Is Qatar Funding Antisemitism in Texas Public Schools?

Over $1.5 million flowed from the Qatari royal family's charity into Austin and Houston classrooms, and the materials it brought with it told children that Zionists manipulate Westerners and that Jews seek to control people in the West.

Qatar Foundation International has provided more than $1.5 million since 2015 to public school districts in Austin and Houston. The funding supported Arabic language teachers, classroom observers, curricular materials, and textbooks imported from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, and Egypt. One of those textbooks contained explicit antisemitic conspiracy theories claiming that Zionists manipulate Westerners and that Jews seek to control people in the West. That is the finding of a new report by Foundation for Defense of Democracies researcher Simone Weichselbaum, published in Real Clear Education, and it raises questions that Texas school administrators have yet to fully answer.

Conspiracy Theories, Mosque Greeting Cards, and Maps Without Israel

In Austin, QFI spent more than $462,000 between 2016 and 2022 funding the Arabic Language and Culture program across the district, paying instructor salaries at Austin High School and Burnet Middle School, along with curricular materials and instructional resources. When FDD requested copies of the teaching materials, Austin school officials said they needed to hire a $50,000 translator before sharing any files and admitted they did not know what, exactly, was being taught in the QFI-funded program. The Texas attorney general's office eventually intervened and the materials were released.

What those files contained was striking. An all-Arabic textbook published by the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Higher Education advanced a conspiracy theory stating that Jews are trying to control people in the West, telling students that Western ignorance of Arabs allows Zionists to manipulate them. Maps throughout the materials falsely labeled Israel as Palestine. One assignment gave students greeting cards decorated with a mosque and text praising the Muslim Prophet Mohammed, asking children to attach a cutout of the Ka'ba to the card. Austin school officials apparently had no idea any of this was in the curriculum they had agreed to deliver.

Another exercise, drawn from a curriculum produced by the State of Qatar, told teachers the lessons were "compatible with Qatari values and the Arab and Islamic culture," and introduced second graders to vocabulary words including Allah and emir alongside basic colors and occupations.

A textbook funded by the Obama-era U.S. Department of Education and found in Austin's QFI files asked students to read a poem by Mahmoud Darwish without mentioning that Darwish was a senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, a group linked to the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics and multiple airplane hijackings. The assignment did, however, ask students to journal about being victims of racism.

In Houston, Qatar Wasn't Just Funding Classes – It Was Running Them

In Houston, QFI's involvement went further still. The organization funded the Arabic Immersion Magnet School, a pre-K through eighth-grade institution that bills itself as the first Arabic immersion school in the United States, where subjects including art and physical education are taught in Arabic. QFI paid not only for teachers and teaching consultants but also for instruction in dabke, a traditional Arab dance that has become a prominent symbol of Palestinian resistance culture.

The contracts between Houston and QFI required the school district to allow QFI staff and consultants to sit in on classroom instruction, review teachers' lesson plans in advance, and provide direct feedback to teachers after observations. Emails obtained by FDD show QFI sent classroom observers to the school multiple times between 2017 and 2019, and that a QFI staffer told one teacher she needed one-on-one coaching after observing her class. A foreign entity with documented ties to Hamas was, in effect, supervising American public school teachers.

QFI also commissioned a study tracking how low-income students were absorbing Arabic instruction across four cities, including Houston, collecting student race, gender, and economic data in the process.

This Isn't Philanthropy. It Never Was.

Qatar is not a passive donor with a simple interest in Arabic language education. It is the primary financial backer of Hamas and hosts the organization's political leadership. It funds the Muslim Brotherhood internationally and operates Al Jazeera as a global platform for Islamist narratives. The idea that its royal family's charitable foundation has been spending money in Texas public schools out of pure linguistic goodwill is not a serious position, and the materials documented by FDD make clear it was never true.

As we reported previously, QFI has spent more than $65 million over 17 years influencing American education at every level, from K-12 classrooms to universities to national teacher training networks. The Texas story is what that national operation looks like up close: specific schools, specific children, specific content, and a foreign government reviewing lesson plans and coaching teachers while school administrators had no idea what was in the textbooks they were distributing.

Texas Is Documented. How Many More States Aren't?

Legislation recently passed by the House and awaiting Senate approval would require schools to provide parents with copies of teaching materials obtained using funds from foreign governments or foreign entities of concern. It is a start. The FDD report goes further, calling for the U.S. government to formally designate Qatar and QFI as foreign entities of concern and for school districts to be compelled to disclose all foreign-sourced teaching materials currently in use.

The question Weichselbaum closes with is the right one: Texas is documented. How many more classrooms, across how many more states, has QFI already reached?