Dirty Little Secrets: Lips Sealed on Academia's Qatar Connection

Last week ended with a split screen featuring savagery on one side and shame on the other. We woke Sunday with news that hours earlier Hamas had taken six hostages they were holding in the tunnels beneath Rafah, each emaciated after 11 months in captivity, and shot them in the head multiple times, all the while BS-ing a gullible world that they were prepared to release them alive. Months earlier, America's far left had demanded that Israeli troops stay out of Rafah. That led many Democrats to dutifully demand the same. Which led the Biden-Harris administration to try to buy their favor by publicly threatening Israel with an aid cut-off if its troops entered Rafah, where everyone knew Hamas was holding hostages.

This counterproductive, even idiotic move emboldened Hamas to give potential ceasefire deals the middle finger, with the result that the innocents kidnapped by Hamas remained in Gaza's tunnels. Now Hamas has murdered six of the few hostages still alive -- five Israelis and one American -- reportedly just as Israeli troops were about to reach them.

On the split screen's other side was the release by Columbia University's antisemitism task force of its report on antisemitism there, which it found to be "serious and pervasive." The report, based on the testimonies of 500 students, came just as students across the country are returning to campus. Documenting rampant "harassment, verbal abuse and ostracism, and in some cases physical violence" at Columbia, the task force found "an urgent need to reshape everyday social norms," indicting the university for its arrogance. "Some members of the Columbia community have been unwilling to acknowledge the antisemitism many students have experienced -- the way repeated violations of university policy and norms have affected them, and the compliance issues this climate has created with respect to federal, state and local anti-discrimination law," its authors wrote.

Punctuating the point that a sort of fashionable neo-Nazism has taken hold in academia were fresh examples of how ugly things are. On the University of Pittsburgh campus Friday night, a group of Jewish students were assaulted by a man wearing a keffiyeh. At Hunter College, Jewish students were confronted by a banner reading "It's right to rebel, Hillel go to hell" next to another banner featuring a Kalashnikov rifle calling to "bring the war home." Near the University of Michigan campus handbills reading "A Dead Zionist A Day Keeps Genocide Away" were posted.

Professor Charles Asher Small, founder of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), has taught about antisemitism in some of the world's most prestigious universities. He predicts that college campuses are about to see more virulent antisemitism than ever before. "It's going to be a rough year," he says.

ISGAP is among the organizations that have demonstrated that the bullying and intimidation of Jewish students is promoted by massive subsidies of petrodollars that are neither immaculately conceived nor immaculately received. ISGAP's research series, entitled "Follow the Money," demonstrates that Qatar, with only 350,000 citizens, has alone funneled billions of dollars to American colleges and universities to buy influence and, in particular, to influence faculty, administration and student views of Israel. Most of the funding has not been disclosed to the IRS or the Department of Education, in violation of federal law. Qatar keeps its influence-peddling secret, and the colleges and universities that happily accept its largesse do the same. "The Qataris know if you influence higher education, where young Americans learn how to be citizens, you influence the rest of society," says Small.

American taxpayers are increasingly suspicious of educational institutions that pocket over 200 billion of their hard-earned dollars annually but who profess outrage that they should have to account for their Middle Eastern benefactors. "Universities want the free flow of money, but they don't want to be held accountable," Small notes. "They want to be completely free of any oversight."

Small believes that federal investigations into the foreign purchase of influence in American academia are long past due. Those with a vested interest in hiding the Qatar connection, of course, see things differently.

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Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.