by Hugh Fitzgerald

(Front Page Magazine) ‘Qatar is the main state supporter of the terror group Hamas and of the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas’ senior leaders have long been provided with luxurious and secure accommodations in Doha, from where they plot their campaigns against Israel.

Qatar spends more on American institutions of higher education than any other country, and its money pays for endowed chairs of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, and lecture series on the wickedness of the “Zionist entity” and the sufferings the “Palestinians” have endured. This tiny and very rich country been able to undermine Israel’s image and to spread antisemitism throughout many of our most prestigious universities.

In Qatar itself, antisemitic schoolbooks remain unrevised, and Qatari children are raised on a steady diet of anti-Jewish hatred and praise of terrorism. More on those schoolbooks can be found here: “Qatar’s Children Still Study Antisemitic Textbooks That Whitewash Hitler, Promote Violent Jihad, Study Finds,” by David Michael Swindle, Algemeiner, February 16, 2026:

Despite Qatari leaders’ rhetoric seemingly promoting peace and opposing hate, the Middle Eastern country continues to educate students with textbooks that celebrate terrorism, hide the Holocaust, and demonize the Jewish people by affirming longstanding antisemitic tropes, according to a new study.

The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), a nonprofit organization that analyzes schoolbooks and curricula around the world, reviewed 52 textbooks officially approved for the 2025-2026 State of Qatar national school curriculum, in addition to checking them against previous editions for potential revisions. The books covered topics ranging from social studies, geography, and history to Islamic education, Arabic language, and Arabic literature. IMPACT-se applied UNESCO-derived standards and guidelines of peace and tolerance in education.

The researchers found that the same problems from the 2021-2022 school year had not improved, as the textbooks “continue to reproduce antisemitic narratives, religious intolerance toward non-Muslims, and legitimization of violent jihad, all of which were documented in IMPACT-se’s earlier reports.”

The antisemitic material includes promoting stereotypes of Jews as arrogant liars obsessed with opposing Islam. The texts also cast Jews as “fleeing in fear, spreading discord, breaching agreements,” and possessing an “excessive attachment to material wealth, thereby reinforcing an image of Jews as fundamentally untrustworthy.”

In historical recounts of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the textbooks depict Jews as manipulating global affairs and deny Jewish historical connections to the Land of Israel. Maps of the region describe the borders of Mandatory Palestine, the name for the area from 1920-1948 when it was under British administration, as split between “Palestinian territory” and “Israeli expansion.”

The textbooks for Qatari children also glorify violent jihad and death in the name of Islam. They teach that students should “love jihad” and expect entry into paradise for those who choose martyrdom. These instructions accompany demonizations of non-Muslims as “infidels,” “pagans,” and “polytheists.” The textbooks offer little objective information about other faiths. They also promote an Arab nationalist ideology, oppose a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and describe Hamas terrorist attacks as “military operations.”

IMPACT-se researchers cite an Islamic education book for sixth graders as an example of the curriculum’s promotion of terrorism.

“An Islamic education lesson teaches that one of the ways to measure a good Muslim woman is to raise children to sacrifice their lives, in what is understood to be violent jihad,” the report states. “The chapter about classical Islamic figure Nusaybah bint Ka’b praises the fact that she raised her children ‘to love jihad,’ pointing out that her three children later ‘died as martyrs for the sake of Allah Almighty.’ The textbook authors describe this type of upbringing as ‘optimal.’”…

Transparency by American institutions of higher learning about foreign funding, both with the government and with the American people, is highly desirable, but it does little to end the influence of Qatari money on those institutions. Perhaps our government could do something much more effective, and ban American institutions from accepting funding from Qatar or from any source that “promotes antisemitism and terrorism” in its own schools, as that surely means that such a source will do the same in the American programs it funds.