“Hamas Patron” Qatar has given more than $5.6 billion to 61 American schools since 2007, including Ivy Leagues such as Harvard University, Yale University, Cornell University, and Stanford University, according to a Feb. 9, 2024, report from The Washington Free Beacon.
Qatar is not the only nation to be supportive of “learning” in the West while simultaneously having deep ties to Hamas and other terrorist organizations—not to mention exhibiting a very anti-liberal stance and unenlightened mind at home.
According to another report from the Beacon in 2023 focused on one notorious example:
China, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Turkey have poured millions of dollars into the University of Delaware since the school launched the Biden Institute, President Joe Biden’s domestic policy think tank led by his sister. … Since the Biden Institute was established in 2017, the University of Delaware has received $6,704,250 in funding from China, $23,610,996 from Saudi Arabia, $2,513,646 from Oman and $1,673,847 from Turkey, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education.
Every one of these “generous donors” is either explicitly or implicitly hostile to Western civilization and everything it stands for, prompting a simple question: Why are nations that are notoriously hostile to freedom, diversity, women’s rights — basically all Western values—donating billions of dollars to fund, of all things, liberal American universities?
The answer seems clear enough: elite universities produce American leaders, and foreign money — “donations” — buys power and influence over those very same future leaders, not least by ensuring that what they “learn” — or are indoctrinated into believing — is beneficial to them, the donors, while also detrimental to the United States.
All of this was made abundantly clear by a blockbuster report published by the Department of Education under the Trump administration in 2020. It thoroughly documented the “purchased” influence foreign nations have on America’s most prestigious universities and, as a result, on what America’s current and upcoming generations of analysts and policymakers will think and believe.
Among those “gifts” has been a whopping $5.6 billion from the Muslim Brotherhood’s number one state backer, Qatar, which also runs the Arabic propaganda network, Al Jazeera. Another $1.1 billion came from the chief disseminator of “radical” Islamic ideology, Saudi Arabia, and nearly $1.5 billion came from China.
As the 2020 Dept. of Ed. report explained,
[A]t least some of these foreign sources are hostile to the United States and are targeting their investments (i.e., ‘gifts’ and ‘contracts’) to project soft power, steal sensitive and proprietary research, and spread propaganda.
As one example of how these “hostile donations” work, in March 2019, the University of North Carolina’s Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies and the Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies — both recipients of big bucks from Islamic nations that hate Israel — sponsored an event described as a “Three-Day Anti-Israel Hate-Fest."
Following the event, the Dept. of Education warned the Consortium, in a letter dated August 29, 2019, to stop misusing federal grants by advancing “ideological priorities.” According to the letter:
The Duke-UNC CMES appears to lack balance as it offers very few, if any, programs focused on the historic discrimination faced by, and current circumstances of, religious minorities in the Middle East, including Christians, Jews, Baha’is, Yadizis, Kurds, Druze, and others. Also, in your activities for elementary and secondary students and teachers, there is a considerable emphasis placed on the understanding the positive aspects of Islam, while there is an absolute absence of any similar focus on the positive aspects of Christianity, Judaism, or any other religion or belief system in the Middle East. This lack of balance of perspectives is troubling.
Similarly, a 2018 Daily Caller report found that “elite U.S. universities took more than half a billion dollars” from Saudi Arabia in gifts and donations between 2011 and 2017. As far back as 2005, Georgetown and Harvard each received $20 million “to support Islamic studies on their respective campuses.”
Here, again, the question arises: why would a nation such as Saudi Arabia — which treats women like chattel, insists that all Muslims are obligated to hate all non-Muslims, and arrests and tortures Christians for “plotting to celebrate Christmas” — become a leading financial supporter of America’s liberal arts?
The answer should be clear: to influence what students are taught about the Middle East and Islam.
The DOE’s 2020 expose (section E.5) on Georgetown University’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, “exemplifies how foreign money can advance a particular country’s worldview within U.S. academic institutions.” As such, it is worth quoting at length:
[T]he Center could advance Islamic ideology in a fashion that belittles opposition, threatens academic integrity, and improperly influences future civil servants. The Center also received criticism for deceptively labeling itself as pluralistic; according to critics, the ‘Christian’ studies portion of the Center was a ‘misnomer’ as there was no Christian representation…
This donation empowered the Saudi Arabian government to advance a particular narrative about Islamic society to the West via a legitimate Western institution like Georgetown University…..
The Saudi Arabian government had successfully impacted American foreign policy thinking through money alone. The Saudi Arabian government invested significantly into the dissemination of its favored ideological views at Georgetown University and several other U.S. academic institutions.
The report further adds that, while raking in and failing to report these billions in foreign “gifts,” these same universities “depend on direct and indirect subsidies from U.S. taxpayers, including through Federal student loans that have encumbered Americans with staggering debt loads, to operate.” Even so, “the evidence suggests institutional decision-making is generally divorced from any sense of obligation to our taxpayers or concern for our American national interests, security, or values.”
Related: Understanding Islam: Theory vs. Experience
In all spheres of life, education is an indicator of the potential for success; its opposite, ignorance — or worse, indoctrination in falsehoods — is an indicator of potential failure. Clearly, one of the reasons U.S. foreign policy, from China to the Middle East, has been a disaster is because policymakers and the advisors and analysts on whom they depend are products of academic indoctrination financed by those who are hostile to the United States.
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