have had a nefarious impact, but it’s difficult to do because universities don’t report what most of the money they receive is used for. Besides demanding greater transparency, the United States and the world need to expand our investigation to trace indirect funding to “independent” institutions.
Qatar is by far the largest donor to universities. Since 1986, it has contributed more than $5 billion (billions more are undocumented) contributions since 1986. The largest gifts were for the creation and operation of Weill Cornell Medical College-Qatar in Doha, which can’t be said to cause antisemitism at the Ivy League’s main campus in Ithaca, N.Y. Because of the U.S. Department of Education’s failure to require universities to publish how they spend the foreign donations, we don’t know if any is going to professors or departments because they are pro-Qatar, anti-Israel or antisemitic, or if they adopt those policies after receiving the money. We can only surmise that universities will not want to risk losing funding by publishing anything critical of the emirate.
Meanwhile, gone largely unnoticed is Qatar’s backdoor to universities, the Arab Center Washington DC (ACW), which is affiliated with the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Doha.
The ACW describes itself as “a nonprofit, independent and nonpartisan research organization dedicated to furthering the political, economic and social understanding of the Arab world in the United States and to providing insight on U.S. policies and interests in the Middle East.”
It says it relies on tax-deductible contributions from “individual supporters, organizations, foundations and corporations.” However, according to its tax return, all but $900 of its $2,262,150 in donations came from the center in Qatar.
A hint of its orientation can be found in its two most recent events: “Gaza and the Crime of Genocide: Legal and Political Dimensions of Accountability” and “Repression of Palestine Activism Amid the War on Gaza.”
Khalil E. Jahshan, the executive director and a veteran of several Arab lobby groups, has said the “clearest political message” of Hamas’s attack on Israel was “the one addressed to the ‘Camp of Normalizers’—be they Israeli, Arab, Americans or Europeans—that their plans to forge a ‘New Middle East’ without Palestine shall not pass unopposed.”
He also tweeted: “Top #Biden adviser and confidant Brett #McGurk is obsessed with rewarding #Israel for its #genocidal war in #Gaza by furthering the #Trump-era cash-&-carry #normalization deal between #Saudi_Arabia & Israel at the expense of #Palestinian national rights.”
The center has 14 academic advisers, 13 of whom are professors from universities such as Georgetown, George Washington, Maryland and Princeton. It does not indicate whether any members are paid. Among the professors on the list are Columbia University professor Hamid Dabashi. He refers to ISIS as “murderous thugs” and says, “Their Israeli counterparts meanwhile conquered parts of Syria and declared it part of their Zionist settler colony.” Dabashi does see one difference, which suggests that he doesn’t read The New York Times, “ISIS does not have a platoon of clean shaven and well coiffured [sic] columnists at the New York Times propagating the cause of the terrorist outfit as the Zionists columnists do on a regular basis.”
While Dabashi wears his disdain for Israel on his sleeve, a more slippery example is the University of Maryland’s Shibley Telhami. An Israel critic, he is best known for producing widely quoted surveys related to Israel with questions consistently written to elicit negative responses towards the Jewish state.
Another adviser, Osama Abi-Mershed, an associate professor in the influential Walsh School of Foreign Service and Director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS) at Georgetown University, is a supporter of the antisemitic Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. He has pledged “not to collaborate on projects and events involving Israeli academic institutions.”
Abi-Mershed’s colleague, Marwa Daoudy, an assistant professor in International Relations at the Walsh School and CCAS, tweeted “Palestinians are denied the right to exist as human beings.” He also praised South Africa’s foreign minister for comparing Israeli policy to apartheid, and accused Israel of genocide and “cultural genocide.”
Another adviser is retired USC professor Laurie Brand, former president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) and now chair of its Committee on Academic Freedom, which devotes much of its attention to criticism of Israel and defense of antisemitic speech, as in its post-Oct. 7 letter to universities denying that anti-Zionism is antisemitic. While expressing heartbreak over the loss of Israeli and Palestinian lives, the letter has nothing to say about the Hamas massacre that created the toxic campus environment. She is indignant over the supposed silencing of Israel’s detractors while defending the boycott of Israel.
