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As Qatar Emir Visits Canada, Just What is Doha Up To?
By HENRY SREBRNIK (Sept. 19/24) Qatar…home of Hamas leaders, Al-Jazeera, host of soccer’s 2022 World Cup, and wealth beyond measure. And everyone’s favourite centre for “negotiations” to end the war Hamas unleashed on Israel a year ago. It’s become everyone’s go-to country, a veritable “light unto the nations.”
However, as the 1946 song “Put the Blame on Mame” has it, in a different context, of course, “That’s the story that went around, but here’s the real lowdown” … about this duplicitous Persian Gulf emirate.
Even before the Gaza war began, there was an upswing of commentary celebrating a shift in the policies and behavior of Qatar: away from promoting and subsidizing radical Islamist groups, and towards “deconfliction” and moderation.
Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the country’s emir, has been basking in the glow of international approval, depicting the country as a global influencer and peacemaker. The Qataris want to make themselves indispensable.
It plays into Doha’s ongoing attempts to create an illusion of rebranding as a moderating actor in the Middle East and beyond, pushed by various propagandists in the West on Qatar’s payroll, including more than a few American university centres and departments awash in Qatari money.
The emir and other officials spent two days in Canada Sept. 17-19, meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and cabinet ministers. The Gaza war was on the agenda, of course. Indeed, Jewish-Canadian leaders urged Trudeau to criticize him over his patronage of Hamas. But being able to tap into Qatar’s wealth via business and trade was more likely on Trudeau’s mind.
Qatar has one of the highest per capita incomes in the world, at $110,000 a year. And while its total population is some 2.7 million, most of these are guest workers, including European lawyers and consultants at the top of the scale, and at the bottom South Asian labourers. Only some 313,000 are native Qataris, the ones who benefit from the riches it derives from the sale of oil and gas.
The Peninsula, an English language daily newspaper published in Doha, ran an article on the occasion of the emir’s visit by noting the expanding trade and investment cooperation between Canada and Qatar, especially with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in June between the Qatar Financial Center and the Canada Arab Business Council, a non-profit organization that aims to enhance trade and investment relations between Canada and the Arab world.
The MoU “aims to establish an integrated framework for cooperation and coordination in specific sectors through joint initiatives and the exchange of information and expertise, with a focus on stimulating growth and promoting innovation in areas such as financial services and professional business services.” Ahmed Hussen, Minister of International Development participated in a signing ceremony with Lolwah bint Rashid Al-Khater, Qatar’s Minister of State for International Cooperation.
More than 9,000 Canadian expatriates live in Qatar, working in Canadian and Qatari companies and institutions. From January to July, Canada exported goods valued at $103.45 million to Qatar, while Qatar’s exports to Canada amounted to $90.27 million.
There is also a partnership in academic programs, as the University of Calgary has been in Doha since 2006, offering a Bachelor of Nursing program, along with the College of the North Atlantic, which transformed into the University of Doha for Science and Technology. Furthermore, there are several Doha-based schools that offer Canadian curricula.
In their meeting, Sheikh Tamim expressed his aspiration to work with Trudeau to advance their bilateral cooperation across multiple sectors in order to “contribute to enhancing regional and global peace and stability.” Bilateral relations between the two countries were discussed, especially in the fields of investment, economy and international cooperation, “in addition to developments and situations in the Gaza Strip and the occupied Palestinian territories.”
Qatar has been very successful in its efforts to shape public opinion in Canada, as well as in the far more important United States. The amount of money that Qatar has poured into universities, schools, educational organizations, think tanks, and media across America, and the number of initiatives that Qatar uses to influence American opinion, is overwhelming.
According to a 2022 study from the National Association of Scholars, Qatar is the largest foreign donor to American universities. It found that between 2001 and 2021, the petrostate donated a whopping $4.7 billion to U.S. colleges. The largest recipients are some of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning. They include Carnegie Mellon University, Ivy League Cornell University, Georgetown University in Washington, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Texas A & M. These schools have partnered with the regime to build campuses in Doha’s “education city,” a special district of the capital that hosts satellite colleges for American universities. (Texas A&M decided earlier this year to shutter its branch campus in Qatar.)
Georgetown University in Qatar, for instance, was hosting the “Reimagining Palestine” conference Sept. 20-22. The event engages scholars, experts, and the public “in timely and relevant dialogues on globally significant issues,” according to a description of the gathering. One of the speakers, Wadah Khanfar, “was active in the Hamas movement and was one of its most prominent leaders in the movement’s office in Sudan,” the Raya Media Network, a Palestinian outlet, tells us. In the months following Oct. 7, the campus has hosted a variety of seemingly anti-Israel events.
