Will the Trump Administration Follow the Antisemitism Trail Wherever It Leads? Trump’s DOJ vows to fight antisemitism and Hamas support—but will it confront the foreign powers, like Turkey and Qatar, funding U.S. campus extremism? By Clare M. Lopez
The Trump administration has taken a series of decisive, direct steps and executive actions that make clear its intention to end the chaos of antisemitism on American campuses and streets. But will it follow the trail of foreign funding and influence wherever it leads?
Amid the flurry of executive orders—including one on January 30 to “combat antisemitism”—and memoranda issuing from the new Trump administration over its first few weeks, one memorandum from Attorney General Pam Bondi at the Department of Justice stands out. On February 5, 2025, a memorandum from her established the Joint Task Force October 7 (JTF 10-7). As explained in the memo, the purpose of the initiative is to seek “justice for the victims of the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack in Israel” and to address “the ongoing threat posed by Hamas and its affiliates” in the homeland.
Among the specified priorities of the JTF 10-7 is “investigating and prosecuting those responsible for funding Hamas.” A partner organization is the DOJ’s newly established Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, led by civil rights attorney Leo Terrell. On February 26, 2025, in remarks to Israel’s Channel 12 News, Terrell promised those “supporting Hamas and trying to intimidate Jews” that “[W]e are going to put these people in jail—not for 24 hours, but for years.”
If indeed the Justice Department is serious about pursuing this investigation and these initiatives to combat antisemitism wherever they may lead and then holding those responsible legally accountable, inevitably that will lead where the Trump administration may not have expected or intended.
One of the most active of the on-campus pro-Hamas groups has been Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), now known as National SJP, the campus branch of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP). Both of these—SJP and AMP—were founded by UC Berkeley lecturer Hatem Bazian. AMP itself was a founding member of the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations, the Muslim Brotherhood’s umbrella group in the U.S. There is also a Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FJP) organization with a national network consisting of more than 160 chapters across the U.S. that was established after the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre.
According to the non-profit AMCHA organization (a Hebrew word meaning “your people” or also “grassroots”), campuses with FJP chapters saw higher rates of antisemitic physical assaults, violent threats, and pro-Hamas protests and encampments than campuses without an FJP chapter. According to AMCHA, FJP is connected to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). PACBI itself is linked to five U.S.-designated terror organizations, including Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
In May 2024, a multi-million-dollar lawsuit was filed against SJP by families of the October 7 victims and others. The lawsuit complaint argues that SJP is, in fact, a network of campus groups “established by Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood” for the purpose of providing “material support and resources” to Hamas. According to the complaint, “material support” includes “facilitating intimidation tactics” and “coercion policies” on college campuses across America.
Notably absent from the discussion is that the center for the Muslim Brotherhood’s global network today is Turkey. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was a co-founder of the Justice and Development Party (AKP in its Turkish acronym), which has ruled Turkey since 2002. The AKP is closely affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, which does not have a chapter per se in Turkey but shares a strong relationship with Erdogan and his party.
According to a September 2024 report at the Nordic Monitor, many Muslim Brotherhood figures, including Hamas members, live and work in Turkey, where they have been allowed to establish foundations, schools, and businesses. Indeed, in March 2024, Erdogan openly declared that “Turkey is a country that stands firmly behind Hamas,” and then in April 2024, he hosted then-senior Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Istanbul. Finally, on May 2, 2024, Turkey announced it was suspending all trade with Israel. Together, those events likely combined to nix a planned meeting at the White House between President Joe Biden and Erdogan.
Additionally, though, the AKP is closely affiliated here in the U.S. with the USCMO and, specifically, with its AMP founding member. As recently as September 2024, an AKP delegation visited Oussama Jammal, the USCMO’s Secretary General, in Washington, D.C. Also, we’ll note that the sprawling 16-acre campus of the Turkish government’s Diyanet Center of America is located just a dozen miles north of DC in Lanham, MD. The Diyanet, or Religious Affairs Directorate, is a Cabinet-level department of the Turkish government. The Diyanet Center in Lanham, MD, maintains close ties with the ADAMS Center (All Dulles Area Muslim Society Center), the Muslim Brotherhood hub for the DC-Maryland-Virginia area, which is located just miles away in Northern Virginia.
