Paradox: The anti-Qatar protests on US campuses
(Against slavery in Qatar)
“Qatar is a transit and destination country for men and women trafficked for the purposes of involuntary servitude.”—US State Department Trafficking in Persons Report 2009.
If you inferred from my headline that I would report on the progress of anti-Qatar protests on US campuses, that’s on you. I didn’t say that. And there are no such protests.
My headline doesn’t lie. It just says: “Paradox: the anti-Qatar protests on US campuses.” As a sentence, it is incomplete, and one may certainly close it like so: “Paradox: the anti-Qatar protests on US campuses are nonexistent.” That’s a grammatical sentence. And that’s the state of affairs that I can report: there are no anti-Qatar protests on US campuses.
One could argue that there should be such protests.
Why? Well, Qatar is fabulously rich today, thanks to some of the largest gas reserves in the entire world, and from that, and from the very modern buildings going up in Doha, Qatar’s capital, you might get the impression that Qatar must be a modern country. It is not. Qatar is a primitive country whose labor force is made up of a giant population of slaves.
But nobody on US campuses is denouncing that. Why not? It’s a question worth asking, I believe. But let me phrase it thus:
Why is there so much agitation ostensibly in favor of the Arab Palestinians, but not one word to defend the slaves that languish oppressed in Qatar?
These are slave slaves, not metaphorical slaves. They are owned. They have a master. They can’t leave. They are mercilessly exploited. Many are raped. Millions of people.
Lest you think I am exaggerating, consider that, in 2005, Gulf News reported this:
“International human rights groups had raised the alarm over the exploitation of children from Asian and African countries by traffickers who pay impoverished parents paltry sums or kidnap their victims to smuggle them into the Gulf.”1
“The Gulf” is a reference to the Persian Gulf, where several sharia-law States, among them Qatar, keep a giant multitude of slaves (yes, in the 21st century).
The title of the article quoted above was: ‘Qatar to combat human trafficking with six-point plan,’ which may leave the reader with a good feeling: the Emirate of Qatar, a human trafficking world capital, is taking the matter in hand and will combat this scourge. So how did that go? Well, in 2009, a full four years later, the US Department of State, the foreign ministry of Qatar’s closest and most precious ally, the United States, said this:
“Qatar is [still] a transit and destination country for men and women trafficked for the purposes of involuntary servitude and, to a lesser extent, commercial sexual exploitation. Men and women from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, Sudan, Thailand, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and China voluntarily travel to Qatar as laborers and domestic servants, but some subsequently face conditions indicative of involuntary servitude. These conditions include threats of serious harm, including financial harm; job switching; withholding of pay; charging workers for benefits for which the employer is responsible; restrictions on freedom of movement, including the confiscation of passports and travel documents and the withholding of exit permits; arbitrary detention; threats of legal action and deportation; false charges; and physical, mental and sexual abuse.”2
I must point out that the US State Department would prefer not to have to write that, as Qatari bosses are the most intimate allies of US bosses, and that relationship is managed by the US Department of State. So it is safe to assume that reality is far worse than any State Department report.
And this reality is no trifle: this is slavery we are talking about.
So I ask again: Why no anti-Qatar protests on US campuses?
Of course, if the issue were compassion for those suffering—which is a very general category—I could have asked (as a friend of mine just pointed out): Why isn’t anybody protesting the near-total absence of food deliveries for people starving to death in Sudan? Campus protesters in the US seem to care nothing about them. We are talking about some 18 million people at risk of starving to death.
But I am asking about Qatar—specifically—because the explicitly ‘leftist’ protesters on US campuses claim to be very interested in freedom. “Free, Free Palestine,” they chant. Okay. Let’s say you care about freedom. But if freedom—rather than starvation—is your pet issue, then why are the Arab Palestinians, specifically, deserving of so much emotion on this question?
A lot of emotion has been poured. ‘Pro-Palestinian’ campus protesters in the US (and elsewhere) are most agitated, taking entire universities hostage—even destroying property—and making it impossible for others to study. They are turning entire cities upside down. All of it on account, they say, of the Arab Palestinians. And the question, they say, is freedom.