Since 2008, Qatar has donated nearly $602 million to Northwestern University, whose journalism school is ranked as one of the best in the world, to establish a school of journalism in Qatar. The Northwestern University campus in Qatar and Qatari broadcaster Al-Jazeera in 2013 signed a Memorandum of Understanding to “further facilitate collaboration and knowledge transfer between two of Qatar’s foremost media organizations.” Are Northwestern’s interests really aligned with Qatar?
Qatari state-financed entities also often fund individual scholars or programs in the United States without official disclosure or being directly traceable to a government source, thus avoiding public scrutiny. For example, Ivy League Yale University disclosed only $284,668 in funding from Qatar between 2010 and 2022. Researchers at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) in a report released in June, though, found that this amount reflected only a small fraction of the money and services the university and its scholars had in fact received over that period. The most common channel for hard-to-track Qatari support for Yale came from individual research grants originating from the Qatar National Research Fund, and their report found 11 Yale-linked QNRF grants which came to at least $15,925,711.
Recent research from the Network Contagion Research Institute indicated that at least 200 American universities illegally withheld information about approximately $13 billion in Qatari contributions. Also, according to the report, from 2015 to 2020 institutions that accepted money from Middle Eastern donors had on average, 300 percent more antisemitic incidents than those institutions that did not.
Overall, the report found that “a massive influx of foreign, concealed donations to American institutions of higher learning, much of it from authoritarian regimes with notable support from Middle Eastern sources, reflects or supports heightened levels of intolerance towards Jews, open inquiry and free expression.”
Much of Doha’s engagement with the world is run out of the Qatar Meeting, Incentive, Conference and Exhibition (MICE) Development Institute (QMDI), which promotes Qatar as a good place for business. The annual Doha Forum gathers major policymakers from around the world.
Qatar’s influence-buying strategies are a textbook example of how to transform cash into “soft” power. The relationship between one of Washington, D.C.’s top think tanks and Qatar, for example, began in 2002, when the emirate underwrote a Doha conference featuring then Qatari Foreign Minister Hamad bin Jassem Al Thani and former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, at the time the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings. (Hamad oversaw Qatar’s $230 billion sovereign wealth fund until 2013.) In 2007, Brookings followed up by opening a centre on Doha. It didn’t end well. In 2021 the institute ended its relationship with Qatar amidst an ongoing FBI investigation.
Still, Washington treads carefully when it comes to criticizing Qatar. It’s not just about money. After all, the Al-Udaid Air Base is home to the U.S. military’s Central Command (CENTCOM), and the country is just across the Persian Gulf from Iran. In fact, Washington’s relationship with Qatar is so close that in 2022 the White House officially designated the emirate a “major non-NATO ally.” The Qataris, realizing that their very existence would be threatened were the U.S. to relocate its CENTCOM operations to the UAE or Saudi Arabia, in January hastened to nail down the agreement for another decade.
Yoni Ben-Menachem, a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, told the Jewish News Service (JNS) that the Gulf country is more dangerous than Hamas or Hezbollah since it is extraordinarily wealthy and thus in a position to influence U.S. administrations.
Qatar has for many years been involved in financing the campaigns of the Democratic Party, he claimed, “especially Hillary Clinton’s campaign” in 2016. He added that former U.S. President Bill Clinton is known to have flown to Qatar to bring back suitcases full of cash.
According to Jonathan Ruhe, director of foreign policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), Qatar has portrayed itself as “indispensable to U.S. interests in the Middle East, including negotiations with the Taliban, reconstruction aid for past Gaza conflicts, and building the massive Al-Udeid base for U.S. forces.”
Yet although it hosts the Pentagon’s regional command, Qatar has long supported terrorism. For decades, it has opened its doors to Islamist terrorists, Taliban warlords and African insurgents. Doha housed the Taliban’s political office before that group returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021.
Beginning in 2012, the Israeli government allowed Qatar to deliver cash to Gaza. Over the next nine years, Qatar provided $1.5 billion. Prior to the outbreak of the present conflict, Doha subsidized Hamas to the tune of $360 million to $480 million a year. With one third of that money, Qatar bought Egyptian fuel that Cairo then shipped into Gaza, where Hamas sold it and pocketed its revenue. Another third went to impoverished Gazan families, while the last third paid the salaries of the Hamas bureaucracy.
The leaders of Hamas, including Khaled Mashaal and the late Ismail Haniyeh, who was chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau until assassinated by Israel in July, have been regular guests in Doha, living in luxury. (The emir sat in the front row with mourners during Haniyeh’s funeral in Doha.) Qatar has defended Hamas’s presence in the country.
