This week, the Baha’i International Community revealed that Qatar is expelling four Baha’is who serve or have served the volunteer institutions that tend to their community’s welfare. Two are already gone; two are packing. Between them, the four have lived in Qatar for a combined 162 years and support six dependents, including elderly, infirm, and disabled parents pushed out ahead of them so their medical care would not collapse mid-expulsion. No deportation orders were issued. No charges were filed. Officials delivered the news verbally, citing only “public order,” after quietly locking the four out of the residency section of the Interior Ministry’s mandatory smartphone app. Without paperwork there is nothing to appeal, no asylum claim to document, no case file for human rights bodies to review. That is the design. One of the four asked the only question that matters: “How do you say goodbye to a place that holds your entire life?”
Without paperwork there is nothing to appeal, no asylum claim to document, no case file for human rights bodies to review.
Call it what the Baha’is call it: religious cleansing, executed by administrative memo. The community has lived in Qatar for more than 80 years. Human Rights Watch has documented the deportation of some 14 Baha’is between 2003 and 2025 for no discernible reason beyond their faith, alongside the state’s refusal to grant Baha’is the “certificate of good conduct” required for employment, its obstruction of the community’s cemetery, and its rejection of Baha’i marriage certificates. The Baha’i International Community counts more than 20 families, roughly 100 people, forced out over the past 15 years, and has told the United Nations that hundreds have been expelled across three generations through security clearances weaponized since the 1980s. In July 2025, UN experts protested the deportation and blacklisting of Wahid Bahji, a community assembly member born and raised in Qatar.
Then there is Remy Rowhani, the 71-year-old chair of the Baha’i National Spiritual Assembly and a former International Chamber of Commerce regional director. Detained at Doha’s airport in December 2024 and rearrested in April 2025, he was sentenced that August to five years in prison over social media posts that prosecutors said “cast doubt on the foundations of the Islamic religion.” The posts celebrated Qatari national holidays. When rights groups objected, the prosecution demanded a longer sentence. Only after UN experts, Human Rights Watch, and the international press made the case radioactive did an appeals court quash the conviction and free Rowhani in October, after more than five months of arbitrary detention. Doha absorbed the lesson: Prosecutions draw cameras; undocumented expulsions do not. Ten months later, four more Baha’is are being disappeared by verbal order.
This is the emirate that markets itself as the indispensable mediator, the interfaith host, the modernizing exception. While its neighbors signed the Abraham Accords and built ministries of tolerance, Qatar blacklisted the infirm. The government that bankrolls Al Jazeera’s sermons on Western bigotry runs a confessional purge at home and lodged Hamas’s politburo in five-star comfort; Israel’s September 2025 strike on Hamas leaders in Doha only confirmed whose capital the group calls home.
None of this survives without Western cover, and the cover is bought. When the Department of Education’s foreign-funding portal went live in January, it confirmed Qatar as the largest foreign funder of American higher education on record: $7.7 billion cumulatively, including $1.1 billion in 2025 alone. Cornell has taken $2.3 billion for its Doha medical campus, Carnegie Mellon roughly $1 billion, Texas A&M $993 million, Georgetown $971 million, Northwestern $734 million. Sit with the irony: Northwestern operates a journalism school, and Georgetown a school of foreign service, inside a state that prosecuted a septuagenarian for tweets. As the National Association of Scholars and ISGAP have documented in forensic detail, this money is not philanthropy. It purchases silence, curriculum, and legitimacy.
The machine runs through Washington, too. Qatari interests have spent nearly a quarter-billion dollars on registered foreign agents since 2016; after the 2017 Gulf blockade, Doha put 33 lobbying and public relations firms on retainer in a single year. In July 2025, former education secretary Bill Bennett registered as a Qatari agent, paid $210,000 to publicize the claim that Qatari campus money does not advance Islamist positions. Brookings ran a Doha center for 14 years while Qatar stood, by The New York Times’s accounting, as its largest foreign donor. Every scholar, lobbyist, and university officer who cashes the emir’s checks while Doha erases a religious community owns a share of the erasure.
If Qatar wants the privileges of an American ally, it can begin by not cleansing its religious minorities.
Official Washington has been the most generous enabler of all. Qatar was named a major non-NATO ally in 2022. In May 2025, the Pentagon accepted a luxury Boeing 747, valued at up to $400 million, from the Qatari royal family for the president’s use. That September, President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring that any armed attack on Qatar would be treated as “a threat to the peace and security of the United States,” a NATO-style guarantee extended to no other Arab state. Al Udeid Air Base hosts the forward headquarters of U.S. Central Command. America has wrapped its security umbrella around a government that deports the disabled for their faith.
That leverage exists to be used. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom’s 2026 annual report recommends placing Qatar on the State Department’s Special Watch List; this week’s deportations, which postdate that report, are grounds for State to go further and open a Country of Particular Concern review under the International Religious Freedom Act. Treasury should apply Global Magnitsky sanctions to the Interior Ministry officials who order undocumented expulsions, and State should hit them and their families with Section 7031(c) visa bans. Congress should condition Qatar’s ally status and its new security guarantee on a verifiable end to the deportations and the reinstatement of the expelled, and should remind Doha that Al Udeid is a privilege America can relocate, not a hostage Qatar holds.
Four families. A combined 162 years of residency. Erased by a blocked app and a verbal order. If Qatar wants the privileges of an American ally, it can begin by not cleansing its religious minorities. Until then, every check Doha writes in Washington, Evanston, and Ithaca should be read for what it is: the purchase price of our silence. Stop selling it.