So what about all those slaves in Qatar? And the slaves elsewhere in the Arab Muslim world? We are talking about several million slaves. They are not free.
I understand that a Western ‘leftist’ protester needs to make some strategic economic decisions. The day has 24 hours and eight of those (or so) need to be spent sleeping in your tent in your makeshift encampment on the university campus. There just isn’t enough time in the day to protest every act of oppression. I get that. But if you are going to demand freedom for just one category of people, how about all those slaves in Qatar?
They seem more sympathetic to me. They didn’t elect a terrorist organization, Hamas, to govern them. They didn’t collaborate in the creation of a terrorist State dedicated to commit genocide against another people, which then sent terrorists to kill on sight or torture to death 1,200 innocent civilians on October 7th and also took some 250 hostages to torture and rape. And, by golly, those poor folk in Qatar are slaves. Slaves!
Can’t a Western ‘leftist’ take some interest in the slaves?
What we have here is a political paradox. Consider:
The ‘pro-Palestinian’ agitators take sides against Israel. Since Hamas is fighting Israel, this means they support Hamas. Much of the agitation has been quite explicit on that score. Many protesters have even adopted the phrase, “A free Palestine from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea,” which is Hamas jihadi code for the extermination of the Israeli Jews.
Consistent with that, we have seen campus protesters take a position even against US citizens who are Jewish. That’s racist, of course. But my angle here is the question of slavery. What is noteworthy, from that perspective, is this: the Jews trace their origins to a slave revolt (Book of Exodus), and it was their moral principles, inherited to Christians, that made possible the abolition of slavery in the West. Were it not for the influence of Jewish ethics, these campus protesters would still be slaves.
By stark contrast, Hamas has a pro-slavery ideology, because Hamas is a jihadi organization, and jihadis believe in enslaving any infidels they don’t kill.3 Indeed, Hamas is financed most of all by—drum roll…—the Emirate of Qatar. And Qatar is a jihadi—therefore pro-slavery—State, which (did I mention this?) is already chock-full of slaves.
So here’s the paradox: nothing is more rigorously or traditionally ‘leftist’ than the fight to abolish slavery, and yet these campus protesters, who present as ‘leftists,’ are agitating for the slave-masters against those who taught us to abolish slavery.
What explains that? How did Western leftists come to adopt a pro-slavery position?
This here is a diagnostic issue—I promise you. In other words, the explanation of this paradox reveals the structure of the entire system. Below I will do the following:
Give a historical overview of slavery in Qatar.
Give a proximate answer to the question: Why no leftist anti-Qatar protests?
Give an ultimate answer to the question: Why no leftist anti-Qatar protests?
This process will reveal the structure of the system.
Two annotations
Before I document slavery in Qatar and other sharia-law States, I must make two annotations.
The first is that I will not be speaking here of the millions of wives and daughters of Muslim men, fully half of the population and every one of them a bona-fide slave in sharia-law States such as Qatar.
This misogynistic barbarity, this misogynistic outrage, merely criticized in the West, is a crime against humanity that should scandalize beet-red every allegedly ‘leftist’ ‘social-justice warrior.’ But this is not my present quarry. My quarry in this piece are the millions of men, women, and children from other countries who’ve been imported into sharia-law States such as Qatar and turned into slaves.
The second annotation is that Qataris are hardly alone in keeping slaves. This is happening all over the Arab Muslim world. I will keep a special focus on Qatar, and secondarily on Saudi Arabia (because they are both key US allies), but please keep in mind that this is happening all over Arab Muslim ‘civilization,’ and especially in explicit sharia-law States such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Okay, here we go…
The early 20th century
In 1907, long before the present wave of pro-Islam political correctness in the West, which has represented Islam as ‘the religion of peace,’ the French scholar of Islam Clement Huart wrote that a conquering Muslim state, when considering persons in the conquered population, would apply the following jihadi rule:
“The status of slave is presumed until the contrary is proved ... Conversion to Islam does not alter that status since it is legal to own a Muslim slave.”4
This never stopped. Indeed, according to the Wikipedia article ‘Slavery in Qatar,’
“The British Empire gained control of Qatar in the 1890s and signed the 1926 Slavery Convention to fight enslavement in all land under their control. However, they doubted their ability to stop Qataris from continuing slavery, so the British policy was therefore to assure the League of Nations that Qatar followed the same anti-slavery treaties signed by the British and prevent observation of the area that could disprove the claims. In the 1940s, there were several suggestions made by the British to combat the slave trade and the slavery in the region, but none was considered enforceable on the Qataris.
