Excerpt:
Qatar Foundation International (QFI), the American affiliate of the nominally private Qatar Foundation (QF), claims to be independent of the Qatari regime and even from its own parent organization QF (which is a deeply important tool of Qatari statecraft). Its representatives and executives claim to be interested only in its public mission of supporting Arabic-language studies in the United States, Canada, Brazil, and elsewhere.
Yet QFI and the Qatar Foundation have made strenuous efforts to block the kind of transparency people expect from civil-society organizations. In 2011, QFI terminated its nonprofit foundation and replaced it with a private "not-for-profit" LLC, presumably to avoid making IRS-required disclosures about its operations. What kinds of disclosures were so problematic? Perhaps that the board of directors included Qatari regime figures, such as Sheikh Jassim bin Abdulaziz Al-Thani and Khalid Al-Kuwari....
Now, with the affair of murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, we are finally getting a better picture of QFI's true agenda....