The Qatar Foundation, which is directly managed by the country’s ruling Al-Thani family, is used to conduct a range of initiatives focusing on education and research as part of its “Education City” campus, which hosts Qatari branches of American universities such as Texas A&M.

Nevertheless, the Qatar Foundation-backed schools in the country have been accused of hosting and promoting radical Islamic preachers and lecturers.

“QF schools and mosques often host the most virulently radical Islamist preachers, including one who referred to the 9/11 attacks as a ‘comedy film,” according to a report in National Review.

Additionally, the Qatar Foundation has been linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, which the Trump administration plans to designate as a terrorist organization.

“The Qatar Foundation is not just an arm of the terror-linked Qatari regime; it is also a vehicle for international Islamist networks,” said Sam Westrop, director of the Middle East Forum’s Islamist Watch project.

“One of the Qatar Foundation’s centers even bears the name of Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, the pro-Hitler, pro-suicide bombing ‘spiritual leader’ of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Given these well-documented extremist connections, it is vital we learn what ideas this powerful Qatari regime institution is attempting to impose on a generation of American college kids,” he said.

Marc Greendorfer, president of Zachor Legal Institute, said that the public records request from Texas A&M stemmed from their own investigation into whether or not foreign money is being used to fund radical activism on US campuses.

Greendorfer said that while most of the public-records requests were complied with, after Texas A&M informed Qatar of their request, they ended up filing a lawsuit in Texas to block the production of documents.

“We discovered through the lawsuit that the Qatar Foundation was the entity that objected to our information request. Before that, we were actually focused on the government of Qatar, but we quickly realized that the government was likely using Qatar Foundation as the financing vehicle for its activities on US campuses,” he said.

After filing a second public-records request focusing on the Qatar Foundation, Greendorfer said that they found that Texas A&M had stopped reporting foreign gifts to the US Department of Education in 2017, and that the Qatar Foundation argued that whatever their financial ties with the school was confidential and could not be disclosed under Texas public-records act.

Texas A&M did not respond to an inquiry regarding a reaction to the legal petition.