The fact that the British Empire felt it was too much of a bother to try and get Qataris to free their slaves—even though Qatar is almost the smallest country in the world and impossible to defend, militarily—speaks volumes. If the most powerful country in the world, the British Empire, wholly responsible for defending Qatari borders, found Qataris so rabidly attached to oppressing their slaves that it decided not to bother, what chance is there that Qataris will reform by themselves?
Zero chance, as we shall see.
The mid-20th century
Qatar officially practiced chattel slavery—in a form that treats humans who are the legal property of another as basically an animal or a thing—until the year 1952, when this was made officially illegal.
But that was a pretense; slavery was not really abolished. It was just given a new name, as Wikipedia explains: the so-called Kafala system, adopted in “Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.”
“The [kafala] system requires all migrant workers to have an in-country sponsor, usually their employer, who is responsible for their visa and legal status. This practice has been criticized by human rights organizations for creating easy opportunities for the exploitation of workers, as many employers take away passports and abuse their workers with little chance of legal repercussions. The International Trade Union Confederation estimated 2.4 million enslaved domestic workers in the Gulf countries in its 2014 report, mainly from India, Sri Lanka, Philippines and Nepal.” (my emphasis)
“Enslaved” is correct. There is no exaggeration in the above text. This is not a metaphor. When you can abuse your workers “with little chance of legal repercussions” and you “take away passports,” so that these workers—abused with impunity—also cannot leave, what you have are slaves. It fits the technical, traditional definition of chattel slavery.
In 1964, in a short article that appeared in International Migration Digest titled ‘Forced Migration: The Slave Trade Still Flourishes,’ the author wrote that,
“Slavery countenanced by law or custom may be found today in Africa, Asia, and Asia Minor. Specific sites include Aden, Kuwait, Muscat, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia …, parts of the Sudan, and Yemen.”
Two years earlier, Saudi Arabia had “announced its ‘termination’ [of slavery], but whether that means that their 500,000 old slaves are freed or no new ones may be purchased,” these authors wrote, “is not clear.”5 But it was clear. There was no termination of slavery. The Saudis just went ahead and called it the kafala system. But that’s slavery.
The late 20th century
Okay, but how about more recently? Well, In 1982, Myron Weiner wrote in Population and Development Review that
“In the five small oil-producing states that line the Persian Gulf—Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman—two thirds of the labor force is imported.”6
Whoa! Two thirds: 66%. Were these imported workers slaves? Yes. Imported workers are imported via the kafala system.
And Saudi Arabia? In 1987, Aharon Layish, writing about Saudi Arabia in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, stated that:
“Slavery and concubinage, firmly anchored in the shari’a and in reality, were abolished in 1962, mainly in deference to world [meaning Western] opinion. ... At the same time it appears that slavery, and especially concubinage, have not yet completely disappeared.”7 (bracket is mine)
I must confess to not having the slightest idea what Layish could possibly mean by his statement that slavery and concubinage in the Muslim world are “firmly anchored ... in reality.” But notice that in 1987, a full twenty-five years after the supposed abolition of slavery in Saudi Arabia, scholars of this country conceded in print that slavery there had not ended.
This admission is quite significant because by 1987 Western scholarship of Islam and the Near East had become deferential rather than critical, and the new ‘scholars’ of Islam were already working hard to diminish the impression that there is anything wrong with this religion. Layish’s article was in fact a defense of the view that Saudi Arabia was becoming more moderate! And that’s why he wrote that “slavery, and especially concubinage, have not yet completely disappeared,” as if they had been disappearing and were almost completely gone (by such phrasings is reality managed…). Layish should have written that slavery and concubinage remained rampant and were perhaps increasing.
