At a July 2026 Christians United for Israel conference, Charles Asher Small, founding director of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), cited figures that ought to stop education officials cold: over $1 billion funneled into Texas A&M, another $1 billion into Georgetown, $10 billion to Cornell—all traced, he says, to a Qatari regime that bankrolls the Muslim Brotherhood, harbors Hamas leadership, and maintains warm ties with Iran and the Taliban.
[Newron, Mass.] parents sued the school district in 2019 over alleged antisemitism in the “Arab World Studies Notebook” curriculum funded by Saudi ARAMCO and the Qatari government.
Small has warned about the Qatari cooption of universities since 2019, when he launched ISGAP’s “Follow the Money” project to track Qatari and Muslim Brotherhood-linked funding to American universities. After a Middle East Forum report that Texas A&M’s relationship with Qatar allowed the Persian Gulf state to acquire ownership rights to more than 500 research projects, some in nuclear science, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, biotech robotics and weapons development, Texas A&M announced it would shutter its branch campus in Doha by 2028, although Texas A&M President Mark A. Welsh III, a retired Air Force general, denied exposure of the national security risk, and instead cited regional instability as the reason for the university’s decision to shutter its campus.
Nor are universities the only target of Qatar’s pay-to-propagandize education. In 2019, Samia Shoman, a southern California teacher, helped draft California’s Ethnic Studies Model curriculum and wrote Palestinian-history lesson plans hosted on Qatar Foundation International’s website. The state revised the curriculum after Jewish organizations and lawmakers objected to anti-Israel content, and the Board of Education adopted a version with that material removed in March 2021.
Newton, Mass., an affluent Boston suburb, saw its own fight. Parents sued the school district in 2019 over alleged antisemitism in the “Arab World Studies Notebook” curriculum funded by Saudi ARAMCO and the Qatari government. The curriculum included Palestine Liberation Organization maps and urged students to question whether Israel had a right to exist. While the plaintiffs dropped the case pending further negotiation, the episode exposed how Qatar seeks to shape grade-school curricula.
In March 2025, ISGAP reported on the Choices Program, a social studies curriculum developed at Brown University but allegedly shaped by the Qatar Foundation. It is used in roughly 8,000 schools, reaching more than a million students. Later editions described Jewish communities as colonial transplants, referred to Hamas and Hezbollah as “resistance” rather than terror groups, and omitted Israel from maps in some units.
Brown argued the funding claims were false and said the curriculum was “appropriately inclusive of a range of viewpoints and academic scholarship.” By April 2025, however, Brown ended its financial support for the Choices Program.
Two cohorts of students, Small contends, have now moved from Qatari-funded lecture halls to the encampments that spread across American campuses after October 7, 2023, and from there into newsrooms, nonprofits, and political parties. Hamas, he reminded the room, functions as the Palestinian chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood—a lineage he says too few administrators, or lawmakers, are willing to say aloud.
That candor rankles some. When Small testified before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions in March 2026, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) pushed back, praising Qatar’s role in Gaza ceasefire diplomacy and accusing Small of prejudice for tying Doha to Hamas and Iran.
The dispute has also produced substantive counterargument beyond politics. William Bennett, a Reagan-era Secretary of Education registered as a Foreign Agent on behalf of Qatar, argued that ISGAP relied on a study that conflated Qatar with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and that Qatari funding of antisemitic content was “speculative.” Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, meanwhile, testified that there was no evidence Qatar had influenced campus protests. Bennett also notes that more than 90 percent of Qatar’s reported funding is spent in Qatar itself, on branch-campus operations; excluding those payments, he argues, Qatar ranks 35th among foreign funders of U.S. colleges, behind Thailand.
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies reported in April 2025 that Qatar ranked among the top five foreign donors to American higher education in 2024.
Other organizations beyond ISGAP dispute this. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies reported in April 2025 that Qatar ranked among the top five foreign donors to American higher education in 2024, and that Georgetown’s Doha campus hosted a September 2024 conference featuring a former Al Jazeera executive who praised the October 7, 2023, attacks and had eulogized Muslim Brotherhood-aligned cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi. A separate Washington Free Beacon analysis of Department of Education records found Qatar’s reported university funding nearly tripled from 2024 to 2025, to $1.2 billion.
Qatar’s own conduct complicates its case for transparency. The emirate sued to block Texas from releasing Texas A&M’s funding records under the state’s public-records law; a judge ordered the documents released anyway, revealing almost half a billion dollars in Qatari grants and contracts to the university—a lower sum than the $1 billion-plus ISGAP has alleged, but still a figure Doha fought to keep hidden.
There is no disputing the pattern: Qatar spends heavily to shape American classrooms, yet seeks opacity to enable it to hide its agenda.