George Washington University history professor Dina Khoury is another former MESA president who supports BDS and has condemned Israel in a prior Gaza conflict for its actions to defend its citizens. Another BDS’er is Amaney Jamal, the Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Politics at Princeton University.
Sheila Carapico, a professor of political science and international studies at the University of Richmond, is another BDS supporter and a consultant to Human Rights Watch. She wrote an article complaining about Saudi Arabia bullying Qatar.
‘The price we had to pay’
ACW also has 18 research fellows, including Dana El Kurd, an assistant professor at the University of Richmond who wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post assailing the normalization of relations between Israel and the Gulf states, claiming that rather than advancing peace, Israel is giving the Arab regimes tools to solidify their authoritarian rule. She claims the Palestinian issue is the “root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict” and suggested that the Abraham Accords emboldened Israel to annex Palestinian territory, ignoring that Israel gave up a plan to exercise sovereignty to achieve the agreement with the Gulf states.
One member of the ACW board is Mohammed Abu Nimer, director of the Peacebuilding and Development Institute at American University. Hamas, he says, has “engaged in the fight against the Israeli occupation since 1987”; that is, two years after every Israeli was withdrawn. He also repeats the canard that Hamas changed its charter and no longer seeks Israel’s destruction. The man who received the 2023 Distinguished Scholar Award for his “groundbreaking work in interreligious dialogue and faith-based peacebuilding” refers to the situation in Gaza as “genocide.”
Another board member is Laurie King, an anthropology professor at Georgetown who was a co-founder of the virulently anti-Israel website Electronic Intifada. She has compared Israel to Afrikaner South Africa and called for it to be boycotted. She falsely accuses Israel of “ethnic cleansing.” Not surprisingly, she objects to antisemites being called out for antisemitism.
Predictably, I found no statements condemning Hamas for massacring 1,200 Israelis.
The creation of the ACW is not Qatar’s first effort to use a Washington think tank as part of its influence operation. In 2007, it convinced the Brookings Institution to open a center in Doha. A few years later, the emirate agreed to a $14.8 million, four-year donation to help fund the affiliate in Qatar and a project on United States relations with the Islamic world. Brookings closed the center in Doha and stopped taking money from the emirate in 2017. Previously, it listed Qatar as one of its top donors, giving more than $2 million. Brookings’s divorce came after its president, Gen. John R. Allen (Ret.), was investigated by the Justice Department for illegally lobbying for Qatar (no charges were brought).
A former visiting fellow at the Doha Center who went on to teach at the University of Queensland in Australia offered one clue to the impact of associating with Qatar. Saleem Ali told The New York Times, “If a member of Congress is using the Brookings reports, they should be aware—they are not getting the full story.” He said he had been warned during his job interview not to criticize Qatar in his published work. “There was a no-go zone when it came to criticizing the Qatari government,” said Ali. “It was unsettling for the academics there. But it was the price we had to pay.”
Qatar didn’t hide what it expected to get for its contributions. When Brookings renewed its agreement for the Doha center in 2012, the Times reported that the Qatar Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced, “the center will assume its role in reflecting the bright image of Qatar in the international media, especially the American ones.”
When Brookings finally dumped Qatar, the emirate lost the prestige of associating with a prominent think tank. Undeterred, the Qataris created their own to give an academic veneer to their influence campaign.
Evaluating the impact of Arab funding on higher education is often a chicken-and-egg proposition. Are professors on the advisory board spreading propaganda because they get paid or are they recruited by Qatar to its stable of apologists because they are anti-Israel (I’ll leave it to others to decide if they’re also antisemitic)? If there is no financial or professional benefit, why associate with Qatar?
Whatever their reasons, they have affiliated themselves with the country that supports Hamas and Islamists.