Of course, the labor migrants imported via the kafala system are called ‘guest-workers,’ but they are slaves. Three years after Layish, in 1990, Frans Schuurman & Raouf Salib wrote in Social Scientist that
“labor migrants in many [Arab] countries are denied the same services and rights as the national population, e.g. there is no juridical protection whatsoever, there is discrimination and the housing conditions in many instances are very bad.”8
When you have “no juridical protection whatsoever” from your ‘employer,’ your employer is really a master. And you are a slave.
The same authors noted that in the United Arab Emirates the proportion of ‘guest workers’ was now almost 75% of the population. But Qatar was even worse:
“Of the 250,000 inhabitants in Qatar 75 per cent is non-Qatari, with an even higher figure (86 per cent) for foreign participation in the economically active population.”9
Can you even picture that? A country run by the tiniest clique of aristocratic loafs while a gigantic population of slaves—86% of the economically active population!—does all the work. To find anything like that in the West, you’d have to go back to ancient Athens.
(Yes, I know they told you in school that Athens was ‘democratic.’ Think again. Demetrius of Phalerum commissioned a census of the Athenian Empire, which he governed in the late 4th century before Jesus, and the figures reported to him were 21,000 citizens, 10,000 (semi-enslaved) metics, and 400,000 chattel slaves.10)
It is only in the context of comparisons with Qatar that Saudi Arabia is a bit less shocking: “In the whole of Saudi Arabia 30 per cent of the population is of foreign origin,” wrote Schuurman and Salib, whereas in some cities, like Jeddah, “52 per cent are foreigners.”
The 21st century
Okay, but what about more recently? A 2003 article in The Middle East Report didn’t mince too many words. Focusing on Saudi Arabia, they wrote:
“Foreign laborers toil in virtual slavery, subordinate to vague labor laws that allow their unlimited exploitation. Arrest without formal charge is frequent, the torture of criminal and political prisoners is common, and due process is mythical. Forced confessions fill the police records, while capital and corporal punishments are handed out with frightening regularity. The top-heavy regime is corrupt and cruel, and maintains domestic order through fear and the threat of violence.”11 (emphasis added)
“Unlimited exploitation”—supported by the State!—is what happens to formal slaves, and that’s what they are in all but name. So I believe the above text is in error, for it calls them “virtual slaves.”
But just in case you think this is a lot of exaggeration from bigoted Westerners, consider what the Qatari prime minister—feeling pressure from outside to reform—conceded in 2007:
“Qatar and Gulf immigration and labour policies require that migrants work under local sponsors [the kafala system], a measure which Qatari Prime Minister Shaikh Hamad Bin Jasem Bin Jabr Al Thani just two weeks ago compared to a form of slavery, raising concerns in the local business community.”12
I didn’t say it. The Qatari Prime Minister said it.
And by saying things like that, the Qatari Prime Minister was indeed “raising concerns in the [Qatari] business community.” Because frank talk like that might be consistent with a moral conviction to reform, and, well, Qatari businesspeople felt it would be bad for business if they were compelled to free the slaves, pay them, and respect their human rights.
But those Qatari businesspeople, the slave masters, really should have known better. This was the Qatari Prime Minister speaking. What were they worried about? Would you expect genuine compassion for the slaves in—of all places—Mordor, from—of all people—Sauron? Nonsense. The Qatari Prime Minister was just making the requisite public noises that would allow Western media to ‘report’ that a reform effort was supposedly afoot in Qatar.
Indeed, just two years earlier the Qatari government had pretended—with a “six-point plan”—to be doing something about the rampant slavery in Qatar.13 This kind of PR-sloshing is to slavery what green-washing is to environmental sustainability. (So let’s call it ‘free-washing.’)
