Public Enemy: Unmasking the Qatar Connections

“The name Yahya means the one who lives. They thought of him as dead but he lives. Like his namesake, Yahya bin Zakariya, he will live on and they will be gone.”

These were the words of Sheika Moza Bint Nasser  eulogizing Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas mastermind behind the Oct. 7 massacre, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). Moza, the mother of current Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and chair of the Qatar Foundation, is emblematic of the double game played by Qatar, using Western outreach to cover up its nefarious activities.

“Qatar has been funding Hamas,” Middle East historian Asaf Romirowsky, who heads Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and the Associate for the Study of the Middle East and North Africa, told the Journal. According to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), the Qatari regime has funneled nearly $2 billion to the Hamas government in Gaza since 2007, and “pledged $360 million of annual support to the enclave in January 2021, in part to subsidize government salaries. About a third of Qatari support is in the form of fuel that Hamas authorities sell for cash.”

“Doha has been harboring Hamas leadership, including Khaled Mashaal… while at the same time they’re buying institutions, including K-12 institutions, to normalize this narrative within American society,” added Romirowsky.

While Qatar has portrayed itself as an ally to the West, acting, for example, as a go-between in negotiations to free the hostages held by Hamas, Qatari money has flown into American schools and universities to indoctrinate American students.

Moza has been a leading emblem of that double game.

She is “extremely pro-Palestinian, extremely pro-Hamas,” Romirowsky says, adding that “one of the most famous quotes she’s known for” is when she said at a recent conference in Turkey that “a Palestinian child dies every 10 minutes.” While portraying herself as an “image of elegance” and a “fashion icon,” Romirowsky said that “the connectivity and the support for Hamas [and] the Palestinian cause at large is front and center within her narrative.”

Jewish Insider (JI) also noted that Moza said during a speech in 2023 that “artificial intelligence [is] used to fabricate stories, falsify facts, and block publications, photos, and videos that include atrocities committed by the Israeli occupation forces against the people of Gaza and the West Bank,” which JI characterized as an apparent claim that AI has been used to fabricate “Hamas atrocities against Israelis.”

“It’s not only her,” Romirowsky said, “but her role is unique and influential because of who she is,” as it “gives her this imagery as a legitimate voice while at the same time attempting to downplay the ties to Hamas and everything else. That’s how they’re playing it.”

Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president of research for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), told the Journal that though Moza does not have a formal role in the current Qatari government structure, she is the matriarch of the royal family “and is heavily involved in the dispersing of funds to the various causes and alliances that Qatar supports” and has “immense clout within Qatar…The decision to  eulogize and lionize the architect of the 10/7 slaughter is to me not surprising but should be very clarifying to Qatar’s partners and allies.”

Schanzer pointed out that Qatar, in addition to sponsoring Hamas, are “proponents of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is an ideological driver of Hamas but also al-Qaeda, the Taliban and ISIS. The Qataris have long played a double game with the international community where they have invested in the West and gotten involved with international multilateral bodies purportedly in the name of peace while simultaneously financing and supporting a range of bad actors that have destabilized the Middle East and in fact the West.”

A 2010 feature in Haaretz, titled “The Power Behind the Throne?” described Moza as “one of the most impressive and influential women in the Middle East. Her name appears on the Forbes magazine list of the world’s 100 most powerful women, and the British newspaper Guardian quoted a top fashion designer who said that ‘not since Jackie O has any first lady had such global resonance in terms of fashion.’”

The Haaretz article also noted that “it seems there isn’t a single public institution in Qatar or international organization involved in education in which she doesn’t play a role.”

“She’s heavily involved at the U.N. You’ll see her getting up and speaking at various committees at the U.N. and various bodies at the U.N. purportedly in the cause of peace,” Schanzer said. “Eulogizing a mass murderer is probably not in line with that objective.”

Born in Qatar in 1959, Moza grew up in Egypt and Kuwait because her family was in exile after her father was imprisoned for being a political opponent of the Qatari emir at the time. She subsequently married Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani––the son of the then-Qatari emir––in 1977, becoming the second of his three wives. Al-Thani took the throne in a bloodless coup from his father in 1995, and Al-Thani’s son took the throne from him in 2013. Scholar Osama Fauzy alleged in his book “Rulers and Women” that Moza “may even have been among [the] planners” of the 1995 coup, according to Haaretz, and that she “was also behind the political purge conducted by the new leader among his brothers and their sons, using the claim that they had tried to oust him—in order to promote her own children to senior positions.”

