‘Foreign Infiltration’: Qatar Funnels $1 Billion Into Georgetown University to Grow Influence, New Report Shows

Georgetown University has received over $1 billion in funding from the Qatari government over the last two decades, according to a new report arguing the money has compromised the institution’s curricula development and positions on major geopolitical issues which bear on the national security of the US.

The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism Policy (ISGAP) on Tuesday released a report titled, “Foreign Infiltration: Georgetown University, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood,” a 132-page document that reveals dozens of examples of ways in which Georgetown’s interests are allegedly conflicted, having been divided between its foreign benefactors, the country in which it was founded in 1789, and even its Catholic heritage.

“The Qatari regime targets Georgetown due to its unrivaled access to current and future leaders. Over two decades, that investment has paid off — embedding Muslim Brotherhood scholars and narratives deep within the American academic and political culture,” Dr. Charles Asher Small, executive director of ISGAP, said in a statement on the report. “This masterful use of soft power is not only about Georgetown. It is how authoritarian regimes are buying access, narrative control, and ideological legitimacy — and too many universities are willing sellers.”

According to the report, the trouble begins with Washington, DC-based Georgetown’s decision to establish a campus on Qatari soil in 2005, the GU-Q located in the country’s Doha Metropolitan Area. The campus has “become a feeder school for the Qatari bureaucracy,” the report explains, enabling a government that has disappeared dissidents, imprisoned sexual minorities without due process, and facilitated the spread of radical jihadist ideologies.

In the US, meanwhile, Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding “minimize the threat of Islamist extremism” while priming students to be amenable to the claims of the anti-Zionist movement, according to ISGAP. The ideological force behind this pedagogy is the Muslim Brotherhood, to which the Qatari government has supplied logistic and financial support.

US lawmakers are currently moving to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as an official terrorist organization.

The ISGAP report calls on policymakers to take action now and prevent the university’s becoming any closer to a country whose ideals threaten US interests and ideals.

“It is time to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. As we saw, pro-Hamas antisemitism in the US has moved from rhetoric to outright terrorism on the streets of Washington,” Asher Small said, referring to the recent antisemitic shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers. “Just three miles from the site of the murders outside the Jewish Museum, Georgetown has been the center of a 50-year indoctrination campaign aimed at infiltrating the highest echelons of US society with murderous antisemitism.”

ISGAP chair Natan Sharansky, who is known across the world for his human rights advocacy, added, “Our goal is to protect liberal values and the principles of equality within the American academy, of which higher education is a vital institution of the very foundation of democracy. Sadly, our enemies with their billions understand this only too well.”

ISGAP’s report came out a month after the Middle East Forum released its own report exposing the extent of Qatar’s far-reaching financial entanglements within American institutions, shedding light on what experts described as a coordinated effort to influence US policy making and public opinion in Doha’s favor. The findings showed that Qatar has attempted to expand its soft power in the US by spending $33.4 billion on business and real estate projects, over $6 billion on universities, and $72 million on American lobbyists since 2012.

Georgetown University is not the only elite institution with questionable ties, as previously reported by The Algemeiner.

According to a recent “preliminary” report published by nonprofit watchdog NGO Monitor, Harvard University is linked to anti-Zionist nongovernmental organizations and other entities acting as proxy organizations for terrorist groups that warrant scrutiny and reproach, .

Titled, “Advocacy NGOs in Academic Frameworks: Harvard University Case Study,” the report presented copious evidence that Harvard’s academic centers, including Harvard Law School, have come under the influence of Al-Haq and Addameer — two groups identified by the Israeli government as agents and propaganda manufacturers for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an internationally designated terrorist organization. The NGOs, the report added, influence research and institutional culture, tilting the ideological balance of the campus toward anti-Zionism.

“The report demonstrates the major contribution from prominent advocacy NGOs to the atmosphere of propaganda and antisemitism at Harvard, particularly through frameworks claiming human rights agendas,” Professor Gerald Steinberg, who authored the report alongside Dr. Adi Schwartz, said in a statement. “The close cooperation between prominent NGOs and Harvard academic programs warrants urgent scrutiny. The blurred lines between scholarship and advocacy threaten academic integrity and risk further inflaming campus tensions.”

Georgetown, meanwhile, has been the site of antisemitic incidents and rampant anti-Israel activism in recent months. In April, for example, a perpetrator graffitied an antisemitic message in a residence hall.

That same month, Georgetown’s student government had to reschedule an anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) referendum that it initially scheduled to take place during the Passover holiday following outcry from Jewish students.

Last year, a building at Georgetown’s campus in Washington, DC was vandalized with pro-terrorist graffiti indicating support for Hamas.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

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