Qatari Influence Network Has US Teachers Advancing Propaganda

The Qatari government is funding teacher salaries, curriculums, and programming in school districts large and small across the country, allowing the small country to pursue a scheme of indoctrinating America’s youth.

That is what the first batch of public records requests from OpenTheBooks, reviewed by The Federalist, shows. The “cradle-to-graduation propaganda pipeline” includes grooming teachers to advance Qatari influence and talking points, angling soft cultural changes through language and field trip opportunities, and ultimately, as OpenTheBooks points out, creating “the next generation of activists ready to sew chaos on college campuses.”

“Parents and taxpayers have a right to understand what influences could be capturing classroom learning. While China and Russia dominate our global affairs concerns, the small nation of Qatar has become very sophisticated at influencing classroom curriculum, including for elementary school students,” OpenTheBooks CEO John Hart told The Federalist. “Well-meaning teachers who are looking for ways to better their classrooms can’t be expected to suss out foreign influence operations like this, but we can. Open the Books is going to take an exhaustive look at the extent of QFI’s grantmaking and the results.”

Qatar Foundation International (QFI) is the international wing of the Qatar Foundation, which is a government-run nonprofit. QFI gives grants to K-12 schools to fund things like Arabic language teachers’ salaries, the Arabic Honor Society, and school field trips. Field trips for students have included visits to the House of Palestine Annual Culture Festival in San Diego, California, but the organization also funds teacher trips to events it sponsors in the United States and Doha, Qatar, like the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE).

The group functions similarly to the Confucius Institute, which runs a similar propaganda scheme on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party in the American public education system. QFI has a heavy push toward globalism and being a member of a “global community.” Doha itself hosts the “Education City,” where American universities like Texas A&M, Northwestern, and Georgetown have affiliates.

The Lawfare Project, an organization that advocates for the rights of Jewish people, has suggested that any group, schools K-12 through college, that benefits from QFI should be required to register as foreign agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Lesson plans in K-12 schools suggest fealty to Qatar, with one titled “Express Your Loyalty to Qatar.” More propagandistic, however, is the use of Zinn Education Project materials. The group, named after infamous propagandist and revisionist history purveyor Howard Zinn, consistently pushes anti-American sentiments into American schools.

One Zinn lesson QFI uses is called “Whose ‘Terrorism,’” which attempts to alter the definition of terrorism in order to inject a level of relativism into the discussion — asserting that terrorism is in the eye of the beholder and the one committing the atrocity could see it as a righteous act.

Bill Bigelow, who came up with the “Whose ‘Terrorism’” curriculum, wrote the reactions of some students after going through the lesson.

“One student said, ‘If you don’t have any boundaries, then anyone can be a terrorist.’ Another said, ‘The U.S. government won’t define terrorism because they don’t want to be able to be considered terrorists.’” Bigelow said. “As one student wrote after the activity: ‘I also realized how many terrorism acts the U.S. has committed. When our government doesn’t define terrorism, it makes me think that they just want a free shot to kill anyone they want.’”

QFI also sponsored a “Middle East 101” course for public school teachers in Phoenix, Arizona, where the primary speaker was Center for Strategic and International Studies senior staff member Barbara Petzen. Petzen “repeatedly argued that religion or ideology had no relationship with Islamic terrorism” and that Islamism as an ideology was about prioritizing good government and is actually opposed to terrorism.

At New York and Texas schools, QFI-affiliated teachers have displayed maps in their classrooms that replace Israel with a “united Palestine.”

OpenTheBooks’s data also shows QFI’s influence in the nation’s capital of Washington, D.C. There, Qatar distributed $731,113 between 2017 and 2024. While that number may appear small compared to the D.C. school district’s budget, the influence it purchases is outsized — and OpenTheBooks said this kind of funding just scratches the surface of what Qatar has been able to do across the country.

In return for its funding, QFI requires that school districts report back to them three times per year with activities and accomplishments, the number of students enrolled, issues, staffing changes, budget changes, events and activities planned, and the progress and “sustainability of the work.”

Moreover, teachers are required to participate in a professional development regime and must be given “reasonable release time from regular duties so as to participate in Foundation-sponsored events and activities or other seminars, workshops and/or conferences that promote Arabic language and culture professional development.” Teachers are also required to participate in “regular meetings with a teacher trainer designated by” QFI.

Teachers are visited by QFI staff three times in a school year, on top of teachers attending the group’s summer institute. QFI can also “observe classroom activities,” speak with teachers, students, and administrators, and administer an “AAPPL Measure” to evaluate student Arabic language progress.

In the general grant terms, however, there is at least an “anti-terrorism clause” requiring that no one receiving the money from QFI will engage in terrorist activity.

There are also consequences for noncompliance.

Arizona’s Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) received $431,522 from QFI from 2012 to 2018, but in 2019 QFI denied continued funding because the district purportedly lacked clarity in its financial reporting and “provided inaccurate and misleading final narrative reporting,” according to QFI. OpenTheBooks told The Federalist that the break in 2019 shows how quickly QFI will shift money around if it is not able to maintain a tight leash on the school district.

In an email to the school district from QFI, the group said that TUSD’s lack of compliance with reporting and spending requirements would essentially warrant an audit of the district as it pertains to the QFI program, saying ominously in its program denial email, “QFI will continue to support TUSD teachers directly by offering professional development opportunities as well as through our CREGs program that provides classroom resources and materials as we take a full financial accounting of the program for the past four years. Our accountants will be in touch to make arrangements to this end.”

“By attaching extensive reporting and training requirements to the grant money, Qatar is able to monitor the awardees and ensure the programming is run the way the Qatari government wants,” OpenTheBooks wrote. “This under-the-radar project poses a hazard for every school district in the country and for our overall national security.”

The information on the D.C. and Tucson school districts represents the initial findings of a larger OpenTheBooks records request campaign, which will likely reveal more about the size and scope of QFI’s influence operation in the future. In 2017, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Qatar Foundation had given $30 million to dozens of schools over an eight-year period.

Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.