“There was this moment where Qatar had gotten kind of a bad reputation, so much so that the surrounding Gulf states had turned against the Qatari regime, and it was around that time that we began to see a pivot,” Schanzer said. “There was a smooth transition, took a lot of people by surprise but what I think we can say with certainty is that the ideology for the regime never changed… it was continuity, not change.” Schanzer attributed the pivot to “a decision in the royal family” and that “her role didn’t change, everybody else’s did… she was still the matriarch of the regime, the difference is that her husband no longer had that primary role, but her son did. The Al-Thani family continued to preside over this immense wealth, and they continued to sink massive investments all over the world as a means of amassing influence and power.”

Exposing the facade

Schanzer attributed Qatari money as the primary reason for why “people like Moza [have] the access she has enjoyed. Western leaders and entities have been persuaded to look the other way because of the immense amount of money that is being wielded here.” He added that Qatar has more than 300,000 citizens “and it controls more than 10 percent of the world’s energy and this affords them outsized influence.”

“She makes a significant concerted effort to create the façade that she wants, that she knows will resonate with the West while at the same time being able to layer the pro-Hamas narrative,” Romirowsky said, adding that “the more concerning part [is] the kind of power she yields has to do with the fact that she controls The Qatar Foundation, which of course allowed all this money and pro-Muslim Brotherhood, pro-Hamas propaganda to infiltrate and trickle down into American society… there’s a connection between the money and the power she yields and the institutions they’re actively buying.”

The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) has released reports detailing how the Qatar Foundation that Moza chairs funneled billions of dollars to major American universities like Harvard, Yale, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, and Columbia. One ISGAP report declares that “Qatar is currently the largest foreign donor to U.S. universities” and that Columbia’s Middle East Institute “is a hub of vocal support for the BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] movement. Several of its staff members have voiced pro-Hamas sentiments following October 7, 2023.” Further, ISGAP reported in 2024 that there are some universities who have not been fully disclosing the money they have received from Qatar and that “if the law were to be enforced properly, these universities would face serious consequences.”

“There’s no coincidence where she has received honorary doctorates and Qatari gifts, you’ll see a correlation,” Romirowsky said. Indeed, ISGAP’s report on Columbia shows a picture of Moza with Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health Dr. Linda Fried launching a researching project in 2018. Romirowsky added that there’s also a correlation between Qatari money and American universities with campuses in Qatar; both Georgetown and Carnegie Mellon  have campuses in Qatar.

“I think what we can say is that it has tempered the school administrators’ will to get the problem under control,” Schanzer said regarding a possible connection between campus antisemitism and Qatari money. “In other words, when you’re getting that much money from sovereign wealth, maybe you care a little less about what alumni and parents and students have to say. I think that’s as far as we can probably go for now.”

“This goes to a larger issue [of] foreign money that has gone into American institutions with the idea of buying the politics, buying the role, and if you buy a chair or department, you also buy the complete and total narrative of how these topics are being taught in Western institutions,” Romirowsky said. “And that’s where they have been able to sanitize Hamas or Brotherhood kind of Islamist education in Western institutions.” He added that for Qatar, such spending is “a drop in a bucket and universities don’t like to say no to money, because universities kind of operate like a hedge fund.”

Additionally, the Qatar Foundation’s funding of K-12 education shows “how the foundation is being built in a very structured way even before they get to the campuses,” Romirowsky said. The New York Post reported on Oct. 26 that, according to the Network Contagion Research Institute and New York City Public School Alliance report, a map of the Middle East excluding Israel in a Brooklyn school was funded by the American arm of the Qatar Foundation and that the foundation has “donated more than $1 million to the [city’s Department of Education] for dual-language Arabic programs.”

And according to researcher Robert Williams’s Dec. 2023 piece in The Gatestone Institute, since the money to these education institutions is being funneled through the Qatar Foundation nonprofit, “the foundation can identify itself as a private organization, which enables Qatar to conceal its state funding as private donations.”

For its part, the Qatari embassy has denied wrongdoing, saying in a statement following a House Ways and Means Committee hearing that some in the hearing “repeated a false narrative that Qatar is funding American universities for malign purposes, including influencing recent incidents of campus unrest. When this same unfounded assertion was put to Avril Haines, Director of National Intelligence, at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on May 2, 2024, she said plainly there was no evidence Qatar played any role. Qatar has no desire or ability to influence anything that happens on U.S. university campuses. It is flatly untrue, for example, that Qatar is the ‘largest foreign donor to U.S. universities’ – a claim made to imply dark motives, and to undermine the strong U.S.-Qatar security and trade partnership.”

