Why did Texas A&M decide to shut down its Qatar campus?
Why would a respectable public American university decide to shut down its Middle East campus, sacrificing international prestige and hundreds of millions of dollars in donations from a tiny Gulf country with almost unlimited oil wealth?
Zachor Legal Institute spent over five years in litigation with Qatar to obtain information about its activities at Texas A&M, a public university. Our original premise was that Qatar, an incredibly wealthy country with a long history of funding terrorists, may also be funding radical student groups in the United States.
According to the contracts we secured, Texas A&M was handing over intellectual property to Qatar. The agreements were signed between Texas A&M and the Qatar Foundation, a government-controlled agency that maintains the relationships between Qatar and foreign universities.
These contracts allowed Qatar to obtain control of discoveries made at the Doha campus using Texas A&M’s world-class resources, including those related to nuclear research. For example, here is an excerpt from one of the contracts:
“The Qatar Foundation shall own the entire right, title, and interest in all Technology and Intellectual Property developed at (Texas A&M University Qatar) or under the auspices of its Research Program.”
Americans rightfully expect that information with sensitive military and commercial value will not be shared with countries that sponsor terrorism or promote anti-American propaganda. Qatar does both.
Qatar supports and maintains a close relationship with the US-designated terror group, Hamas and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Qatar also uses its propaganda arm, Al Jazeera, and billions of dollars of purchased influence in numerous American universities to spread anti-American and anti-Israel propaganda.
The audacity of Texas A&M and Qatar cannot be overstated. They bypassed the national security concerns of the US government to set their independent foreign policy, which includes potentially giving Qatar and Iran access to highly classified technology that can put Americans and the entire civilized world in harm’s way.
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