In that same year of 2007, right as the Qatari Prime Minister was confessing publicly that his country was full of slaves, the US State Department wrote the following about Saudi Arabia:
“Saudi Arabia is a destination country for men and women trafficked for the purposes of involuntary servitude and, to a lesser extent, commercial sexual exploitation. Men and women from Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Kenya, and Ethiopia voluntarily travel to Saudi Arabia as domestic servants or other low-skilled laborers, but subsequently face conditions of involuntary servitude, including withholding of passports and other restrictions on movement, non-payment of wages, threats, and physical or sexual abuse. Women from Yemen, Morocco, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Tajikistan were also trafficked into Saudi Arabia for commercial sexual exploitation; others were reportedly kidnapped and forced into prostitution after running away from abusive employers. In addition, Saudi Arabia is a destination country for Nigerian, Yemeni, Pakistani, Afghan, Chadian, and Sudanese children trafficked for involuntary servitude as forced beggars and as street vendors.
The Government of Saudi Arabia does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and is not making significant efforts to do so. Saudi Arabia is placed on Tier 3 for a third consecutive year. The government failed to enact a comprehensive criminal anti-trafficking law, and, despite evidence of widespread trafficking abuses, did not significantly increase the number of prosecutions of these crimes committed against foreign domestic workers. The government similarly did not take law enforcement action against trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation in Saudi Arabia, or take any steps to provide victims of sex trafficking with protection. Saudi Arabia also continues to lack a victim identification procedure to identify and refer victims to protective services.”14
If you are wondering why the Saudi government doesn’t worry about the slaves I’ll explain it. The ‘Saudi government’ is just a bunch of jihadi princes. Their fun is to oppress and rape slaves. They are the ones chiefly responsible for the whole system, and boy… do they enjoy their slaves! That’s the spice of life for them. That’s the ‘civilization’ we are talking about, here.
And remember: Qatar is even worse than Saudi Arabia. Two years later, the US State Department recognized candidly, in its Trafficking in Persons Report 2009, that “Qatar is a transit and destination country for men and women trafficked for the purposes of involuntary servitude.”
Of course, given the intimate relationship between US and Qatari bosses, the State Department naturally felt obligated to claim that “The Government of Qatar”—meaning the Al Thani family, which literally owns Qatar—was “making significant efforts” to fix the problem.
But that’s just diplomatese, or, as I like to call it, hogwash.
In 2012, following complaints received from workers employed in the construction of the facilities for the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) appealed to the Ministry of Labor of Qatar, emphasizing, says Wikipedia,
“four types of violations: the nature of work does not correspond to what is provided for in the labor agreement; employers do not fulfill their obligations to pay wages; employers withdraw passports from employees; employees are forced to live in overcrowded labor camps and are deprived of the right to form trade unions.”
Qatar promised to fix it. Nothing was done. The following year, in an article titled ‘Indentured Servitude in the Persian Gulf,’ the New York Times wrote that
“Some 1.2 million foreign workers—mostly poor Asians from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Indonesia and the Philippines—make up 94 percent of the labor force in Qatar, an absolute monarchy roughly the size of Connecticut.”15
94% of the labor force. Whoa!
Despite all the pledges to reform and all the laws passed, it just gets worse and worse. Qataris don’t work; they get slaves—ever more as time passes.
“In 2016,” according to the Wikipedia article ‘Slavery in Qatar’:
“Qatar officially announced the abolition of kafala, but introduced an alternative. The employer was left with the right to decide whether to let foreign employees go home.”
More simulation. Kafala was not really abolished. After all, the very logic of the kafala system is that your employer decides whether you can leave. Under such conditions, your ‘employer’ is really your master. And you are a slave.
In 2021 in the context of (slightly) increased international scrutiny as the Qatari 2022 FIFA World Cup approached (secured, according to a recent Netflix documentary: FIFA Uncovered, via massive corruption of FIFA officials), one researcher, Cem Gokhan wrote:
“Human trafficking in Qatar is a longstanding concern among international nonprofit organizations and human rights groups. The wealthy Gulf State’s ongoing campaign to bolster its soft power on the world stage and brand its capital Doha as a financial and investment hub comparable to its UAE neighbors Dubai and Abu Dhabi has gathered considerable momentum in recent years. The country is using large-scale construction projects such as an extravagant airport and lavish tourist attractions to cement the city’s position as an oasis of luxury and opulence. However, the dark cloud cast over how exactly the small but ambitious kingdom is achieving these construction feats remains a critical question mark.”16
In the same year, in a rare look at this scandal in the major media, The Guardian reported on the attitude of the Qatari government to the high number of deaths among its migrant workers, consistent with how callous masters consider disposable the lives of superabundant slaves:
“More than 6,500 migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have died in Qatar since it won the right to host the World Cup 10 years ago, the Guardian can reveal.
