“Judging by the results,” said Margaret Atwood, “stupidity is the same as evil.”
The Canadian writer’s insight was forcefully validated in last week’s congressional hearing, where the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT all fell victim to the evil that has come to fester in their academic abodes.
The evil is in American academia’s failure to call a spade a spade when it comes to the abuse of the Jewish state. The stupidity is in the failure to realize that what started with an effort to ostracize Israeli academics soon proceeded to attacks on American Jews – first social, then verbal, then physical – on the lawns of American schools.
And the even greater stupidity was for these prominent academic figures to arrive in Congress armed not with the moral conscience and intellectual intuition that were once prerequisites for their positions, but with hollow statements written in their lawyers’ legalese.
That is how, when answering a simple question like “Is calling for the genocide of Jews a violation of your school’s code of conduct?” all three presidents thought not of the truth they are supposed to nurture, and not of the justice that the court of history demands, but of the lawsuits they might face in their milieus’ courts of political correctness.
Having said this, the threesome’s failure of judgment is but a symptom of problems much larger than their personal careers. The real problem is the degeneration of American academia, which is gradually losing its intellectual honesty, Western conviction, and educational aim.
The scourge clearly exceeds its Middle Eastern context and should be discussed separately. Right now the subject is this tragedy’s Middle Eastern context, a context that has one word written all over it: Qatar.
How is Qatar responsible for the decline of US academia?
A PENINSULA that protrudes from Saudi Arabia’s hip and faces Iranian shores, Qatar has become American universities’ leading foreign source of money, according to a study by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.
In the half-decade ending in 2019, these sums added up to $2.7 billion, all doled from the fortunes of a country that produces little, but sits on gas fields and oil wells that place its per-capita purchasing power between Switzerland and Singapore.
That itself is odd, even before discussing the sheikdom’s moral record and questionable aims. A country the size of Cyprus, with a citizenry smaller than Buffalo’s, is not a natural funder of a superpower’s higher education.
Yes, the Qataris cleverly hide the funds in seemingly nongovernmental pipes, but the origin is clear. Doha has been using money, systematically and for decades, to penetrate American universities. It takes no political scientist to realize that such financial flow from such an origin represents neither charity nor curiosity.
Anyone who has rubbed shoulders with academia knows that such donations are never free. There is an aim behind Qatar’s donations, and America’s national interest demands that it be explored and exposed.
Like the Russian effort to destabilize American society and institutions, chances are that foreign money has been used to impact what American scholars will research, what they will write, what they will teach, what they will say, and what they will not say, and how their students will think and feel.
Qatar’s academic meddling is but one part of its manipulation of the outer world, an effort begun in 1996 when the princedom launched Al Jazeera, the Arab world’s first serious effort to establish an international news organization. CELEBRATED AT the time by gullible Westerners as a harbinger of Arab freedom, Al Jazeera indeed parted with previous Middle Eastern norms, stinging Arab governments in ways Arab media had previously avoided. There was only one caveat: Al Jazeera attacked anyone’s government, except its Qatari masters’.
It was a microcosm of the Qatari Principle, which uses Western tools to attack Western values, and pretends to be a bastion of neutrality à la Switzerland, while actually waltzing with both sides of any conflict.
With Al Jazeera, the Qatari Principle meant championing freedom of speech and at the same time abusing it. In America, it meant granting Uncle Sam a major military hub, and at the same time backing notoriously anti-Western engines like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.
In Saudi Arabia, the Qatari Principle meant joining Riyadh’s war in Yemen, but bankrolling its enemies in Syria. And in Israel, it meant doing business and even diplomacy with Jerusalem, but at the same time financing Hamas.
For years, the West tolerated all this duplicity, whether because it was seen as harmless or because its benefits seemed higher than its costs. Well, this forgiveness must now change.
THE GRAVITY of Qatar’s finagling with world affairs was laid bare in last year’s World Cup. Fortunately, the soccer event itself came and went smoothly. Unfortunately, Qatar is believed to have bought the right to host international sports’ largest event, which previously required a mature local league with a vast fan base, all of which Qatar patently lacked.
The hosting was reportedly bought for some $150 million in bribes to FIFA officials, and the construction of the event’s stadiums cost the lives of 6,500 abused workers.
Now, the same Qatar that contaminated sports is out to contaminate academia. One is at a loss to understand how institutions that are supposed to be beacons of freedom allowed themselves to take money from a deeply corrupt sheikdom of easy money, whose appreciation of America’s values is not much higher than North Korea’s.
Clearly, America’s universities must search their souls and change their ways, but so should its government. Its spooks must start tracing foreign money’s paths to and within America’s campuses, its diplomats must shun Qatari mediators, and its leaders must treat Qatar not as the paragon of neutrality that it isn’t, but as the troublemaker that it is.
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The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.■