What do Oxford University, Paris Saint-Germain Football Club and Hamas have in common? They’ve all been beneficiaries of Qatar’s largesse – a miniature Gulf petrostate with outsized ambitions, a dismal human rights record and a gift for laundering its image through Western investments.
Recent headlines that Donald Trump may accept a $400 million plane from the emirate, conveniently timed with Qatar Airways’ record-breaking Boeing deal, have cast fresh light on the country’s chequebook diplomacy. For years, Doha has funnelled money into Western economies, sports clubs, property portfolios and – most troublingly – universities.
The generous funding of Western academia is particularly jarring. This Gulf monarchy embodies everything our elite institutions claim to oppose. Homosexuality is illegal. Women remain subjugated under “male guardianship laws”. Political parties don’t exist. Criticising the emir can land you in jail. Freedom House, the US-based non-profit which assesses each country’s political freedoms and civil liberties, scores Qatar a dismal 25/100, classifying it as “Not Free”.
And yet the Gulf state plays patron to elite institutions that pride themselves on liberal values. Qatar is the largest foreign donor to US universities. In Britain, its cash reaches into Oxford, King’s College London and beyond. Leading international universities have opened satellite campuses in Doha. Few seem troubled that the same regime hosting Western educational outposts also hosts Hamas, entertained Taliban representatives, and finances Islamist movements with, shall we say, rather limited enthusiasm for “diversity and inclusion”.
But this isn’t just about hypocrisy. It’s about leverage. There is astonishingly little curiosity about why a “not-free” regime from the Middle East invests so heavily in institutions underpinning our free societies? What authoritarian regime funds institutions supposed to teach critical thinking and question authority – unless it hopes, perhaps, the donations will help them avoid too many questions?
Qatar’s influence strategy is built on a four-pronged infrastructure to embed itself into the heart of Western public life: academia, sport, real estate and media.
And it’s in the latter that Al Jazeera plays its part. The Doha-based broadcaster is routinely presented in the West as a kind of Arab BBC – bad enough one might say given the corporation’s accusations of anti-Israel bias. But, as with the Beeb, it’s Al Jazeera’s Arabic service, reaching hundreds of millions of people in the region, that seems particularly worrying. Clips showing AJ reporters cutting off live interviews whenever Gazans begin criticising Hamas rule are all across social media. Israeli officials have accused several of its Arabic-language journalists of moonlighting as Hamas terrorists.
But of course the English-language service is not without fail. For example, the long debunked accusation that an Israeli missile hit Al-Ahli Arab hospital in October 2023 supposedly killing 500 (in reality a misfired Palestinian rocket struck the hospital’s car park with far fewer casualties) is still presented on the Al Jazeera website as a plausible story, with Israeli denials buried below the accusatory headline.
The problem with Qatari influence goes well beyond a free pass for its domestic human rights record. The emirate has geopolitical ambitions that ought to concern Western democracies far more than they do. Qatar presents itself – through gleaming towers, global investments, and academic partnerships – as a modern, constructive partner. But behind the designer suits and football deals lies a deeply pre-modern project. Qatar is pursuing an Islamist agenda while posing as a liberal ally.
This two-faced strategy is nowhere more cynically executed than in its patronage of Hamas. Qatar has managed to win accolades from Western governments for “mediating” negotiations to free Israeli hostages – abducted, however, by the very terrorists Qatar has funded and hosted in luxury hotels. It’s a diplomatic sleight of hand: bankroll the arsonist, then get applauded for lending the fire brigade.
Through its support for groups such as Hamas and ties with Iran, it promotes values and policies fundamentally at odds with Western interests.Consider the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), led by Ali al-Qaradaghi, a Brotherhood loyalist and Qatari academic. In April, the IUMS issued a fatwa calling for jihad against Israel. Qaradaghi – who calls same-sex marriage an “aggression” against Islam – lectures at Qatar University, while Western universities accept money from his government without blinking.
Meanwhile, funds linked to Qatar have also been flowing into mosques and Islamic centres across Europe. Given the brand of Islam favoured by the regime, and the threats posed by Islamist radicalism in Europe, is there adequate scrutiny of what these donations are really buying? The real issue isn’t that Qatar is playing this game. It’s that we are. Our institutions have been tested and found eminently for sale. And the price isn’t just positive coverage. It’s a threat to our principles, our interests, and social cohesion.
Qatar knows our price. Time we remembered our worth.
