THE DOHA MACHINE How Qatar Bought a University, Funded a Film Studio, and Got a Mayor — All in Plain Sight

PART ONE: FOLLOW THE MONEY

There's a question that nobody in New York City's media establishment wants to answer, perhaps because answering it would require them to explain what they were doing for the past fifteen years while the answer was sitting right in front of them in publicly available federal filings, Department of Education foreign funding disclosures, and a series of think-tank reports that the prestige press ignored with the focused determination of a sommelier pretending not to notice a cockroach in the Burgundy.

The question is simple: How much did Qatar spend to own American higher education, American culture, and now, American city government?

The answer — and buckle up, because this is one of those numbers that sounds made up until you realize it isn't — is $62.4 billion.

Not million. Billion. Sixty-two point four of them.

That's the figure the Department of Education released at the end of 2025 in its foreign funding disclosure data — the total amount of gifts and contracts that foreign sources have reported to 527 U.S. institutions. Qatar isn't just leading that list. Qatar is that list. The emirate the size of Connecticut, which hosts Hamas's political leadership in Doha hotel suites and funds Al Jazeera as a geopolitical instrument, is the largest single foreign funder of American higher education in history.

Let's walk through what that buys.

Cornell University received nearly $2.3 billion from Qatar — primarily to operate Weill Cornell Medicine in Doha's "Education City". Carnegie Mellon received $1 billion. Texas A&M received $992.8 million. Georgetown received $971.1 million. Northwestern received $601.9 million. Virginia Commonwealth received $103.4 million.

The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy — ISGAP, whose director Dr. Charles Asher Small has been sounding alarms about this for a decade while mainstream reporters called him alarmist — dug into the Texas A&M numbers and found something that should have been front-page news in 2023. Qatar Foundation didn't just give Texas A&M money. It signed a contract committing to fund over 500 research projects on the Qatar campus — and then had the audacity to claim all intellectual property rights to the research. Texas A&M confirmed this. Confirmed it, and nobody cared.

ISGAP's executive director told the New York Post in November 2025 what the Post, to its credit, actually printed: the Qatari royal family has a "spiritual commitment to the Muslim Brotherhood," and that commitment is why they spend billions funding American universities, K-12 schools, and cultural organizations. Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies has been making the same argument for years.

The response from the universities? Silence. The response from the media? Crickets.

In 2025, the New York Post published a report noting that Qatar pumps more than $20 billion into American colleges as part of a Muslim Brotherhood-aligned soft power strategy. Al Jazeera — Qatar's own state media network — covered Zohran Mamdani's mayoral election with the enthusiasm of a hometown paper covering a local boy making good. Because, in a very real sense, he is.

Now. What about Columbia University?

Columbia is where Mahmood Mamdani — author of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, husband of filmmaker Mira Nair, and father of New York City's current mayor — has held the Herbert Lehman Professorship in Government since 1999. Columbia, located in the same city whose school system Qatar Foundation International has been quietly funding since 2012. Columbia, the institution that hosted the encampment protests of 2024, the epicenter of American campus pro-Palestinian agitation.

How much did Qatar give Columbia? This is where it gets interesting — not because the number is so large, but because Columbia has apparently decided the answer is: none of your business.

ISGAP's 2024 Columbia University report is a forensic document that should be read by every journalist in New York who claims to care about institutional transparency. Its central finding: Columbia University has received Qatari funding but has not reported any of it to the Department of Education as required by law.

None. Zero. Not a dollar disclosed.

What ISGAP was able to piece together from indirect records is damning enough. Two joint projects between Columbia and Qatar Foundation International — estimated Qatari funding: $500,000. Six research projects through the Qatar National Research Fund — estimated Qatari contribution: approximately $250,000 each, for a total of $1.5 million. An Amiri Scholarship Program sending Qatari students to Columbia. Collaborative programs through the Qatar Foundation hosting Columbia faculty in Doha.

Estimated total Qatari funding to Columbia: $1.75 million — none of it disclosed.

ISGAP's response to Columbia's public statement that it received "no Qatari funding requiring disclosure"? The institute noted, carefully, that Columbia's claim "does not address the central findings of the research". Translation: that's a non-denial denial dressed up in a blazer and sent to a Faculty Senate meeting.

Now. Why does any of this matter? It matters because Qatar Foundation International — the U.S. arm of the Qatar Foundation, registered as a foreign agent with the Department of Justice — spent between 2009 and 2017 at least $30.6 million in American K-12 schools pushing Arabic language curricula. Its curriculum platform, Al Masdar, includes a lesson titled "Express Your Loyalty to Qatar". Another lesson asks middle schoolers whether Israeli soldiers "shooting children in Palestinian refugee camps" constitutes terrorism.

They ran these programs in New York City public schools — P.S. 261, P.S./I.S. 30, Hamilton Heights School — and established the city's only Arabic dual-language immersion program in 2013.

The city whose schools are now run by a mayor whose mother was paid by Qatar.

Nobody asks the obvious question out loud, so let's ask it here: What, exactly, are you buying for $62.4 billion?

Dr. Small's answer at ISGAP is straightforward. You're buying proximity. You're buying access. You're buying the ability to shape what the next generation of American elites believes about the Arab world, about Islam, about Israel, and about U.S. foreign policy — while your proxies walk the halls of the same institutions where your grants are deposited and your scholarship students are enrolled. And when one of the faculty members' sons runs for mayor of New York City, you boost his candidacy on Instagram from a royal account with millions of followers and dispatch Al Jazeera to cover his every speech like he's the second coming of FDR.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies held an event in 2017 — eight years ago — titled "Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood's Global Affiliates". Schanzer, Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and a panel of experts sat in a room in Washington and explained, clearly, what Qatar was doing. In 2025, the Trump administration designated three chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. In early 2026, those designations were formalized.

By that point, Zohran Mamdani had already been the mayor of New York City for three months.

To be continued...