The embassy added that “six American universities have operated campuses in Qatar, educating and awarding degrees to Qatari women and men, and to students from around the world who wish to study there. These universities operate with complete independence. The contract payments to these universities fund the operating costs of the campuses in Qatar, including construction, maintenance, and faculty salaries. They are not donations, and this distinction is clearly reflected in the Department of Education data.”

To get to the bottom of Qatar’s role, Romirowsky called for a “crackdown” on the Qatar Foundation and  investigations on possible violations of Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and the tax code over the flow of Qatari money into American institutions. “There are two aspects to all of this: one is [a] FARA issue regarding foreign-country [involvement]. The other part is proving the terrorist connection as it relates to all of that,” Romirowsky said. He added that “we are not privy to the contracts between The Qatar Foundation and the universities, so there needs to be a deep dive into what those contracts actually say, so when all these universities have campuses in Qatar and what’s going on there and have lectures on these issues, to my mind there would be enough evidence to go after these matters.”

According to Gerard Filitti, Senior Counsel at The Lawfare Project, “It is not illegal for Qatari money to be flowing to US campuses; the burden is on the recipients of this funding to comply with various laws…The law that has been most widely reported on is Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965, which requires colleges to report to the Department of Education any gifts received from, as well as contracts with, any foreign source, that are valued at $250,000 or more,” Filitti said in a statement to the Journal. “The Department under the Trump Administration opened investigations into multiple universities, and concluded in October 2020 that they had failed to disclose nearly $6.5 billion of foreign gifts and contracts. Under the Biden Administration, the Department has not prioritized similar investigations, despite the concerns raised by this significant amount of dark money.”

National Review reported in 2020 that the Department of Education released a report finding that “a number of universities had not appropriately reported funding received from entities in China, Qatar, and Russia” and that several universities were being investigated over the matter; in 2022, The Washington Examiner reported that “the inquiries seem to be in a lengthy limbo” and the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the department was planning on ending the investigations. And in 2024, former U.S. Attorney Paul Moore and Prague Security Studies Institute Senior Fellow Paul Moore wrote at RealClearEducation that the department decommissioned an “interactive data table for analyzing foreign funding disclosures” that was part of an “online portal for reporting foreign source gifts and contracts valued at $250,000 or more per calendar year.” The department’s explanation for the removal of the table: a “contract change.”

In February, The Washington Free Beacon reported that Qatar has “doled out more than $243 million on lobbying efforts in the United States since 2015, with more than $16 million spent in 2023 alone.” The Free Beacon quoted both Republican Study Committee (RSC) Chair Rep. Kevin Hern (R-OK) as saying that he is putting in efforts to get investigations launched and legislation on the floor to address the matter.

“While Section 117 reporting requirements have received a modicum of attention, there has been next to no attention on the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a law that requires anyone acting on behalf of a foreign government to influence U.S. policies to disclose this relationship,” Filitti added. “Considering the amount of dark money that comes from countries whose political systems, let alone political interests, do not align with America’s democratic values, there needs to be a close examination of what, precisely, Qatar and other countries are funding. This means we need information beyond the amount of money received – we need transparency into how that money is being spent, and a frank assessment as to whether many of the universities receiving foreign funds should be treated as agents of a foreign power.”

The Al Jazeera connection

Also under the microscope lately has been Al Jazeera, the Qatari-funded network that the Israel Defense Force says has been coordinating with Hamas and that journalists for the outlets were found to be members of both Hamas and Islamic Jihad. According to FDD, “the Qatari royal family established Al Jazeera in 1996” and “if Doha sponsors the extremists, Al Jazeera amplifies their voices. Notably, the late Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, hosted a popular show on Al Jazeera through which he legitimized suicide bombings against Israelis.”

MEMRI similarly noted in a lengthy report in February  that al-Qaradawi promulgated “antisemitic, homophobic and anti-Western views and to praise the Holocaust and promise another one – this time ‘at the hand of the believers’” during his Al Jazeera show. The MEMRI report also attributed Al Jazeera to being “the prime power for toppling the secular authoritarian regime in Egypt, when Qatar, by means of Al-Jazeera, supported the Muslim Brotherhood in ousting then Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak” and noted that “two months before 9/11, Al-Jazeera gave an Al-Qaeda spokesman, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, free rein to speak un-interrupted for ten minutes, and to call for 12,000 mujahideen to join Al-Qaeda.”