… The total death toll is significantly higher, as these figures do not include deaths from a number of countries which send large numbers of workers to Qatar, including the Philippines and Kenya. Deaths that occurred in the final months of 2020 are also not included.
… The findings expose Qatar’s failure to protect its 2 million-strong migrant workforce, or even investigate the causes of the apparently high rate of death among the largely young workers.”17
The following year, writes Wikipedia,
“Approximately 100 days after the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar came to an end, a significant number of construction workers involved in the stadium construction found themselves unemployed, impoverished, and struggling to meet basic needs.”
Yes, basic needs like food.
It is the year 2024. Nothing has changed. And nothing will. Not in Qatar.
So why no anti-Qatar protests? The proximate answer
The question is: Why so many anti-Israeli protests but no anti-Qatar protests? My proximate answer: it’s a matter of narrative.
The dominant narrative among ‘leftists’ today, especially the very mobilized ‘leftists,’ has the following structure.
When you are right, everything is morally permitted; you can direct violence at others with unimpeded freedom—because you are right; those who disagree with you are evil.
How do you know if you are right? That’s easy. Can you call yourself a victim? If the answer is ‘yes,’ then you are right, and those who disagree with you must then be ‘oppressors.’
And who is the most important victim anywhere? The Arab Palestinians, as our high-prestige professors answer in a solemn and unanimous chorus.
Therefore, the Arab Palestinians can rape and torture and kill—they can even burn babies—and that will all be interpreted as a morally worthy fight for ‘liberation.’
Why can the above structure—which is at the heart of ‘woke’ ideology—recruit anyone? Because, for fifty years, high-prestige professors at our Western universities, and now also their graduates in Big Media, have taught that the key litmus test to decide who is a good, moral ‘leftist’ is just to check whether they support the Arab Palestinians against Israel: the ‘victim’ against the ‘oppressor.’
This is like a ‘secret handshake’ that establishes you as a ‘good leftist’ in good standing with other woke leftists. Since this is virtue signaling, the Arab Palestinians themselves are hardly noticed. They are only important as an abstract symbol. Facts are unimportant. What matters is saying the right thing so you don’t become a target for your fellow woke leftists, because they are essentially communist commissars always looking for ideological weakness, ready to sick their dogs on anybody who falters.
Terrorism is not an issue. It’s ‘liberation’ so long as ‘the victims’ do it. And nobody is a bigger victim—say the professors—than the Arab Palestinians.
So, after Hamas murdered 1,200 Jewish civilians on October 7th, many tortured to death, and also took some 250 civilians hostage, many to be raped and otherwise abused, these campus ‘leftists’ have felt naturally compelled to protest against Israel. Not against Hamas. Because Hamas fights Israel, meaning—in woke ideology—that it fights for ‘liberation.’
So why no anti-Qatar protests? Well, by this logic, because Qatar is the main financier of Hamas. Which means that Qatar supports ‘liberation.’
To summarize. Qatar—which probably has the highest proportional concentration of slaves of any country in the world—is fighting for ‘liberation.’ And the Israeli Jews, inheritors of the original movement that fights against slavery, and founders of the only democracy in an Arab Muslim sea of slave-making States, are the bad guys.
You see? It’s logic. Woke logic.
So why no anti-Qatar protests? The ultimate answer.
Since the repulsive woke ‘logic’ adduced above has been propounded by university professors at US universities, the next question is why?
There is a larger answer to that question that I will present in a forthcoming essay. But a partial answer is this: Qatar has been paying the salaries of these professors. And the paymaster gets what the paymaster wants.
“Qatar has become the largest foreign donor to American academia in the two decades since 9/11. What has been going on since the outbreak of the war on the campuses of the prestigious American universities, is a multi-participant event that was organized in advance and waited for the right moment. This moment came after the massacre of October 7.
