Buying American Education

What we teach our children matters. They learn lessons at home, but they spend a lot of time learning in school. As children and young adults, they tend to believe what their instructors tell them. It may be time to take a closer look at some of those instructors and the textbooks they are using.

On Tuesday, CBN News posted an article about the amount of Qatari money that has been poured into American education during the past twenty-five years.

The article reports:

Direct from the Persian Gulf to elite universities, corporations, and powerful institutions — Qatari cash is flooding America.

Natalie Ecanow, a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, has tracked this money trail, which goes back some 25 years.

“I spent over a year trying to trace as much of Qatar’s money as I could in the United States, and the grand total that I came up with was $400 billion and change,” she explained. “That’s billion with a b.”

Most of that money started flowing in 2010.

“In some cases, it’s a clear play for influence. I would say that money the Qataris spend on lobbying, public relations, media, to a certain extent, education, all of that is buying influence to some degree,” Ecanow said.

It turns out FDD found Qatari billions making their way into important places here in the U.S. — from our defense and energy industries to public schools and even American universities.

The article notes:

Over the past decade, Qatar has also pumped $25 billion into U.S. energy, with most of that money landing in oil-rich Texas. “Mostly in liquefied natural gas operations down there. And I believe one of the Qatari projects actually just came online in the last couple of months,” Ecanow said.

She and Roman both point out that they consider Qatari donations to American universities especially troubling.

Why? Qatar openly supports the Muslim Brotherhood and has hosted the Taliban and Hamas, terrorists.

According to FDD, the Israeli government actually approved more than $1 billion in Qatari money sent to Hamas since 2012.

“The thinking was, if the Qataris could, you know, spend money on or subsidize, you know, civil service salaries and things like that in Gaza and stabilize, sort of like civilian life in the strip, that maybe, you know, Hamas would sort of moderate. That thinking obviously was proved wrong,” Ecanow said.

Roman is pulling back the curtain on how and where this money can shape what happens at our universities.

The article quotes Gregg Roman, who heads up the Middle East Forum:

“There’s a direct correlation between the levels of antisemitism on college campuses and how much Qatari money goes into those schools.”

Please follow the link to read the entire article. It’s time for America to teach its children and young adults to love America and eschew anti-Semitism.

Discovering The Financial Ties

The Epoch Times is reporting today that Senators have introduced a bill that would force American colleges to disclose their financial ties with the Chinese regime, including its Confucius Institutes, in order to qualify to receive international students. In view of recent arrests of college professors who were working for the Communist Chinese government, I think this is probably a good idea.

The article reports:

The bill comes amid heightened scrutiny on the Chinese regime’s influence on American campuses. A 2020 investigation by the Department of Education found that universities received almost $1.5 billion in contracts and gifts from China from 2014 to 2020.

“The communist regime poses a serious threat to U.S. research as well as undue influence on our college campuses,” Grassley said in a May 5 statement.

One of the vehicles of Beijing’s influence is Confucius Institutes. Billed as Chinese language and culture centers, the institutes have been sharply criticized for promoting Beijing’s propaganda and suppressing academic freedom in universities across the country.

From 2006 to 2019, the Chinese regime poured more than $158 million to about 100 U.S. universities through Confucius Institutes, according to a 2019 U.S. Senate subcommittee on investigations report (pdf). There are currently 47 Confucius Institutes in the country, according to the National Association of Scholars (NAS).

“This legislation will shine a light on any funny business that the Chinese government is trying to play on our campuses under the guise of Confucius Institutes and any financial ties between our educational institutions and the communist regime,” Grassley said in the statement.

The proposed legislation would effectively codify a Trump-era policy proposal that was automatically rescinded when President Joe Biden took office because the proposed rule not been formalized through regulatory processes before the end of former President Donald Trump’s term.

The article concludes:

The Senate in March passed a bill that would force host universities to take full control of Confucius Institutes or lose their federal funding.

In the past few years, dozens of Confucius Institutes have closed down around the country. But in their place, many universities have simply entered into new rebranded partnerships with the Chinese regime under a different name, according to the NAS.

This bill is definitely needed.