Qatar’s influence, campus anti-Zionism, and the growing convergence between Islamist and progressive politics demand a strategy that confronts radical ideology without compromising American freedoms
America has an Islamism problem. The danger is that we fail to recognize how deeply Islamist ideas are already embedded in parts of our society, reinforced by a red-green alliance between Islamists and progressive socialists seeking to fundamentally transform America.
The public often prefers simple stories and easily identifiable adversaries. Political Islamism is neither, making the challenge even more difficult to confront.
In a May 2025 Free Press investigation titled “How Qatar Bought America,” Frannie Block and Jay Solomon reported that Qatar had spent almost $100 billion over two decades on US investments, weapons purchases, universities, lobbying, and other activities. The authors portrayed that spending as part of a far-reaching effort to build access and influence in Congress, universities, newsrooms, think tanks, and corporations.
Through the Qatar Foundation, Qatar has poured money into partnerships with American universities, particularly their branch campuses in Doha, while Al Jazeera has given a major platform to figures associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and political Islamism. Qatar has also hosted senior Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas figures. In America, this combination of money, access, and media influence can give Islamist ideas a wider platform while Qatar benefits from its status as a US security partner.
Political Islamism is an ideology that seeks to make Islamic religious doctrine a governing principle of the state. The Muslim Brotherhood helped shape modern political Islamism. Hamas emerged from the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, while the writings of Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb deeply influenced al-Qaida and, through the broader Salafi-jihadist movement, the Islamic State group. Qutb’s writings also influenced some Iranian revolutionaries despite the Sunni-Shiite divide. Yet largely unnoticed by most Americans, Islamist influence has been slowly seeping into the fabric of American society.
America has been largely oblivious to the threat. Confronting it requires a four-step process:
- Define Islamism clearly, without fear of being labeled anti-Islamic.
- Understand why Islamism’s ideology, strategy, and long-term objectives threaten America and the West.
- Learn to identify Islamism in its different forms, both domestically and internationally.
- Develop a comprehensive strategy to counter it while educating the American public about the threat.
It will not be easy.
Political Islamism is remarkably adaptable. Like a chameleon, it changes its appearance to fit its environment. In democratic societies, it can patiently build influence through politics, education, philanthropy, media, and social networks, waiting years or decades for opportunities. This, I believe, is part of the Qatari strategy in America.
The progression can become a slippery slope. After October 7, some anti-Israel protests and campaigns on American campuses involved intimidation, harassment, threats, attempts to silence opposing views, and, at times, physical violence against Jews and others with whom activists disagreed, while participants also invoked constitutional protections for even their most provocative actions. I see the overlap between far-left anti-Zionism and Islamist politics in parts of this movement as one manifestation of the red-green alliance.
Jewish Americans became particular targets in some cases because their actual or perceived support for Israel and Zionism was equated with complicity in genocide. That rationale was sometimes used to target Jewish students, organizations, and even events associated with synagogues and Jewish institutions.
Elsewhere, including France, Britain, Sweden, and Germany, societies have faced repeated jihadist violence and threats targeting non-Muslims as well as Muslim critics of radical Islam. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was forced into hiding under police protection after her colleague Theo van Gogh was murdered in the Netherlands and a death threat addressed to her was pinned to his body. She later moved to the United States.
What can America do?
Qatar can remain an important American security partner, but Washington should demand greater transparency about support for Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations and an end to the hosting of Hamas leaders. If Qatar wants the privileges of a major US security relationship, there must be consequences for conduct that undermines America domestically. Unfortunately, this administration emphasizes Qatar’s financial value while underestimating the ideological danger.
America needs a comprehensive strategy, a policy checklist followed by action, not rhetoric:
- Define the threat: Distinguish Islam from Islamism, while defining radical jihadism, lawful political advocacy, and terrorism. Terrorism should be named plainly rather than softened with euphemisms. The target is a political ideology, not a religion or its adherents.
- Protect American institutions: Require full public disclosure of foreign funding and influence in universities, schools, nonprofits, think tanks, and advocacy organizations. No authoritarian money influencing American education, whether from Qatar or China.
- Protect education: Islamist influence can operate through foreign funding, curricula, campus organizations, and advocacy networks that normalize Islamist political narratives while marginalizing opposing views. Schools should teach religions and civilizations fairly, including Jewish peoplehood, civilization, tradition, and religion, not merely the Holocaust. Confront antisemitism using the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance framework.
- Demand accountability: Condition US cooperation with governments that support anti-American Islamist organizations.
Michigan illustrates why this debate can no longer be avoided. Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed has refused to affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. Opposition to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state has long been a priority of Islamist movements. He invokes the antisemitic trope that Jewish money (AIPAC) buys influence, while linking good standing in progressive politics with anti-Zionism. This reflects a growing willingness within the progressive-Islamist alliance to normalize the rejection of Jewish national self-determination.
America can protect Muslim Americans from discrimination while confronting Islamism, foreign influence, and terrorism. It can defend free speech while strictly enforcing laws against violence, true threats, and constitutionally unprotected incitement. These principles are not contradictory.
The objective is to prevent any radical ideology, Islamist or otherwise, from capturing American institutions, purchasing influence with foreign money, intimidating citizens, or displacing the primacy of the Constitution as the framework of American public life.
A free society survives by identifying threats accurately and confronting them lawfully without surrendering its constitutional principles. The time to confront political Islamism is before it becomes too entrenched and powerful to confront. We are getting dangerously close to that tipping point.