The post Qatar’s Back Door to Higher Education first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Palestinian Authority’s Abbas Offers to Work With Trump to Broker Peace Deal With Israel
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas holds a leadership meeting in Ramallah, in the West Bank, April 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mohammed Torokman
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has offered to work with US President Donald Trump to broker a comprehensive peace deal with Israel, praising the American leader for brokering a ceasefire between the Jewish state and Iran and calling for an end to the war in Gaza.
In a letter sent to Trump, Abbas expressed his “deep gratitude and appreciation for [Trump’s] successful efforts in reaching a ceasefire between Israel and Iran,” the official Palestinian Authority (PA) news agency WAFA reported.
After 12 days of conflict between the two Middle Eastern adversaries, Trump announced a “complete and total” ceasefire on Monday, just hours after Iran launched missile strikes on the Al Udeid US airbase in Qatar in retaliation for American attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend.
The US joined Israel’s airstrike campaign against the Islamist regime by launching a large-scale military strike against Tehran, destroying three key nuclear enrichment facilities, including the heavily fortified Fordow site.
Although the fragile ceasefire appears to have since held, Tehran initially broke it within minutes, with Israeli officials reporting that three Iranian missiles were launched within the first three hours of the truce.
In his letter to Trump, Abbas called the ceasefire a “necessary and important step to defuse the crises plaguing the world, which will have a positive impact on the security and stability of the region.” He then turned his attention to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
“A ceasefire in Gaza would constitute an additional step to [Trump’s] crucial efforts to achieve a just and comprehensive peace between the Palestinians, the Israelis, and the entire world,” the Palestinian leader wrote.
In an effort to earn trust within the international community, Abbas expressed his willingness to work with Trump, Saudi Arabia, and other global partners “to fulfill the promise of peace.”
The Palestinian leader said he was ready “to immediately negotiate and implement a comprehensive peace agreement within a clear and binding timeframe that ends the occupation and achieves security and stability for all, a just and lasting peace.”
Although Trump attempted a peace deal with the PA during his first term, he ultimately bypassed it and instead pursued the Abraham Accords — a series of historic US-brokered normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab countries.
“With you, we can achieve what seemed impossible: a recognized, free, sovereign, and secure Palestine; a recognized and secure Israel; and a region that enjoys peace, prosperity, and integration,” Abbas wrote in his letter.
Given the PA’s long-standing lack of credibility and widely known support for terrorism against Israel, Abbas has been making promises of change as he seeks to secure international trust and position the PA to play a leading role in the Gaza Strip once the current Israel-Hamas war ends.
The PA, which has long been riddled with accusations of corruption, has also maintained for years a so-called “pay-for-slay” program, which rewards terrorists and their families for carrying out attacks against Israelis.
Under this policy, the PA Martyr’s Fund makes official payments to Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, the families of “martyrs” killed in attacks on Israelis, and injured Palestinian terrorists. Reports estimate that approximately 8 percent of the PA’s budget is allocated to paying stipends to convicted terrorists and their families.
Earlier this year, Abbas announced plans to reform the system, but the PA has continued issuing payments, with top officials stating they will not deduct any of the funds.
Abbas, who was elected to a four-year term in 2005, has also promised to hold elections soon — the first the PA will hold since then.
Even with his commitment to long-promised administrative reforms, the PA lacks public support among Palestinians, with only 40 percent backing its return to govern the Gaza Strip after the war.
Abbas has also promised the demilitarization of his rival Hamas, while condemning the terrorist group’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 — an attack he had previously celebrated.
In the past, Abbas praised Hamas for achieving “important goals” with the Oct. 7 onslaught, describing the attack — the deadliest single-day massacre against the Jewish people since the Holocaust — as one that “shook the foundations of the Israeli entity.”
Other PA officials, including Mahmoud al-Habbash, Abbas’s adviser on religious and Islamic affairs, have similarly praised Hamas’s atrocities, describing them as “legitimate resistance.”
The post Palestinian Authority’s Abbas Offers to Work With Trump to Broker Peace Deal With Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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New York City Jews Sound Alarm After Anti-Israel Socialist Zohran Mamdani Wins Democratic Mayoral Primary
Candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks during a Democratic New York City mayoral primary debate, June 4, 2025, in New York, US. Photo: Yuki Iwamura/Pool via REUTERS
Following Zohran Mamdani’s stunning victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary on Tuesday, local Jewish leaders are expressing deep apprehension about their future status in a city facing the prospect of being led by a man who has been accused of antisemitism and made anti-Israel activism a cornerstone of his political career.
Mamdani, the 33‑year‑old state assemblymember and proud democratic socialist, defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and other candidates in a lopsided first‑round win in the city’s Democratic primary for mayor, notching approximately 43.5 percent of first‑choice votes compared to Cuomo’s 36.4 percent.
Voters in New York City rank their choices in order of their preference. While Mamdani declared victory and Cuomo conceded defeat, the race’s ultimate outcome will technically be decided when every vote is tallied, taking into account the ranked choice count. Mamdani’s victory is all but assured.
Some observers have speculated that Mamdani’s win over an older, high-profile Democrat signifies growing frustration with the party’s status quo and represents a generational change.
The election results have also alarmed members of the local Jewish community, who expressed deep concern over his past criticism of Israel and defense of antisemitic rhetoric.
“Mamdani’s election is the greatest existential threat to a metropolitan Jewish population since the election of the notorious antisemite Karl Lueger in Vienna,” Rabbi Marc Schneier, one of the most prominent Jewish leaders in New York City, said in a statement. “Jewish leaders must come together as a united force to prevent a mass Jewish Exodus from New York City.”
Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt, who along with her husband Rabbi Benjamin Goldschmidt co-founded the Altneu, an Orthodox synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, suggested that Mamdani’s political ascendance indicates that antisemitism might actually be a political “asset” these days.
“Perhaps soft antisemitism is not a liability for a NYC politician. It’s an asset,” Chizhik-Goldschmidt wrote. “Perhaps New York City is not the city we thought it was.”
Former New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who later founded the organization Americans Against Antisemitism, similarly repudiated Mamdani and encouraged New Yorkers to consolidate behind a single candidate to oppose the presumptive Democratic nominee in the general election in November.
“Mamdani has won the Democratic primary,” he said in a video posted to social media. “It is pathetic, it is sick, it is painful for people who care about the future of New York and in particular the Jewish community.”
Hikind added in a written post accompanying the video: “NYC must unite to defeat the dangerous antisemite Mamdani.”
A little-known politician before this year’s primary campaign, Mamdani is an outspoken supporter of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to isolate Israel from the international community as a step toward its eventual elimination.
Mamdani has also repeatedly refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, falsely suggesting the country does not offer “equal rights” for all its citizens, and promised to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visits New York.
Most recently, Mamdani defended the phrase “globalize the intifada”— which references previous periods of sustained Palestinian terrorism against Jews and Israels and has been widely interpreted as a call to expand political violence — by invoking the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during World War II. In response, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum repudiated the mayoral candidate, calling his comments “outrageous and especially offensive to [Holocaust] survivors.”
The same week, an old X/Twitter post from 2015 by Mamdani resurfaced online showing him appearing to threaten that a “third intifada” was coming.
New York City, which is home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, has experienced a major spike in antisemitic incidents since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of southern Israel, with police data showing Jews were targeted in the majority of hate crimes perpetrated in New York City last year.
Concern among Jewish leaders over Mamdani’s victory amid rising antisemitism extended well beyond New York.
Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of European Rabbis, warned that Mamdani’s victory represents a well-known pattern that starts with hatred of Israel and ends with violence targeting Jews.