(…)
Through its vast capital, Qatar is paving the way for the deepening influence of its shadows over more and more fields and geographical areas. The American universities that received the most significant funding from the Qataris, including Cornell, Georgetown, Northwestern, and Carnegie Mellon, established branches in Doha, the capital of Qatar. Cornell, which belongs to the American Ivy League, opened a medical school for $1.8 billion, Georgetown received $750 million for a school of government and Northwestern established a journalism school for which it received $600 million in 2007.
(…)
An examination conducted back in 2020 by ISGAP, The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, of which Elie Wiesel served as Honorary President, revealed disturbing findings. The study found a direct connection between the amount of donations from Qatar and other Persian Gulf countries and the presence of pro-Palestinian groups that today feature on college campuses, led by SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine). In some universities, SJP groups organized demonstrations and days of rage immediately on October 8, even before Israel began carrying out significant operations in Gaza.”18 (my emphasis).
Students for Justice in Palestine was founded by a professor at an American university, Hatem Bazian. Get to know him.
Now, this, of course, has influenced universities all over the West, because the entire Western university system is dominated by what happens at American universities.
Qatar has been preparing this for years. Those organizing the protests on US campuses are Qatari hired guns. And those following the organizers have had their minds brainwashed by other Qatari hired guns.
Follow the money, as they say.
Is this what the US bosses want?
Sure it is. The US power elite controls the boards of trustees of the universities. If they didn’t want the Qatari money coming in and transforming US education they would not have cooperated with this policy. But of course they cooperate with this policy because the boards of trustees are a branch of the US power elite that makes US foreign and domestic policy.
Political scientist Thomas Dye, in his work on the structure of US power, explains the supreme role of these university trustees. He writes:
“Most university presidents today have come up through the ranks of academic administration, suggesting that universities themselves may offer a channel for upward mobility into the nation’s elite. We must keep in mind, however, that presidents are hired and fired by the trustees, not by students or faculty.”19
The trustees have ultimate effective control over a university, and they, unlike the rise-through-the-ranks presidents, are members of the corporate elite structure:
“Corporate representatives—company presidents, directors, or other high officials—sit on the boards of trustees of the foundations, universities, and policy-planning groups [think tanks]. The personnel interlocking among corporation boards, university trustees, foundation boards, and policy-planning boards is extensive.”20
The small US power elite, which controls policymaking, is of course responsible for the fact that the most important US military base in the Middle East, home of CENTCOM, is in… Qatar.21
The US Invasion of Iraq was done from this base in Qatar. In other words, US bosses launched themselves to ‘bring freedom and democracy to Iraq’ from the greatest jihadi terror base in the world, also the biggest slave state in the world. Don’t you just love that? FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.
Now, Qatar is the tiniest peninsula, entirely flat and entirely made of sand, situated in the Persian Gulf. It is the size of Connecticut. It cannot be defended, militarily. Except by the US bosses. It follows that US bosses are in a unique position to influence Qatari policy. If they were at all unhappy with the effect of Qatari money on the US university system, they could of course make it stop. But, obviously, they love it.
Don’t look abroad. The US is being destroyed from within. Qatar is just an appendage of the powerful US bosses.
Now you see it: this is the structure of the system. This is what US bosses want. With the help of Qatari money, US bosses have been teaching young college goers to say: to fight for freedom, support the slave master (Qatar) and his terrorists (Hamas).
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
Didn’t George Orwell warn us about that?
But why do US bosses want this? Oh, you must get to know them. Then you’ll understand. Here, take a look:
.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
.svg){kind=link}
‘Qatar to combat human trafficking with six-point plan’; Gulf News; 25 July 2005; by Barbara Bibbo.
https://gulfnews.com/world/gulf/qatar/qatar-to-combat-human-trafficking-with-six-point-plan-1.295163
US Department of State, Trafficking in Persons Report (2009).
