Qatar recently hired the services of a former United States secretary of education as a lobbyist working on its behalf in Washington. Dr. Bill Bennett has been brought in to help the oil-rich emirate improve its image in the United States, which has suffered as a result of harsh public criticism over the massive investments Qatar has made in American universities.

Bennett served as Secretary of Education under President Ronald Reagan from 1985 and 1988, as well as holding several posts in the administration of President George H. W. Bush. He currently hosts a popular podcast and appears as a regular analyst on the Fox network. According to the documents Bennett filed with the U.S. Justice Department, he has signed a four-month contract with Qatar, for which he will be paid $30,000 a month. The document describes his role as “Senior Education Advisor to the Embassy of Qatar” in the United States. Bennett is just the latest lobbyist to be employed by Qatar in recent years, as part of its ongoing efforts to improve its standing with the administration and to improve its public image on various matters.

The massive funding that Qatar has funneled into the American academic system has been widely – and almost exclusively negatively – covered. A study published in 2022 by the National Association of Scholars in the United States found that, between 2001 and 2021, the Qataris donated an unfathomable sum of $4.7 billion to U.S. universities, making the country the largest single foreign donor to American academic institutions. Among those universities which benefited from Qatar’s generosity were Cornell, Georgetown and Northwestern – all of which went on to establish branches in Doha. According to various media reports, some of the universities that set up branches in Qatar were asked to “adapt” their syllabi. For example, some were asked to remove books considered “too liberal" from their reading lists.

Qatar in K-12, too

An investigative report published by Shomrim in March found that Qatar has also funded education programs in the American K-12 education system, from kindergarten through to Grade 12, by means of a program called Choices, which operates under the auspices of Brown University, a prestigious private Ivy League research university in Providence, Rhode Island. The Choices Program offers academic syllabuses, textbooks and video lessons and also provides subsidized training for teachers. Funding for the program came via an organization called the Qatar Foundation International (QFI), which is part of the Qatar Foundation (QF) – a non-profit organization established by Sheikha Moza bint Nasser Al-Missned, the mother of the current Emir of Qatar, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. QFI is also involved in the direct funding of programs which teach the Arabic language and Arab culture in public schools in several states of the U.S. and in the United Kingdom.

Revelations about the extent of Qatari involvement in American universities and schools came to light in part thanks to an investigation conducted by a forensic Israeli accounting firm specializing in global financial investigations. The firm was hired by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) in New York, which has published a series of reports over the past two years detailing the extent to which Qatar has penetrated American academic institutions and K-12 schools.

ISGAP reports claim that Qatari funding has influenced the content of K-12 and university education and has fueled an increase in antisemitic incidents on several key American campuses. According to ISGAP, academic institutions that received Qatari funding experienced on average 300 percent more antisemitic incidents than those that did not. Students at Qatari-funded institutions reported increased exposure to anti-Israel rhetoric, pushbacks against freedom of expression, suspensions, investigations, censorship and even the dismissal of faculty and researchers.

Brig. Gen. (Res.) Sima Vaknin-Gill, the Managing Director and Vice President of Strategy and Development at ISGAP, told Shomrim at the time that anti-Israel policy is embedded in educational material in the United States. “Over time, the [Choices] program – which started as a relatively balanced program when it came to the issue of the Middle East – has become more extreme and has adopted a blatantly anti-Israel narrative, including negating the right of Israel to exist as a state. From omitting historical details, such as the Balfour Declaration on the one hand or the Abraham Accords on the other, to downplaying the connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel and erasing Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel. And the gatekeepers are totally unaware that any of this is happening.”

Vaknin-Gill added that Qatari infiltration into K-12 schools in the United States is a critical moment, not only in the Israeli context. “This is a case of a foreign country advancing an ideology that is fundamentally anti-Western and anti-democratic – and it is being allowed to wield unimpeded influence over American children, teenagers, and students, with no supervision and no system of checks and balances.”

Bennett’s role

Now, it appears that Qatar is trying to counter the negative publicity – at the same time as it is readying for possible hearings on the subject in the U.S. Congress. According to the documents filed with American authorities, Bennett is expected to write opinion pieces, give interviews and, if called on, to give his views to any Congressional hearing about Qatari involvement in the American education system. His employer, the Qatari Embassy in Washington, added that “the purpose of this engagement [with Bennett] is to provide him with information relating to American universities offering curriculum in Qatar, to allow him to review and understand funding decisions made by the Qatari government relating to these schools, to promote Western understanding of the nature of these expenditures and the nature of the curriculum, and, most broadly, to promote economic and cultural understanding between Qatar and the United States.”

The agreement also stipulates that Bennett’s generous remuneration is in exchange for him “discussing his research into Qatari influence and funding in the educational context.” The embassy added that Bennett would also make efforts to publicize the fact that “Qatari higher education efforts do not support radical Islamicist movements or positions, and his engaging in publicized efforts, potentially including communications to U.S. political office holders, would help dispel contrary notions.”

It is interesting to note that, in an interview with Fox News last year about anti-Israel protests on American university campuses, Bennett cited “external agitators” as having an impact at several universities and called for legal action to be taken against campuses that allowed such protests to go ahead. Less than two months later, and again on the Fox network, Bennett published an op-ed that struck a very different tone to his previous comments. The headline was “An American education partnership in Qatar brings surprising benefits to the Middle East.”