“Zohran Mamdani’s win in #NYC feels deeply familiar to #Europe’s #Jewish community. We’ve seen where radical politics — especially cloaked in ‘justice’ rhetoric — can lead. It starts with slogans. It ends with violence,” Goldschmidt, the former chief rabbi of Moscow, posted on social media.
“In Europe, we’ve learned the hard way: when far-left ideologues and radical Islamists turn Israel into a symbol of absolute evil, it quickly becomes a weapon — not against a state, but against Jews. ‘Anti-Zionism’ becomes the mask. Exclusion and incitement follow,” the rabbi continued. “This isn’t about legitimate critique of Israeli policy. It’s about obsession. Israel becomes a dog whistle — a coded target on synagogues, schools, and Jews in public life.”
Europe, like New York, has experienced a surge in antisemitism since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, with antisemitic incidents often liked to animus against Israel.
“The safety of all New Yorkers — including Jewish New Yorkers — is the single greatest responsibility of the mayor of New York,” said Rabbi Moshe Hauer, executive vice president of the Orthodox Union.
“That safety has been deeply impacted by the rhetoric and actions of those whose opposition to Zionism has driven them to work to instill fear and intimidation in Jews who support Israel,” he added.
Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), called for Jews in New York to immigrate to Israel.
“As an American Jew and as a human, I am truly frightened that an antisemitic communist Mamdani has actually promoted murdering Jews by supporting and legitimizing the antisemitic rally cry ‘globalize the intifada,’ refuses to accept the Jewish state of Israel as a Jewish state, states he will arrest PM Netanyahu if he comes to NYC, and is friendly with Israel bashing Jew-haters – and yet has been mainstreamed in the most important Jewish city in America,” he posted. “Is it time to make aliyah to Israel.”
The post New York City Jews Sound Alarm After Anti-Israel Socialist Zohran Mamdani Wins Democratic Mayoral Primary first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Jewish Teen Threatened at Knifepoint in France Amid Surge in Antisemitic Attacks
Sign reading “+1000% of Antisemitic Acts: These Are Not Just Numbers” during a march against antisemitism, in Lyon, France, June 25, 2024. Photo: Romain Costaseca / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
A Jewish teenager was threatened at knifepoint and called a “dirty Jew” in an antisemitic attack in France — the latest in a growing wave of hate crimes targeting the country’s Jewish community.
Last week, a 15-year-old boy was violently attacked in Colomiers, southwestern France, after attending a meetup arranged with a girl over social media, French media reported.
When the boy arrived at the meeting point, two men were waiting for him at the entrance to a basement. They held him at knifepoint, humiliated him, and shared the assault on social media.
One of the attackers, armed with a knife, forced him to remove his shirt and dance, then grabbed him by the neck and forced him to kneel.
Then, the attacker reportedly told him to “beg and pray,” repeatedly calling him a “dirty Jew” because he attended a private Jewish school. He also threatened to kill him if he tried to contact the police.
The following day, the teenager found out that the assault had been filmed and circulated on social media. Using the attackers’ TikTok accounts, the victim was able to file a formal complaint.
On Friday, local police arrested one of the suspects who posted the video, according to the French broadcaster Europe 1. He was taken into custody on charges of aggravated assault motivated by religious hatred.
As of this week, the investigation is ongoing, with authorities actively searching for the remaining suspects.
The brutal assault is the latest antisemitic incident amid a troubling surge in anti-Jewish violence sweeping the country since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Antisemitism in France continued to surge to alarming levels across the country last year, with 1,570 incidents recorded, according to a report by the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) – the main representative body of French Jews.
The total number of antisemitic outrages in 2024 was a slight dip from 2023’s record total of 1,676, but it marked a striking increase from the 436 antisemitic acts recorded in 2022.
In late May and early June, antisemitic acts rose by more than 140 percent, far surpassing the weekly average of slightly more than 30 incidents.
The report also found that 65.2 percent of antisemitic acts last year targeted individuals, with more than 10 percent of these offenses involving physical violence.
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