Israel and the United States should not trust Qatar as an honest broker, according to Dr. Charles Asher Small, founder and director of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP). “We know that the Qataris funded Hamas, which is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood,” Small said in an interview with The Jerusalem Report on March 18 as hostage negotiations were underway in Doha, Qatar. “They also have good relations with the Taliban and with the Iranian revolutionary regime, and this is who we’re dealing with. I think that in the US and Europe, because of a lot of investment in PR and branding, they portray themselves as an honest broker, in this case with the hostage negotiations, but we really have to realize that they are the sanitized face of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
ISGAP is a leading global research institute dedicated to combating antisemitism through rigorous analysis and policy recommendations. Its groundbreaking Follow the Money project, launched in 2012, has been at the forefront of investigating the flow of funds from foreign entities to US universities, uncovering substantial funding from Qatar.
Montreal-born Small, an international expert in antisemitism, extremism, and illicit funding in higher education, who now lives in the US, was in Israel for meetings with ISGAP’s chair, Natan Sharansky, and Israeli officials.
Tell us about your work.
I started by mistake in 2012. To make a long story short, we found money going to Yale University from the Muslim Brotherhood and started our research project. In 2019, we presented our research at a summit on antisemitism in Washington, attended by the heads of Homeland Security and the FBI, as well as the attorney-general and secretaries of state and education. We found $3 billion of undocumented money coming from the Muslim Brotherhood to American universities. Our research led to a federal investigation, and within a short period of time they found about $18 billion in undocumented money. When the Biden administration came into power, the investigation was called off; but because of the minor success that we had, we were able to expand our research. So now we have a team of experts on terror financing, experts on the Muslim Brotherhood, and scholars, and we’ve been able to ascertain that tens of billions of dollars are coming in from Qatar to American universities. The Qataris are funding higher education institutes in the United States, Canada, the UK, and around the world. And we believe there’s a correlation between their funding and rising antisemitism in the academic environment.
How so?
Since October 7, we’ve come out with six reports on Qatar and the funding of American universities. Two reports are on Texas A&M University and its campus in Qatar. We discovered over $1 billion that Qatar gave to Texas A&M, and for years they tried to hide the contracts between the two entities. We found parts of the contract, and we discovered that Texas A&M gave Qatar all the intellectual property rights for all the research they were doing together, which was rather odd. We found 502 research projects they were doing together, with 57 projects flagged as possible dual use for military research, and 12 projects in particular with nuclear military implications. After we published the two reports, Texas A&M decided in secret deliberations to vote 7-1 to close the campus in Qatar. We have another report coming out imminently on Cornell University and we are also working on reports investigating MIT and other top US universities. Our findings further expose billions of dollars invested by Qatar in these universities, some of it unreported.
How do you feel about Qatar hosting indirect talks between Israel and Hamas?
I think what we have to realize is that first of all, the Qatari regime is giving more money than any other country in the world to American universities. The Qatari royal family has a Bay’ah, which in Islam is a spiritual oath, to the Muslim Brotherhood. As we know, the Muslim Brotherhood calls for the destruction of the State of Israel. Its leaders argue that the true Muslim is obligated to complete the work of Hitler. This is a core element of their ideology. They basically fuse European antisemitism, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and even Nazism with what I would call a perversion of Islam. This is what the Qatari regime represents, ideologically and religiously. We have to understand in negotiations that we’re really negotiating with the Muslim Brotherhood. We know that the Qataris funded Hamas, which is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. They have good relations with the Taliban and with the Iranian revolutionary regime, and this is who we’re dealing with. I think that in the US and Europe, because of a lot of investment in PR and branding, they portray themselves as an honest broker, in this case with the hostage negotiations, but we really have to realize that they are the sanitized face of the Muslim Brotherhood. In the kinetic field of war, Israel is much superior to Hamas; but in the war of propaganda, they’re using the weakness in the West to their advantage, and they’re encouraging the protests and the ceasefire calls, and the genocidal rhetoric and incitement coming out of the streets of Europe and North America. There’s a red-green alliance between what we refer to as the radical Left and the radical Islamists and even the radical Right to some extent, and it’s encouraging the antisemitism in the West. We’ve seen this in antisemitic discourse, and now in the violent acts against Jews taking place in the US, Canada, and elsewhere.