“Although slavery existed almost everywhere, it seems to have been especially important in the development of two of the world’s major civilizations, Western (including ancient Greece and Rome) and Islamic.”
https://www.britannica.com/topic/slavery-sociology
Huart, Clement 1907. ‘Le droit de la guerre.’ Revue du monde musulman 2:331-46. [English translation in: The legacy of jihad: Islamic holy war and the fate of non-Muslims. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, pp.282-292. (p.286).]
Forced Migration: The Slave Trade Still Flourishes
International Migration Digest, Vol. 1, No. 1. (Spring, 1964), pp. 69-70.
Weiner, Myron 1982. "International Migration and Development: Indians in the Persian Gulf"; Population and Development Review, Vol. 8, No. 1., pp. 1-36. (p.1)
Layish, Aharon 1987. "Saudi Arabian Legal Reform as a Mechanism to Moderate Wahhabi Doctrine," Aharon Layish, Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 107, No. 2., pp. 279-292. (p.283)
Schuurman, Frans J. & Salib, Raouf 1990. "Labour Migration to the Middle East: A Review of Its Context, Effects and Prospects," Social Scientist, Vol. 18, No. 5., pp. 19-29. (p.23)
Schuurman, Frans J. & Salib, Raouf 1990. "Labour Migration to the Middle East: A Review of Its Context, Effects and Prospects," Social Scientist, Vol. 18, No. 5., pp. 19-29. (p.23)
For more on this topic, consult:
Gil-White, Francisco, Were the Greeks Any Good? WEIRD Morality, Democracy, and the Semiotic Paradox of Classical Historiography (April 23, 2020).
http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3583957
Jones, Toby. 2003. "Seeking a 'Social Contract' for Saudi Arabia," Middle East Report, No. 228. (Autumn, 2003), pp. 42-48. (p.43)
‘Qatar studies new law to tackle human trafficking’; Gulf News; 12 June 2007; by Barbara Bibbo.
https://web.archive.org/web/20171018091453/https://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/qatar/qatar-studies-new-law-to-tackle-human-trafficking-1.183920
‘Qatar to combat human trafficking with six-point plan’; Gulf News; 25 July 2005; by Barbara Bibbo.
https://gulfnews.com/world/gulf/qatar/qatar-to-combat-human-trafficking-with-six-point-plan-1.295163
Extracted from U.S. State Dept Trafficking in Persons Report, June 2007.
http://gvnet.com/humantrafficking/SaudiArabia-2.htm
‘Indentured Servitude in the Persian Gulf’; New York Times; 12 April 2013; by Richard Morin
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/sunday-review/indentured-servitude-in-the-persian-gulf.html
‘The 2022 World Cup: Human Trafficking in Qatar’; The Borgen Project; 5 February 2021; by Cem Gokhan.
https://borgenproject.org/human-trafficking-in-qatar/
‘Revealed: 6,500 migrant workers have died in Qatar since World Cup awarded’; The Guardian; 23 February 2021; by Pete Pattisson, Niamh McIntyre, et al.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/23/revealed-migrant-worker-deaths-qatar-fifa-world-cup-2022
‘Tuition of terror: Qatari money flowed into U.S. universities - and now it's fueling violence’; CTech; 30 October 2023; by Sophie Shulman
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/jwhsqhrat
For more on this, consult Wikipedia’s article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatari_involvement_in_higher_education_in_the_United_States
Dye, Thomas R.. Who's Running America?: The Obama Reign (pp. 134-135). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.
Dye, Thomas R.. Who's Running America?: The Obama Reign (p. 143). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.
“Of all seven American regional unified combatant commands, CENTCOM is among four that are headquartered outside their area of operations (the other three being USAFRICOM, USSOUTHCOM, and USSPACECOM). CENTCOM's main headquarters is located at MacDill Air Force Base, in Tampa, Florida. A forward headquarters was established in 2002 at Camp As Sayliyah in Doha, Qatar, which in 2009 transitioned to a forward headquarters at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.”
Source: Wikipedia.
Clarity embodied. Thank you. Muchas gracias. I have a request/question. In this essay there is the following statement: "But a partial answer is this: Qatar has been paying the salaries of these professors". Which Professors? Regards, Ira
Another brilliant essay. You and Douglas Murray. My favourite people right now.