“This was started to be used as a way of communicating and bringing peace and calm into the region, not to instigate any war,” Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani told U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken last October. “And this is the purpose of that office.” Blinken seemed to buy this. At a press conference in Doha in February, he asserted that “we’re very fortunate to have Qatar as a partner.”
As far back as 2007, when Hamas seized control of Gaza, Qatar recognized that “adopting” the group would be a worthwhile opportunity: connections with Hamas in Gaza grants Qatar influence and status in the Middle East and beyond. In addition, they bolster the popular Arab perception of Doha as working for the Palestinian cause. In 2012, the emir became the first head of state to visit Gaza, pledging $400 million to Hamas. At the same time, the Qataris became the exclusive mediators between Israel and Hamas.
The U.S. has accused the Qataris of harboring members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC). But at the same time the Qataris are an important intermediary between America and Iran. Doha has enjoyed good relations with the Biden administration, which it helped in the American hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan three years ago.
While organized as a private company, the Al-Jazeera television network is the voice of Qatar’s regime. Founded in 1996 and financed by the then-emir of Qatar, it has described terrorist attacks that killed Israeli non-combatants as martyrdom operations and even posted articles describing Israel as “the Zionist entity.” For years, Al-Jazeera aired all of Osama bin Laden’s speeches. The late Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yusuf Al-Qaradawi was based in Doha and for years hosted a prime-time program on the network. The war on Israel was declared on Al-Jazeera by Hamas military commander Muhammad Deif last October 7. Its operations in Israel were finally terminated by Jerusalem in May.
Qatar has been using the immense wealth it has accumulated to turn Al-Jazeera into an international media conglomerate, spreading Muslim Brotherhood propaganda, Hamas’ original sponsor, on a global scale. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by the cleric Hassan al-Banna as a reaction to his perception that the Muslim world had become week in relation to the West. The royal family of Qatar has since been using the Muslim Brotherhood to minimize political opposition against them. In exchange for allowing the Brotherhood to use the country as a base for its international operations, the Brotherhood makes sure that there is no political threat based on organized religion against the Qatari monarchy.
A major shock to Qatar’s economy occurred when some Gulf Cooperation Council members — Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — imposed an embargo on Qatar from 2017 to 2021. The reason for the embargo was Qatar’s support for the Brotherhood.
Qatar owns other news media that are equally awful. The London-based daily newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi in June published an article entitled “War Criminal Blinken Wages Diplomatic Campaign to Eliminate Palestinian Resistance and Buy Time for Israeli War in Gaza.”
Qatar is not a neutral agent, despite its attempts to portray itself as such. Time and again, it has supported the region’s most radical nations and paramilitaries, all to the detriment of American and Western interests. Its malign influence activities the United States reflect the broader issue of foreign manipulation in America’s political landscape.
“Qatar has been playing a dual role since the beginning of the Gaza war. On the one hand, it is a well-known supporter of Hamas, and even finances it with a lot of money, and on the other hand, it is trying to help in the deal for the release of the Israeli hostages,” remarked Dr. Udi Levy, a former senior official of Israel’s Mossad spy agency in April. But the U.S. relationship with Qatar will continue as long as the American government finds it useful in the on-again off-again negotiations to have Hamas release the remaining Israeli hostages.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
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Artist alters Whitney Museum display screens to protest Israel’s conduct in Gaza
The Whitney Museum of American Art has over 27,000 pieces in its collection. On July 3, artist Jonathan Allen tried to add a couple more to call attention to what he considers “Israeli atrocities.”
Late that night, Allen vandalized two electronic displays outside the Whitney, a contemporary art museum in Manhattan, plastering them with posters accusing Israel of genocide and targeting Palestinian children.
Staff soon removed the posters after being notified of the vandalism, the museum said in an emailed statement.“I think it’s important artists take risks and use private property and unconventional spaces towards political and social ends,” Allen told the Forward.
Whitney Director of Communications Ashley Reese wrote, “The Museum maintains a zero-tolerance policy for vandalism, harassment, discrimination, or bias of any kind.”
This is not the first time a pro-Palestinian protest has targeted the Whitney. Last year, the museum planned to hold a performance mourning Palestinians killed during the Israel-Hamas war. When footage surfaced of a performer telling audience members to leave a previous performance if they “believe in Israeli in any incarnation,” the Whitney canceled the event.
Shortly afterward, the group Writers Against the War on Gaza held a protest at the Whitney, passing out brochures demanding “the removal of board members tied to genocide, militarism and apartheid.”
