David Suissa
Jewish Journal, June 10, 2025
“To award Georgetown’s highest honor to someone openly praising a mass murderer is not intercultural dialogue. It’s capitulation.”
A sweeping new report has cast fresh light on the growing role of foreign influence in American higher education, reporting that Georgetown University received more than $1 billion from Qatari sources over the last three decades. The findings, released by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), claim that the Gulf state has strategically invested in U.S. universities to shape policy discourse, normalize Islamist ideologies, and establish long-term influence pipelines into government and civil society.
In the wake of the report, it was announced today that a Congressional hearing on campus antisemitism scheduled for July 3 will include testimony from Georgetown’s interim president Robert Groves, in addition to testimony from leaders of University of California, Berkeley and the City University of New York.
At the heart of the Georgetown controversy is Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q), a branch campus founded in 2005 in partnership with the Qatar Foundation, a government-controlled organization under the patronage of the country’s ruling family. According to the report, titled “Georgetown University, Qatar and the Normalization of Radical Ideologies,” the agreement has transformed Georgetown into what ISGAP describes as a “prestige façade for authoritarian soft power.”
The tension surrounding Georgetown’s Qatari ties reached a symbolic peak earlier this year during a gala celebrating GU-Q’s 20th anniversary. At the event in Doha, Georgetown renewed its contract with the Qatar Foundation for another 10 years and awarded its prestigious President’s Medal to Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, a central figure in the Qatari royal family and longtime patron of GU-Q…..SOURCE