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May 2024

EDUCATION Comments turned off

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY ANSWERS FOR MASSIVE CASH HAUL FROM QATAR

By on May 26th, 2024

https://mailchi.mp/fd11b7e3e8ac/35b-from-us-taxpayers-funded-world-health-organization-59980?e=0c8ccf8e98

On Thursday, Northwestern was held to account in a hearing by the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Labor Force.

NU President Michael Schill had to answer for shocking concessions he made to anti-Israel protestors who occupied his campus.

Schill was confronted with our findings that nearly $1 billion in foreign cash has poured into the school since 2007. The bulk of it came from Qatar, the tiny nation that harbors key Hamas leaders. 

Yesterday, I joined The National Desk to discuss our findings and the hearing: 

A staggering $690M was donated from Qatar to NU, much of it for their mutual partnership: a degree-conferring campus (NU-Q) in Qatar.  

Rep. Burgess Owens (R-UT), with a huge check as a visual aid, walked through the details:  

NU-Q has a partnership with Al Jazeera for journalism students; more than 1/3 of the campus speakers expressed pro-Hamas sentiments. 

The royal family of Qatar funds Al Jazeera, which delivers the Qatar point-of-view in the news.  

NU-Q mints journalists hired by… Al Jazeera.  

NU-Q has at least one visiting professor associated with an organization accused of funneling funds to Hamas. 

Of $690 million, Northwestern took $173 million to agree to the satellite campus, and another chunk of money to provide scholarships in tandem with the government-backed Qatar Foundation.  

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

What’s Spanish for ‘Chutzpah’? Bret Stephens

By on May 26th, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/05/21/opinion/thepoint#spain-palestine-recognition

This week’s announcements by the governments of Ireland, Norway and Spain that they will recognize a Palestinian state are drawing predictable reactions from predictable quarters. Some see them as useful rebukes to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war strategy in Gaza that will further isolate Israel. Others, including me, view them as feckless gestures that reward Hamas’s terrorism.

That’s a column for another day. For now, it’s enough to note the Spanish government’s sheer nerve.

Though Spanish public opinion overwhelmingly supports swift recognition of Palestinian statehood, it’s another story when it comes to Spain’s own independence movements. In 2017 the regional government of Catalonia held a referendum, declared illegal by Spain’s Constitutional Court, on the question of Catalan independence. Though turnout was low — in part because Spanish police forcibly blocked voting — the Catalan government said nearly 90 percent of voters favored independence.

The central government in Madrid responded by dismissing the Catalan government, imposing direct rule. Two years later, under the current left-wing government of Pedro Sánchez, Spain sentenced nine Catalan independence leaders to prison on charges of sedition, though they were later pardoned. This year the lower house of the Spanish Parliament voted to grant amnesty to those involved in the 2017 campaign as part of a deal to prop up Sánchez’s government, despite a Senate veto. Seventy percent of the Spanish public opposes the amnesty.

Catalans aren’t the only ethnic minority in Spain that has sought independence, only to encounter violent suppression. In the 1980s the Spanish Interior Ministry under a socialist government responded to the long-running Basque separatist movement with state-sponsored death squads, notoriously responsible for a string of kidnappings, tortures and assassinations. The Spanish government called the separatists terrorists — as indeed some were — though their tactics look tame compared with Hamas’s. By the time the conflict ended in 2011, it had claimed more than 1,000 lives.

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