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Wall Street Journal Publishes Pro-Qatar Content Paid For By Doha

The Wall Street Journal accepted investment from Qatar and ran a series of articles extolling the country, which hosted the leaders of Hamas during the October massacre of roughly 1200 Israelis and has been spending billions of dollars around the world to promote its image.

The ad, titled, “Eye on Qatar,” features articles with titles such as “Qatar’s billion-dollar vision: creating a global vc hub in the gcc,” “The future of business in Qatar: why global companies are setting up here,” “Media city Qatar’s chairman on building the next global media capital,” and “Innovation on the rise: inside qatar’s startup boom.”

In 2008, the Al-Qaradawi Center for Islamic Studies at Qatar Foundation in Education City, Doha, Qatar, part of the state-led Qatar Foundation’s College of Islamic Studies, was opened. It was named after the violently antisemitic Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the cleric who in 2009 called for God to kill all Jews, “down to the very last one.”

The mother of Qatar’s emir and chair of the Qatar Foundation, Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, wrote on social media that the Jews would disappear from Israel as she praised Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas terrorist who masterminded the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre, “The name Yahya means the one who lives. They thought him dead, but he lives… He will live on. And they will be gone.”

The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) released a study in 2019 showing the existence of substantial Middle Eastern funding (primarily from Qatar) to American universities that had not been reported to the Department of Education, as required by law. “In fact, ISGAP’s research uncovered billions of dollars of unreported funds, which, in turn, led to the launch of a federal government investigation in 2019,” the organization noted. “Georgetown University has received approximately $1.073 billion from Qatar since establishing its Qatar campus in 2005, with credible evidence of underreporting to the U.S. Department of Education,” ISGAP noted this year.

Earlier this month, GOP Rep. Mark Harris of North Carolina grilled Georgetown University President Robert Groves for awarding a university medal to Sheikha Moza bint Nasser; Groves refused to revoke the medal.

In 2012, Qatar pledged $400 million to Hamas and the Gaza Strip, and an estimated $1.8 billion since 2012, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies reported, adding:

In 2019, Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh reportedly told Qatar’s foreign minister that Doha was “Hamas’s main artery” for fundraising. Haniyeh wrote to then-Hamas Gaza chief, Yahya Sinwar, in 2021 to tell him that Qatar’s emir had “agreed in principle to supply the resistance discreetly,” and that $11 million had already “been raised from the emir for the leadership of the movement.”

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