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Editorial Note
The State of Qatar, known for being the largest financier of Hamas, has also invested millions of dollars in American campuses to promote Islam and anti-Israel themes. It has been doing so for four decades.
Starting in the 1990s, the Qatari government has sponsored groups that could impact the anti-Israel discourse on campus and beyond. Omar Barghouti, one of the pioneers of BDS and the co-founder of The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) is a Qatari-born Palestinian.
Qatar, with its Al-Jazeera media outlet, has trumpeted the current upheaval on American campuses. Qatar responds to the riots on campus by convincing readers that the riots are part of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which “guarantees freedom of assembly and speech.” It quotes the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) open letter to public and private universities, “warning them against violating the rights of protesters.”
Al-Jazeera claimed that: “Dozens of faith, civil rights and progressive groups in the United States have expressed solidarity with university students protesting against US support for Israel amid the war on Gaza. The groups – which include the Working Families Party, IfNotNow Movement, Sunrise Movement, Movement for Black Lives, and Gen-Z for Change – lauded the student protesters in a joint statement… The signatories also included the Arab American Institute, MPower Change Action Fund, Greenpeace USA and Justice Democrats.”
An online perusal of MPower Change shows its purpose is to “empower American Muslims to realize their faith values and translate it into local, state and national policies that safeguard the freedom to move, work, and be Muslim. We achieve this through grassroots organizing, political education and training, mobilizing Muslim voters, and leading campaigns that impact Muslims.”
The various groups that Qatar promotes wrote an open letter, “We commend the students who are exercising their right to protest peacefully despite an overwhelming atmosphere of pressure, intimidation and retaliation, to raise awareness about Israel’s assault on Gaza – with US weapons and funding. These students have come forth with clear demands that their universities divest from corporations profiting from Israeli occupation, and demanding safe environments for Palestinians across their campuses.”
Qatar urges American universities to divest from Israel. Columbia University President Minouche Shafik released a statement saying, “While the University will not divest from Israel, the University offered to develop an expedited timeline for review of new proposals from the students by the Advisory Committee for Socially Responsible Investing, the body that considers divestment matters.”
Qatar tried to blame pro-Israel groups for escalating the riots. It accused President Shafik, “Her statement failed to mention Palestinians or the anti-Arab and Islamophobic bigotry that demonstrators have reported receiving from counterprotesters.”
Qatar’s goals are not new, in July 2019, as IAM reported “The Campus War Against Israel“ that, over the years, the academy has become a prominent venue for anti-Israel activity. Arab oil-wealthy states invested large sums of money in Western Universities to buy influence. With the Middle East Centers or Islamic Centers, it allowed them to teach a revision of history, tainting Israel in a negative light and influencing who would be invited to teach and research in the social sciences. Staunch enemies of Israel were recruited, as well as Israelis who are critics of Israel.
As IAM reported, in addition to the Qatari direct involvement, some Jewish American scholars have also been involved in the indirect anti-Israel Qatari campaign on campus. Using Jewish academics is known as “tokenism” to deflect accusations of anti-Semitism. As can be expected, the “tokenists” ignore human rights abuses in Iran and the Arab States but highlight the alleged misconduct of Israel. For example, a Jewish anti-Israel scholar named Rebecca L. Stein, an associate professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, who signed a “call for divestment and pressure against Israeli apartheid,” has also been engaged in a program intending to defame Israel through scholarships. The program is a collaboration between the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies (known as the Doha Institute) in Qatar and Birzeit University (BZU). The Arab Center is headed by former MK Azmi Bishara, who sought refuge in Qatar after escaping allegations of spying for Hezbollah. The program created a Master’s degree in Israel Studies, which began operating in 2015.
The program’s purpose was to “produce Palestinian knowledge of Israeli society” aimed at “fundamentally remaking the dominant paradigm of Israel Studies as it has been configured in the United States and increasingly in Great Britain, with its proud ‘advocacy’ mandate on behalf of the Israeli state. Birzeit’s program turns this paradigm inside out, providing students with a radical alternative.” The idea began informally in 2010 in conversations between the President and the faculty of Birzeit with the Ramallah-based Institute for Palestine Studies. The faculty disagreed on the new program’s name – with some wanting to call it “settler-colonial studies “and others preferring “Israel Studies,” The Palestinian Ministry of Education approved the latter title, and the funding was secured from Qatar.
The program encouraged students to pursue Ph.D. at Western universities to produce anti-Israel scholarships. One such student was Izz Al-Deen Araj. During his MA studies, he “started to think about Israel as a settler-colonial society, not [merely] as soldiers…We understand the conflict through one model: settler-colonialism or apartheid.” When another student, Marah Khalifeh, began the program, “Israel was something abstract: the enemy, the colonizer.” Now, with the “in-depth knowledge about Israeli society…It’s part of knowing your enemy, part of the knowledge of resistance.” According to Khalife, “It’s all about the type of knowledge we are trying to produce. We are trying to produce a Palestinian knowledge of Israeli society… to create our own tools.”
In 2019, IAM ended its post by asking: When will the West take notice of the war against Israel on its campuses?
The wave of protest following the Hamas attack on Israel shows clearly that the West did not take notice of the highly antisemitic and radically biased anti-Israel education that generations of students have received. To avoid repeating the chaos, the universities have to take a closer look at what their students are being taught.
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