Allen’s installation is part of his Interruptions series, where he puts translucent poster-size vinyl stickers with political messages atop digital advertising screens to create a flickering effect.
Since 2019, Allen has installed over 400 interruptions, which began with traditional paper posters. When New York City and the MTA added more digital ad displays, he transformed the posters into their current iteration, most recently featuring quotes from public figures that criticize either Trump or Israel. Allen installs most of his interruptions on city-owned property, such as sidewalk ads or subway monitors — even the children’s entrance of the Brooklyn Public Library.
He acknowledges his project “is temporary vandalism, technically,” but explains that the pieces are very easily removable and don’t damage the displays underneath.
For his most recent interruption, Allen used monitors owned by the Whitney without authorization from the museum. Allen chose the Whitney because he believes it “is the contemporary corporate sphere of the art industry.”
“I feel like bringing attention to this sort of issue in that context was important,” he said.
A joint Instagram post by Allen and Eye on Palestine said the installation highlights the findings of a recent UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry report.
The Israeli government has heavily criticized the report, calling it “defamatory” and a “libellous sham,” and from its inception has accused the commission of bias. Israel did not provide any information to the commission for the investigation.
“The Israeli security forces have deliberately targeted and killed Palestinian children,” one poster says. Another poster stated: “If you can’t draw the line at genocide, you probably can’t draw the line at democracy.”
Critics of the installation echo the Israeli government’s criticisms. Hen Mazzig, an Israeli writer and content creator, called the display “blood libel.” The StopAntisemitism campaign also criticized the display on X. “they don’t care about Palestinian children,” they wrote. “The goal is to vilify Jews.”
Allen believes this is a mischaracterization. “I fully support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, and I support Israel, insofar as its right to exist,” he said. “I don’t think the discussion about what’s happening in Gaza hinges at all on that.”
Though Allen’s installations are typically removed “within hours,” he says each one “has a second life, because it lives on social media, which is where it tends to get the most attention.”
The post Artist alters Whitney Museum display screens to protest Israel’s conduct in Gaza appeared first on The Forward.
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European leaders downplayed the Holocaust. Now Trump is using their tactics against the Smithsonian
A new White House report accusing the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History of “extreme political activism,” and demanding the museum revise its exhibitions to elide the darker elements of the nation’s past, mirrors a troubling trend in Europe, where right-wing nationalist governments have spent the past decade forcing museums to minimize their countries’ roles in the Holocaust.
The 162-page report, issued this past weekend, faults the Smithsonian museum for dwelling, in the administration’s eyes, too heavily on slavery, and for teaching about race and gender in ways that President Donald Trump’s administration considers to “divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.” It follows a 2025 executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” that directed federal institutions to purge “improper ideology” from their exhibits.
Reasonable people can disagree about specific details in museum exhibitions. But there is a difference between engaging in productive disagreements about historical emphases and demanding a national museum be solely devoted to make citizens feel good about their country. And the way that the latter approach has been used to downplay crimes against Jews in Europe should give American Jews, in particular, pause about it being deployed in their own country.
Propaganda in Poland
In 2017, Poland opened a permanent exhibit at the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, which delivered a multi-layered account of the war. The exhibit highlighted Polish suffering under Nazi occupation as well as the Holocaust and the pogroms Poles carried out against their own Jewish neighbors, including the infamous 1941 Jedwabne massacre, in which several hundred Jews were burned alive in a barn by their fellow townspeople.
The right-wing Law and Justice party, known as PiS, called the exhibit “not Polish enough,” forced a merger that replaced the museum’s director, and altered the exhibition to foreground Polish heroism while softening material on Polish complicity in the extermination of three million Polish Jews. Five hundred eminent historians labeled those changes an attempt to turn the museum into a “propaganda institution.”
The following year, the Polish parliament went further, criminalizing any claim that Poland bore responsibility for Nazi crimes, with penalties of up to three years in prison. Yad Vashem warned that the law “jeopardizes the free and open discussion of the part of the Polish people in the persecution of the Jews at the time.” Under international pressure, Poland later dropped the criminal penalty, but the campaign to legislate a flattering national story had made its point.
Hungarian ahistoricism
The nation of Hungary offers an even starker case.
Former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government spent years developing the House of Fates, a Holocaust museum on the site of the Budapest rail station from which 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz in a matter of weeks in 1944. Yad Vashem and Hungary’s largest Jewish federation, Mazsihisz, boycotted the project, warning that its planned narrative would leave visitors believing “the citizens of Hungary were essentially blameless for what was inflicted upon their Jewish neighbors.” In fact, Hungarian gendarmes rounded up and deported their Jewish neighbors with minimal direct German involvement.
