After October 7, I kept asking how so many Americans turned against Israel so quickly.
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Hamas had just murdered about 1,200 people and kidnapped roughly 250. Israeli families were still identifying bodies when American protesters were already accusing Israel of genocide and colonialism. Students defended Hamas as resistance and tore down posters of kidnapped Israeli children.
That response did not develop in a week. The language and political framework were already here.
So, I started following the money and the institutions behind it.
That led me to Qatar and to a woman most Americans have never heard of: Sheikha Moza bint Nasser.
She is the mother of Qatar’s current ruler and the chairperson of Qatar Foundation, the organization behind Qatar’s enormous investment in Western education.
Georgetown, Northwestern, Carnegie Mellon, and other American universities have built operations in Qatar. In 2025 alone, American universities reported more than $1.1 billion in gifts and contracts from Qatari sources, making Qatar the largest foreign source reported that year. The Department of Education’s own inspector general says foreign-funding disclosure exists partly because such relationships can create risks involving foreign influence, academic freedom and national security.
Americans spent years hearing about foreign interference in our elections. Meanwhile, an authoritarian Gulf monarchy has been spending billions building relationships inside institutions that educate future journalists, diplomats, lawyers and political leaders.
That should have produced much more scrutiny—especially considering Qatar’s other relationships.
Qatar provided a home to senior Hamas leaders and maintained Hamas’s political office in Doha. The Congressional Research Service confirms that Hamas officials continued operating there and that Qatar provided substantial financial assistance to Gaza for years. Some of that money entered with Israeli approval, a policy Israel should admit was a serious mistake.
Qatar also gave enormous reach to Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s most influential clerics. Hamas itself grew from the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood.
Then there is Al Jazeera, which Qatar funds, and which is enormously influential throughout the Arab world.
With those facts in mind, look again at Sheikha Moza.
Five weeks after October 7, she accused Israel of spreading “fabricated narratives” and called for them to be confronted through media, culture, and intellectual channels. She then described antisemitism as “a problematic concept.” These are her words, published on her own website.
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Think about what she was saying and where she was saying the fight should happen.
Qatar had already spent decades establishing itself inside media, education, and elite Western institutions.
This is why I have trouble calling Qatar’s university spending simple philanthropy. Influence does not require somebody in Doha calling a professor and dictating tomorrow’s lecture. A foreign government gains influence by becoming useful, respected, and financially connected to institutions whose leaders want the relationship to continue.
Qatar became very good at that.
After October 7, its relationship with Hamas became useful too.
Washington and Jerusalem needed somebody who could reach the terrorists holding American and Israeli hostages. Qatar could because it had maintained access to Hamas for years. Using that channel to free hostages was necessary. Treating Qatar as a neutral peace broker requires forgetting how it obtained that access.
I teach self-defense, and I spend a great deal of time teaching people to recognize a threat before the physical attack. You study behavior, intent, preparation, and capability. Looking only at the final act means you missed everything that developed beforehand.
America should approach foreign influence the same way.
The campus explosion after October 7 was the final act we could see. Before it came years of ideological education, institutional relationships, and foreign money flowing into universities that increasingly produce a very specific view of Israel.
Qatar did not create the entire anti-Israel movement in America. It does not need to have done so for Americans to ask a much more uncomfortable question.
Why did some of America’s most prestigious universities become financially intertwined with a government that hosted Hamas leadership, gave the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideological world a major platform, funded Al Jazeera, and built diplomatic leverage through its relationship with Hamas?
Sheikha Moza helped give Qatar a respectable face in the West.
Then, after October 7, she told us exactly where she stood.
Americans should stop admiring the philanthropy long enough to follow the money, examine the relationships, and ask what Qatar received in return for becoming so deeply embedded in our institutions.
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Tsahi Shemesh is an Israeli-American IDF veteran and the founder of Krav Maga Experts in NYC. A father and educator, he writes about Jewish identity, resilience, moral courage, and the ethics of strength in a time of rising antisemitism.
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