How do you view current tensions between the US and Israel in the wake of recent comments by Biden and Schumer?
Elie Wiesel – our first honorary president at ISGAP – always taught that antisemitism is not a parochial problem for the Jewish people or Israel. He said that antisemitism is a form of hatred that once unleashed, begins with the Jewish people but never ends with the Jewish people. It attacks the very fabric of human societies and human decency and knows no bounds. I think it’s incumbent upon the leadership of democratic countries to understand that this cancer is eating away at their most prestigious and important institutions of higher education, the place where young Americans learn to be citizens. I think the fact that the leaders of the United States and other Western countries are engaging the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian revolutionary regime is a strategic mistake from the perspective of protecting democratic values, number one. And number two, after October 7 we had an explosion of antisemitism and anti-Israel rhetoric starting on October 9. I think the fact that the protests that came out of the universities and onto the streets were anti-Israel and anti-Jewish really speaks to a cancer of antisemitism that is pervasive and even structured in Western democratic societies and is a threat to democracy. The fact that over five months later, Western leaders – including in the US – are now blaming the victim, blaming Israeli tactics in what is a Hamas war against democracy and an existential threat to the Jewish people, is really a mistake of historic proportions. The Americans can kick the can down the road with Iran, and they can kick the can down the road with antisemitism, but at what point are they going to stop and act as people defending democratic principles? The Jewish people and Israel and the West are fighting a malicious, Nazi-inspired, genocidal, sexist, homophobic, antisemitic, anti-democratic social movement with a cult of death. The Nazis hid their ‘final solution’ to some extent. These Hamas characters are advertising it, and their PR strategy is very effective. They’ve actually obtained more support by filming the massacres in southern Israel, not just from jihadists around the world but from so-called progressive intellectuals in the universities, and this poses a threat to the US, Israel, and other democratic societies. It’s Orwellian.
What is your advice to the US and Israel on combating this phenomenon?
We can see the inroads through the Qatari funding of our most important institution, higher education and others, as a new anti-Israel, antisemitic and anti-democratic discourse begins to filter down into society, into the media of record, into halls of policymaking, into the best law firms and PR firms in Washington. This is a cancer that is a real threat to the US and other democratic countries. I think they need to learn from history and develop strategies and policies to confront this anti-democratic cult of death. I think the Israeli government needs to understand the strategic threat that antisemitism poses to Israel and to Jewish communities throughout the Diaspora, and I’m afraid we’re at a tipping point. What we’re seeing now is an attack on Jews as a people. The focus is on the dehumanization of the State of Israel and Israelis and, by extension, people who have an affiliation to Israel that is now being labeled at our best universities as a racist, apartheid entity. So Jewish communities that are committed politically and ideologically or have family connections with srael are perceived increasingly as a threat to all that is good and decent. If I am on campus and I support Israel, I am increasingly perceived as supporting an apartheid state, by faculty and students. An apartheid state from a liberal human rights perspective, must be dismantled.This is a threat to Israel because as more and more people are educated with this worldview, it will affect the media of record and public policy. It’s a war of ideology.
What can be done?
I think the Israelis need to make this a government-to-government issue, and not tolerate from allies this type of ideological attack on the State of Israel, and make sure it is not left unchallenged..Forty-two years ago in Switzerland, there were documents discovered by Swiss security police on the Muslim Brotherhood. A goal of what is called The Project was to distance Israel from the West, isolate it and defeat it, and use antisemitism as a way to fragment American society and weaken democratic countries. The US is the big Satan, and Israel is the small Satan. The Muslim Brotherhood is masterfully using soft power and antisemitism and anti-Zionism as a way to fragment and weaken America, and we see from October 9 that this is what is happening with the Qatari funding of American universities. ■