Qatar Campus Collusion: Hamas-Friendly Gulf State Demanded US Schools in Doha 'Be Aligned' After Oct 7
Plus, Harvard looks to recruit at Jewish day schools after study finds steep decline in Jewish enrollment
Emails released by the House Education Committee show that Qatar pressed American universities with satellite campuses in Doha to coordinate their messaging with the regime in the days following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack. University officials were instructed to “be aligned” to ensure “information sharing and no surprises,” the Free Beacon’s Collin Anderson reports.
The directive came during an Oct. 17 call organized by the state-run Qatar Foundation, which asked that the communications from each university “be aligned and in touch” when it came to their official communications. The same day, Northwestern University Qatar’s campus dean, Marwan Michael Kraidy, declined to sign onto a statement from the university criticizing a professor who had downplayed the Oct. 7 attack. Northwestern Qatar also “intentionally chose not to circulate” a university statement describing the Oct. 7 attack as “abhorrent and horrific,” according to the committee’s report.
The revelations come amid growing scrutiny of Qatar’s financial ties to U.S. universities and the influence and foothold it gains with that money. Qatar is the largest foreign funder of American higher education: It funneled $396 million to American universities in 2024 and $1.2 billion in 2025. Schools like Northwestern and Georgetown are big recipients. They operate campuses in Doha under contracts that dole out millions of dollars in annual “management fees” and require compliance with Qatari law and cultural norms. A Georgetown visitor’s guide exposed in the committee report, for example, asks visitors to the university’s Qatar campus to “speak respectfully about the emir, the ruling family, and the government system”; “be cautious about spreading rumors on social media, even if they’re true”; refrain from “publicizing crises happening inside Qatar”; and avoid “criticizing religions, prophets, or holy books.” Talk about an education, however unintended, in a government where a terror-friendly monarch and his family wield absolute control.
Harvard is following Brown University’s lead in recruiting students from Jewish day schools in the wake of a new report showing a steep decline in Jewish enrollment. That’s according to previously unreported remarks from Harvard College’s dean of admissions and financial aid William Fitzsimmons made at a Harvard Chabad shabbat dinner on Feb. 20. Weeks later, the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance found that Harvard’s Jewish undergraduate enrollment “stands at 7 percent today, the lowest level recorded since World War II and the lowest level of any Ivy league institution with reliable data.”
The author of the report, Adrian Ashkenazy, said in an interview with our Ira Stoll that other universities “have not seen such severe drops,” and asked, “Why is Brown succeeding where Harvard failed?” Stoll writes:
Since Fitzsimmons himself is not hostile and was in place both at Harvard’s Jewish peak and at its recent low ebb, it’s worth considering what or who else may be driving the decision making. There’s a pincer of anti-Israel students and faculty that are involved. Harvard’s anti-Israel student activists have infiltrated the admissions office and at one point even were posting pictures of themselves in keffiyehs from the main Harvard College admissions Instagram account. And there is a faculty standing committee on Admissions and Financial Aid in Harvard College. Its members include Ali Asani, who signed a statement demanding “an end to US support for Israel’s apartheid regime,” condemning Israel’s “state aggression,” and expressing “support for the Palestinian liberation struggle.” Another member is Maya Jasanoff, who said she brought oranges and bananas to the anti-Israel protesters who erected an encampment in Harvard Yard in violation of university policies. Asani and Jasanoff are both on leave this academic year. President Trump recently posted a link to a Washington Free Beacon article about Jasanoff, who was expected to take over as the next chair of Harvard’s history department, proclaiming, “Harvard should not hire this misfit!”
Some prospective Jewish applicants to Harvard, seeing what a circus it is, may decide not to even apply. Or, if they do apply and get in, they may choose to go somewhere else instead. It’s that second risk that might drive even a nondiscriminatory admissions officer to go with a more sure-bet-to-attend applicant instead of a Jewish student who might decide that there’s less hostility at Vanderbilt, the University of Florida, Yeshiva University, Brown, Yale, the University of Chicago, West Point or Annapolis, or Washington University in St. Louis. The University of Florida and the University of Texas at Austin are both offering 4-year, full-tuition scholarships via the Rosenthal-Levy Scholars Program for “exceptional undergraduates interested in the great ideas of Jewish and Western civilization and the responsibilities of American civic leadership.”
As I observed in 2018 about Stephen Schwarzman, a Jewish student rejected when he applied to Harvard College in the pre-Fitzsimmons era who later became a significant donor to Yale and MIT, the genuinely scarce resources aren’t the slots at Harvard College but the future Stephen Schwarzmans. For all of the constructive interventions by Stefanik, Trump, and others, and for all the ways that endowments and federal financing make it less than a purely free market, the most powerful forces for quality and improvement in higher education are competition and choice. That’s part of why Harvard’s Fitzsimmons and Ashkenazy are both suddenly talking about Brown.
READ MORE: Harvard to Recruit at Jewish Day Schools After Study Finds Steep Decline in Jewish Enrollment
When Joe Kent was confirmed as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, the New York Times said he “embraced conspiracy theories and has links to extremist groups.” Now that he’s resigning in protest of Operation Epic Fury, which he blamed on the “Israel lobby,” the Times is changing its tune, describing Kent in a report on his resignation as a “credible dissenter.” President Donald Trump gave a harsher assessment:
“When somebody is working with us that says they didn’t think Iran was a threat—we don’t want those people,” Trump told reporters. “There are some people, I guess, that would say that, but they’re not smart people or they’re not savvy people. Iran was a tremendous threat.” Our Andrew Stiles writes:
“This is Trump at his finest. Once a neocon, always a neocon. Dick Cheney—may he rest in war—must be smiling down from the heavens. If he wasn’t fully confident that Neocon Don could wear the big boy pants and crush our enemies with overwhelming force, he never would have left us when he did.
“It’s amazing to think that Neocon Don was a Washington Free Beacon Man of the Year in 2025 for everything he accomplished last year—finishing the war in Gaza, bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, ending Marjorie Taylor Greene’s career. That’s all child’s play compared to Trump’s output in the first two and a half months of 2026.”
READ MORE: Say His Name: Neocon Don
Additional reading:
Another one down: Israeli forces killed the Iranian regime’s security chief and de facto leader, Ali Larijani, in a Tuesday morning airstrike that may foment greater chaos within the Islamic Republic’s remaining leadership. The strike also took out the commander of the powerful Basij militia in Iran, Gholamrez Soleimani. Both men played a central role in the Iranian regime’s murder of tens of thousands of protesters in January.
Dems in disarray? House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries is facing a potential “2027 rebellion,” according to Axios, which reported that a “growing number of Democratic candidates … can’t commit to backing his leadership.” Retirements from incumbents in the caucus, the outlet added, have spawned candidates “who are not yet sold on—or outright hostile to—Jeffries’ leadership.”
Remember Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, the Florida Democratic congresswoman under indictment for allegedly using fraudulently obtained government funds to finance her campaign? Since taking office in January 2022, she’s spent more than $200,000 in taxpayer funds on luxury chauffeur services from a Miami-based company that boasts of offering the “pinnacle of luxury and sophistication” to VIP clients “who demand the very best.”
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Congratulations, Harvard Jewish Alumni!
The democrats field for 2028 is a mess. https://radicalrino.substack.com/p/the-democrats-2028-wasteland?r=1r7m1u&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=post-publish