Orbán separately made efforts to rehabilitate Miklós Horthy, Hungary’s Nazi-allied wartime ruler, as an “exceptional statesman,” and backed a Budapest statue honoring Holocaust victims that was widely seen as covering up Hungary’s role in the deportations by depicting the country as an angel attacked by a Nazi eagle. The implication: all Hungarians were equal victims of the Nazi occupation, an idea that conveniently overlooks the fact that the Nazis had many Hungarian collaborators.
The museum sat empty for years amid the dispute. Jewish leaders in Hungary have only recently reported progress toward a version that names Hungarian, and not just German, responsibility for atrocities against Jews.
The dangers of whitewashing
The recent histories of Poland and Hungary demonstrate that when a government decides that its national story shouldn’t include honest examinations of what its people did to vulnerable minorities, the nation’s integrity as a whole is imperiled.
This is the same demand the Trump administration has issued to the Smithsonian. The White House report does not claim that the museum has facts wrong; rather, it objects that the museum treats history as a tool for “social justice.” The administration demands, instead, “patriotic history” — exactly the same ultimatum issued by governments in Warsaw and Budapest.
Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III says his institution’s goal is scholarship, not partisanship. The administration’s answer is that scholarship itself is the problem, if the story it tells is not celebratory enough.
The kind of “patriotic history” the administration wants entails, instead, a thinner historical accounting, built to avoid making visitors uncomfortable with the actions of their ancestors. A country pressured to foreground its heroism while pushing its failures to the margins is one that shows its own people that, effectively, minorities do not belong.
When Poland won’t discuss Jedwabne, or Hungary won’t acknowledge its own role in the deportation of Hungarian Jews, they send the message that they don’t see Jewish citizens as fully human — in either the past or the present. A U.S. that treats discussing the facts of slavery — or the immigration quotas that helped trap Jews in Europe — as a betrayal of national values is one that suggests the people it wronged, and their descendants, don’t matter.
A serious national museum has to depict a nation’s failures and achievements in the same frame. What the White House is proposing for the Smithsonian is very different, and very dangerous. Jews have watched this play out before and seen where it leads. A nation’s museums are essential to its capacity to reckon with the worst of its history. This is a capacity worth defending in Gdańsk, in Budapest, and now in Washington.
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Mamdani more popular than Netanyahu among U.S. Jews, new poll shows
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose outspoken criticism of Israel has made him a frequent target of Jewish and pro-Israel advocates, is viewed more favorably by American Jews than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to a new poll released Tuesday.
The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey of 1,022 Jewish adults nationwide, conducted from June 11 through June 17, found that 44% of American Jews hold a favorable opinion of Zohran Mamdani, compared with 39% who view him unfavorably. By contrast, just 32% of respondents said they have a favorable opinion of Netanyahu, while 59% said they have a negative view of the longtime Israeli leader
The poll suggests that Mamdani’s positions on Israel have not prevented him from maintaining a net-positive image among American Jews overall.
Mamdani won just 26% of the Jewish vote in last year’s mayoral election. Since taking office, he has faced scrutiny from Jewish leaders and Zionist organizations over his sharp criticism of Israel and embrace of Palestinian activism that is shaping his tenure as leader of the city with the largest population of Jews outside Israel. Mamdani refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and said he wouldn’t travel to the country. He has also pledged to order the arrest of Netanyahu if he visits the city on his watch, complying with an ICC arrest warrant. That will be tested in September when Netanyahu arrives to speak at the United Nations General Assembly.
Recently, the mayor skipped the annual Israel Day parade, where participation is a longstanding tradition for New York City leaders, and he also called for divestment from Israel’s economy. In congressional races in New York City, Mamdani actively campaigned for candidates who made inflammatory statements on Israel.
Netanyahu, who has been in office since 2009 except for an 18-month hiatus from 2021 to 2022, has seen his standing with Americans erode in recent years despite longstanding ties to the United States. He spent part of his childhood in the Philadelphia area, attended college in Boston and served as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations in the 1980s. Netanyahu has often spoken directly to American audiences, giving frequent interviews to U.S. television networks more often than he has spoken to Israeli media.
The AP survey, which had a reported margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points, also found that American Jews are increasingly critical of the Israeli government’s conduct in the Gaza war and its handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
While a majority of American Jews — 73% — said Israel’s initial military response to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack was justified, just 42% said they supported the continued military operations in Gaza through last year’s ceasefire. The survey also found that, similar to the broader American public, 30% of American Jews believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.
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