Investigative Project on Terrorism Examines Qatar's Outsized Influence on Brookings Institution

WASHINGTON, Oct. 28, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) has launched a four-part series exploring how Qatar's multi-million dollar annual contributions to the Brookings Institution – $14.8 million in 2013 alone and the overall top foreign donor – has helped legitimize and provide respectability to one of the top governmental financial sponsors of Islamic terrorism in the past two decades.

"Qatar is among the most nefarious sponsors of Islamic terrorism and radical Islamic movements in the Middle East– from Hamas to Hizballah to the Muslim Brotherhood and its many militant offshoots – yet seeks to portray itself to the West as a moderate Arab influence in world affairs," IPT Executive Director Steve Emerson said. "The IPT's extensive research documents how Qatar developed an insidious relationship with the Brookings Institution in creating a false veneer of moderation and positive public relations image to mask that government's deep support of and involvement with radical Islamic terrorist groups, militant 'charities' and radical Islamic clerics who have issued fatwas calling for suicide bombings and other violence to be carried out against Americans and Jews. 

Brookings went so far as to specifically invite to their conferences and provide speaking venues for known terrorist supporting clerics like Sheik Yusuf Al Qaradawi, who had openly issued religious declarations calling for the killing of Americans and Jews throughout the Islamic world. Speaking before one of the annual Brookings-Doha conferences in 2002, Qaradawi actually used his platform to sanction suicide bombings. Yet, despite his continued support for suicide bombings and his continued leadership in fundraising for Hamas, Brookings invited Qaradawi back to speak at its annual 2007 Brookings/Doha Conference, where he sat next to Brookings official Ambassador Martin Indyk on the dais. Furthermore, after receiving financial support from Qatar, Brookings scholars also issued papers that provided political legitimacy to such terrorist groups as Hamas in which they claimed falsely that Hamas had become moderate and was willing to accept Israel's right to exist.    

The four-part Investigative Series, titled "Brookings Sells Soul to Qatar's Terror Agenda," reviews the proceedings of 12 annual conferences co-sponsored by Brookings and the government of Qatar comprising more than 125 speeches, interviews, lectures and symposia; a dozen Brookings-based programs that were linked to the Qatari financed outreach to the Muslim world; and analyzed 27 papers sponsored and issued by the Brookings Institution and scholars based in Washington and at the Brookings Doha Center since 2002.

"The Brookings Institution bills itself as 'the most influential, most quoted and most trusted think tank in the world,' but should it be?," the series begins. "Brookings' long-term relationship with the Qatari government – a notorious supporter of terror in the Middle East – casts a dark cloud over such a lofty claim to credibility."

The IPT is a nonprofit research group founded by Emerson in 1995. It is recognized as the world's most comprehensive data center on radical Islamic terrorist groups. For more than a decade, the IPT has investigated the operations, funding, activities and front groups of Islamic terrorist and extremist groups in the United States and around the world.

SOURCE Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT)