Hamas Patron Qatar Has Spent $6 Billion Lobbying the U.S. Government and Funding Universities

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Free Beacon

Qatar, the oil-rich Middle Eastern nation that provides shelter and cash to the Hamas terror group’s top leaders, has spent nearly $6 billion since 2007 lobbying the American government and funneling cash to the United States’ top universities, funding that is generating scrutiny in Congress.

 

 

With Qatar emerging as a central mediator in the United States’ attempts to reach a hostage deal between Israel and Hamas, Doha’s decades-long influence peddling operation in America is raising concerns about the country’s ties to the Iran-backed terror group.

Qatar has given or contracted more than $5.6 billion to 61 American schools since 2007, including Ivy Leagues such as Harvard University, Yale University, Cornell University, and Stanford University, according to funding records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. The country has also doled out more than $243 million on lobbying efforts in the United States since 2015, with more than $16 million spent in 2023 alone.

The money, experts and lawmakers say, has enabled Qatar to have outsized influence in American politics and academia, efforts they say have mainstreamed anti-Israel propaganda and silenced criticism about Doha’s longstanding ties to Hamas, the Iranian regime, and other terror groups. Hamas’s "three top leaders alone are worth a staggering total of $11 billion and enjoy a life of luxury in the sanctuary of the emirate of Qatar," according to the New York Post.

The vast funding operation has generated congressional interest in the past and is fueling calls for an investigation by members of the Republican Study Committee (RSC), Congress’s largest GOP caucus, according to lawmakers and senior GOP aides who spoke to the Free Beacon. The RSC, one senior staffer said, is currently pressuring the relevant House oversight committees to investigate Qatar’s lobbying efforts and funding to schools.

"The amount of money that Qatar has invested in its influence operations in Washington over the last two decades is simply staggering," Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism finance analyst at the Treasury Department who now serves as research director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) think tank, told the Free Beacon. "It’s even more staggering when one stops to consider that the country has a mere 330,000 citizens. What does a country this tiny want with so much influence?"

[Valin]

May 6, 2024 #FoxNews

Fox News' Peter Doocy and Madison Alworth report the latest on the aftermath of the anti-Israel college protests. The 'Fox & Friends' co-hosts react reports revealing who is financially behind the widespread pro-Palestinian demonstrations

[Valin]

The janitor versus the multimillionaire:

Last week, Suzy Weiss wrote about the tale of two Columbias, captured in a single photograph: a now-viral image of a janitor fighting off an anti-Israel rioter during the occupation of Hamilton Hall. 

Per the New York Post, the activist is James Carlson. He also goes by Cody Carlson and Cody Tarlow. A high-ranking police source told the paper he is “a longtime anarchist.” Carlson is not a Columbia undergrad but the 40-year-old son and heir of a prominent ad executive. Carlson owns a $3.4 million Park Slope townhouse that has “four wood-burning fireplaces” according to the Post. Carlson has been charged with “burglary, reckless endangerment, criminal mischief, conspiracy, and criminal trespassing.”

The whole thing is delicious. Almost as delightful as our favorite trust-fund communist: Fergie Chambers.