Georgetown University Awards Medal to Qatari Royal Who Praised October 7 Mastermind

Sheikha Moza bint Nasser celebrated Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar after his death last October. On April 16, Georgetown University awarded Sheikha Moza its President’s Medal at a ceremony marking the 20th anniversary of Georgetown’s Qatar campus (GU-Q). The President’s Medal is “one of the highest distinctions conferred” by the university and “is reserved for individuals whose contributions reflect the university’s deepest commitments,” Georgetown Interim President Robert M. Groves said.

Sheikha Moza is the mother of Qatar’s emir and the chairperson of the Qatar Foundation — a nonprofit established by the Qatari royal family in 1995. The Qatar Foundation runs an academic campus in Doha called “Education City” that houses GU-Q along with the Doha branches of several other American universities.

Georgetown says it is “committed to the service of humanity,” yet honoring Sheikha Moza signals that it has different standards for those who direct hundreds of millions of dollars to the university. After Sinwar, the October 7 mastermind, was killed, Sheikha Moza posted on X: “The name Yahya means the one who lives. They thought him dead but he lives.” Hinting at her wish for Israel’s elimination, she added, “He will live on and they will be gone.”

Georgetown and Qatar: A Decades-Old Partnership

Georgetown established its Doha campus in 2005 in partnership with the Qatar Foundation. According to the U.S. Department of Education, Georgetown University has accepted nearly $930 million in gifts and contracts from Qatar since 2005. A substantial portion of the funding came from the Qatar Foundation and underwrote GU-Q.

Sheikha Moza’s award is not the first indication that Georgetown has forsaken its values while soaking up Qatari funds. Last fall, GU-Q invited former Al Jazeera executive Wadah Khanfar to speak at a conference titled “Reimagining Palestine.” Khanfar previously praised Hamas’s October 7 massacre, which he said, “came at the perfect moment for a radical and real shift in the path of struggle and liberation,” and once delivered a eulogy for Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the late Muslim Brotherhood-aligned cleric who gave religious authorization for the abduction and murder of American troops in Iraq.

In 2022, Assistant Dean Christine Schiewitz of GU-Q published a book whose acknowledgments thank Sheikha Moza “for her incredible vision,” while the text praises her commitment to coexistence across cultural divides.

Qatar’s fingerprints aren’t limited to GU-Q. Back in Washington, Qatar funds a post-doctoral fellowship at Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Qatari Minister of State Sheikh Abdulrahman bin Saud Al Thani sits on the center’s board of advisors.

Qatar Is a Top Foreign Funder of American Universities

Disclosures submitted to the U.S. Department of Education indicate that Qatar has pumped $6.25 billion into the American higher education system since 2001. Between 2012 and 2024,Qatar poured “more non-tuition money into U.S. universities than any other country,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Given Qatar’s record of covering its tracks, coupled with the traditionally low compliance and lax enforcement of federal reporting requirements, Qatar’s total investments in the American higher education system likely exceed the $6.25 billion mark.

Qatar’s dollars come with strings attached. The emirate’s wealth is a major source of soft power that Doha leverages to buy influence in the United States. That influence often manifests in the quiet normalization of radical Islamism, as is the case with Georgetown University. This trend is not surprising considering that Qatar is a longtime sponsor of the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots, Hamas included.

Washington Needs to Sound the Alarm on Qatar

Policymakers are aware of China’s malign influence on American college campuses. Last month, the House of Representatives passed the DETERRENT Act, which is designed to increase transparency in the higher education system by lowering the threshold for reporting foreign funds. The act sets a $0 threshold for adversaries like China, but not for Qatar. Doha’s influence hasn’t sounded a similar alarm — but it should.

Natalie Ecanow is a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). For more analysis from Natalie and FDD, please subscribe HERE. Follow Natalie on X @NatalieEcanow. Follow FDD on X @FDD. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on foreign policy and national security.