Further, according to the MEMRI report and Long War Journal, Al Jazeera correspondent Tayseer Allouni was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2005 after being convicted of providing support for al-Qaeda; Allouni has denied the charges and called the sentence “political.” He went right back to working with Al Jazeeraafter being released in 2012. Allouni was also “the first to air an interview with Osama bin Laden after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack” and that in 2013, Allouni interviewed Abu Muhammad al Julani, who headed the Al Nusrah Front, which was the Syrian affiliate of al-Qaeda at the time, reported Long War Journal.

More recently, Al Jazeera provided an exclusive broadcast to Hamas commander Mohammed Deif on the morning of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in Israel. “It was, in fact, a Qatari declaration of war in the very first hours of the conflict – given the fact that it was Qatar who developed Hamas’s capabilities over a decade,” the MEMRI report stated. “Later, Qatar offered its services as a mediator between Israel and Hamas. This is the common Qatari playbook. It proved effective in Afghanistan in 2021: Qatar supported the Taliban for years, all the way until the day of the removal of the secular regime of President Ashraf Ghani, with 13 U.S. soldiers killed. It then offered its services as mediator between the U.S and the Taliban to evacuate the remaining Americans to Qatar, and since then it has been operating on the political level to provide legitimacy in the West to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.”

Notably, the MEMRI report cited various Arab journalists who have criticized Al Jazeera for also being a propaganda arm of the Iranian regime, pointing to how Al Jazeera of ignoring the 2022 protests––and the subsequent regime crackdown––against the Iranian regime after Mahsa Amini was beaten to death by the morality police for not wearing a hijab to the regime’s standards. Indeed, Qatar and Iran are two faces of the same snake; Qatar camouflages its support of terror by buying influence and indoctrinating the west, while Iran wreaks havoc through its terror proxies whose chief mission is the destruction of Israel.

In those efforts, Al Jazeera is never too far away.

“Al Jazeera has been a mouthpiece of Hamas, not to mention al-Qaeda and the insurgency of Iraq, the fight for Afghanistan, the Qataris have been involved in this from the start,” Schanzer said. “You’ve got to understand here, the Qataris were also the people who established the Taliban embassy in their country with the goal of negotiating an American exit from the country, which obviously ended in disaster… we have evidence of al-Qaeda financiers and ISIS financiers that have found shelter in Qatar. So none of this surprising when you see Sheika Moza come out and say what she did about Sinwar.”

“The fact that Al Jazeera is that platform that basically allows for active terrorists to use it as a quasi-media platform that gives a façade of Westernism vs. the reality of it, that’s all part of the winning of hearts and minds. They’re doing that through media, education, this is exactly the tactic that has been used by the Qataris to buy influence in the United States,” Romirowsky said.

And yet, in April the Biden administration criticized the Israeli government for taking efforts to shut down Al Jazeera’s operations in Israel, with State Department spokesman Matthew Miller saying at the time: “We support the independent free press anywhere in the world, and much of what we know about what has happened in Gaza is because of reporters who are there doing their jobs, including reporters from Al Jazeera.” This is what prompted MEMRI to republish their February report in May.

Schanzer said that Moza has “a very important role to play here with Qatar, its foreign policy, its dispersal of funds worldwide, which continues at an alarming rate. You have to start to ask yourself, what does a country of 330,000 people—what do they want with American education? Why are they supporting terror groups? Why are they investing in the West? This is a dangerous regime with no power to speak of other than ideology and money. But when they wield them together, it is something that I find extremely troubling.”

He called for Qatar to “be identified as a state sponsor of terror” and to “be stripped of its major non-NATO ally status here in the United States. We should move our airbase from Qatar… we should not be operating there. We should be distancing ourselves from this dangerous regime.”

The military base that Schanzer is referring to, the Al Udeid Air Base, is located in Qatar and is the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East. The Biden administration reportedly reached an agreement with Qatar in January to continue using the base for another 10 years. Qatar has reportedly restricted the U.S. from using the airbase to launch strikes against Iran.

Schanzer also called for Moza to be “condemned” and that statements like hers eulogizing Sinwar “should not go unanswered.”

Beyond its Hamas and Iran connections, Qatar has also come under fire for its human rights abuses, especially its treatment of women.

According to Human Rights Watch, “Women in Qatar must obtain permission from their male guardians to marry, pursue higher education on government scholarships, work in many government jobs, travel abroad until certain ages, and receive some forms of reproductive health care.”

Also, “Unmarried women who report sexual violence can be prosecuted for non-marital sex if authorities do not believe them with a penalty of up to seven years’ imprisonment, as well as floggings if they are Muslim.”

As Romirowsky sums it up: “There is no pressure coming on them. They try to play it both ways. This needs to stop.”