Qatar – The Real Face of the Snake

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How could it not raise eyebrows? Donald Trump is set to invest some $5.5 billion in Qatar, according to news reports, and he’s just received a $400 million jet from the Qataris.

This is the same Qatar that unabashedly hosted Hamas leaders, and funds the terror organization into the billions of dollars. It’s the same oil-rich country that is bankrolling Al Jazeera, a channel virtually synonymous with Jihadist propaganda, and that is also being sued for having alleged terror ties. To top it off, Qatar’s Deputy Prime Minister has a history of pro-Hamas tweets.

Yet, if Qatar’s place in the world could be described as a Facebook relationship status, it’d be “It’s complicated.”

Complicated, indeed. After all, Qatar has announced that it is no longer playing the role of mediator between Israel and Hamas, and that it is closing the terror group’s offices within its borders. The country the size of Connecticut has also invested $50 million in pro-Trump American media Newsmax in 2019 and 2020. It gave the green light to thousands of fresh kosher meals being provided to Israelis during the 2022 World Cup in Doha, which now hosts a recently opened Jewish center.

Additionally, Qatar also houses Al Udeid, the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East with 10,000 troops, a sign of cooperation that arose after the U.S.’s Saudi military base was shut down.

“It’s a massive amount of money that they have spent on an air base, that America got for free. And what they have done through this direct foreign direct foreign investment, is they have effectively convinced American decision makers, Congress people, the White House, to look the other way,” says Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

In an exclusive interview with this author, Schanzer described the country of 330,000 citizens as “this weird place” that, by his calculation, has “invested $150 billion to $300 billion in the United States’ influential spheres” — which has been revealed in detail lately by The Free Press.

In 2023, The New York Daily News reported that Qatar invested advertising contracts and sponsorships for A-list media and entertainment outlets such as Foreign Policy, VOX, Sundance, and Buzzfeed. $5 million was given to the L.A. Mayor’s Fund, and $20 million for the Nixon Foundation, and the Endowed Journalism Fellowship for the Carter Center. The “Qatari influence ecosystem” expands its reach to think tanks, influencers, PR firms, lobbyists and universities, and all of this “has effectively advanced the virulently antisemitic and anti-Israel views of the Al Thanis.”

With roughly 10-12% of the world’s energy resources, the Qataris can “do whatever they want, and they do. They have bought off so many levers of power that it makes it virtually impossible for the state to fight back,” Schanzer warns.

Qatari tentacles have taken hold in Canada, too. In August 2021, Canada and Qatar signed a Defence Cooperation Agreement (DCA), providing a framework for joint defense activities. In May 2024, both countries signed a Memorandum of Understanding to establish an annual bilateral political consultation mechanism, further formalizing their commitment to deepening ties.

Qatar is Canada’s fourth largest merchandise trade partner in the Gulf. Between January and July 2024, bilateral trade totaled $193.72 million, with notable Canadian exports including aircraft ground trainers, nuclear reactor components, and pharmaceuticals.

Major Canadian companies such as Bombardier, SNC-Lavalin, and CAE, have a presence in Qatar, and joint ventures are active in various sectors. Qatar Energy has entered into agreements with ExxonMobil Canada for LNG exploration licenses off Newfoundland and Labrador. Canadian healthcare institutions, such as SickKids and Accreditation Canada, have established partnerships with Qatari organizations.

Meanwhile, France received a $11.5 billion investment from Qatar, of which a fraction is transparent, according to a report by The Counter Extremism Project (CEP) last year. The Qatari government owns some $30 billion in French assets, such as luxury hotels in Paris, Cannes, and Nice; a stake in the French brand, LVMH, the Printemps department stores, and the majority of the shares of Paris Saint-Germain.

Qatari investments have secured nearly $2 billion over the past fifteen years in the UK.

Schanzer states:

You could argue they’re the world’s largest political hedge fund. They are hedged across a wide range of political causes, political parties, lots of the United States, swaths of Europe, swaths of the Muslim world. They are hedged across all of it. What does that enable them to do? Access everywhere.

That includes as much the halls of power in Washington and London, as with leadership of the most infamous terror groups.

Schanzer likens Qatar to the Mos Isley cantina scene from Star Wars. “I mean, you will see Taliban, you’ll see Hamas, you’ll see al Qaeda,” but he believes the country is uninvolved in the dirty work of actual attacks. Schanzer also stresses that Qatari officials “hang out with Hamas people” in Turkey. To Western leaders, the cover story goes something like this: “it gives us the ability to speak to these bad actors,” but Schanzer isn’t buying it.

It’s all about influence, and part of the hedge fund deal is to buy as much of it, in as many ways, in as many countries, as possible.

Qatar has its hand in billions of dollars in donations to institutions of higher learning, as well as ties to US teachers’ unions and grade schools.The Middle East Forum just recently released a deep dive report of Qatar buying influence in elite institutions.

In a bygone day, the financial network of alumni used to line the coffers; now it’s “sovereign wealth.” And for good reason.

Schanzer asks: “If you can get a ten million dollar check from sovereign wealth, why do you want to go around asking for $10,000, in a laborious process that may yield you less money over a longer period of time?”

The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism & Policy (ISGAP) and the US Department of Justice have since 2012 worked jointly to examine the unlawful money trails flowing between foreign governments and donors, and American universities.

Their 2019 report discovered that billions of dollars of Middle Eastern donations – predominantly Qatar – had not been reported to the Department of Education, even though it was required by law.

The ISGAP 2024 report revealed that between 2001 and 2023, the Qataris donated $4.7 billion to US academia, including the largest direct foreign donation to any university, that of $1.95 billion to Cornell.

Other elite schools receiving nine or ten figure donations include: Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, MIT, Texas A&M, Yale, and Johns Hopkins. According to the Department of Education, Georgetown University received more than $870 million in gifts and contracts from Qatar since 2005.

This is just what is publicly known.

Although, there are some universities that have now cut ties, such as Texas A & M. And of late, Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern severed their relationship with Al Jazeera.

Those billions, meanwhile, have helped rev the engine of campus antisemitism in North America, in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 terror attacks in Israel. The institutions receiving heavy donations “feel less responsive to the alumni networks that are talking with disapproval,” said Schanzer.

Administrators who were able to connect the dots, he said, “kept their hands folded, quite content with the money that’s coming through” lest the purse strings be not so coincidentally snipped.

Combined with the encouragement of leftist tenured professors, and radical campus groups bought and paid for by extremist elements, the malignant hate was given free rein to metastasize.

Given these red flags, the American government still isn’t paying close enough attention to the stranglehold Qatar has on US interests, Schanzer believes.

“I think that we should be heavily monitoring and restricting their investment in the United States. We should be far more critical where they spend their money abroad,” Schanzer states.

The U.S., he says, needs to “turn the screws” and remove itself from the al-Udeid Air Base, revoke Qatar’s status as a major non-NATO ally, force al Jazeera to be recognized as a political threat the same way as Russian and Chinese propaganda, send Hamas officials to the U.S. to stand trial, sanction Qatar, and revoke the visa waiver program that was recently introduced to Qataris.

Much to Schanzer’s consternation, he warns, “we’ve not held them to account. Not once.”

Dave Gordon is a writer in Toronto. His work can be found in Jewish News Syndicate, National Post, Globe and Mail, BBC News, New York Times, Washington Times, and many others. He is author of three books and editor of eleven.