Another country name absent from the Attorney General’s Memo is that of Qatar. Qatar has long been the “home-away-from-home” for Muslim Brotherhood figures who were exiled or fled from Egypt, the 1928 birthplace of the Muslim Brotherhood. Yousuf al-Qaradawi, who passed away in 2022, was for many years the senior juridical scholar of the Muslim Brotherhood and chairman of the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS). He made Doha his headquarters from 1997 until a brief return to Egypt in 2011 after the Muslim Brotherhood takeover led by Mohamed Morsi.
Al-Qaradawi hosted a weekly TV show on Qatar’s flagship Arabic-language media outlet Al-Jazeera for many years. Qatar relies on Al-Jazeera to extend its networks of jihadist influence across the Middle East, but also throughout the West. Al-Jazeera is owned by the Qatar Media Corporation and has been used by jihadist groups that include Al-Qa’eda, Hamas, Hizballah, and the Muslim Brotherhood to propagate jihadi narratives. A lawsuit filed on behalf of victims of the October 7 massacre with the Federal Court in Washington, D.C. highlights Al-Jazeera’s “collusion with Hamas,” including interviews with Hamas leaders that the lawsuit claims helped “spread propaganda, recruit activists, and incite violence.”
Qatar has been a key financial supporter of Hamas, the Gaza Islamic terror group, for decades. As I wrote for the Clarion Project more than a dozen years ago, and as we have seen graphically much more recently with Hamas, Qatar has acted as a “banker to the global jihad.” Hamas is the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Qatar hosted Hamas’ political bureau and its top leadership figures from 2012 until only recently, in the wake of the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre in Israel. The head of Hamas’ political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated in Tehran, Iran, on 31 July 2024, had lived in Doha since 2017. According to a November 2024 report by the BBC, the remaining senior Hamas leadership figures outside of Gaza, including Khalil al-Hayya, were no longer living in Qatar (possibly having relocated to Turkey).
Further, Qatar served as a safe haven for Khaled Sheikh Mohammed prior to the 9/11 attacks, and when U.S. forces were on the verge of capturing him in 1996, senior Qatari regime figures tipped him off and helped him escape. The list of offenses continues. During the Islamic Uprising of 2011, led by al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, Qatar actively supported al-Qaeda offshoot the Nusra Front, which later became today’s jihadist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which toppled Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Damascus in December 2024. According to Jonathan Schanzer, writing in Commentary Magazine on April 18, 2025, Qatar continues to provide HTS with financial support to this day. In 2013, the Taliban opened an embassy in Qatar, where Afghanistan surrender talks eventually were held with the Obama administration. It was to Qatar as well in 2014 that the so-called “Taliban Five”—top-level Taliban operatives who were allied with al-Qaeda and Iran pre-9/11—were released from Guantanamo Bay into Qatari custody in exchange for American army deserter Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.
Despite Qatar’s well-documented support for extremism, its influence nevertheless remains prevalent among U.S. lobbyists, think tanks, and on college campuses. A recently released Israeli hostage reported that one of his Hamas captors told them that Hamas was coordinating with “allies” on U.S. college campuses and in the media, according to a new lawsuit filed on February 21, 2025, in a federal court in Washington State. Reporting from the Jerusalem Post on February 25, 2025, cites data that show “Qatar has poured over $6 billion into US universities in the past decade, making it the single largest foreign donor in American academia.” As Douglas Murray wrote in an early May 2025 editorial at the New York Post, Qatar has pumped billions of dollars into American universities in recent years. As he notes, it uses its vast oil wealth “to try to subvert American institutions.” Elite universities, including Harvard, Georgetown, and Northwestern, have accepted such funds and even established satellite campuses in Doha. Under Qatari influence, they have allowed pro-Hamas, pro-Muslim Brotherhood narratives into their Middle East studies program curricula.
But U.S. relations with Qatar are deep and longstanding. For example, Qatar hosts the major Al-Udeid U.S. Air Force Base, an arrangement whose benefits and influence go both ways. In late April 2025, it was reported that the Trump family company had struck a deal with a Saudi company to build a luxury golf resort in Qatar, including an 18-hole golf course and beachside villas. Then came the news in May 2025 that President Donald Trump plans to accept a Boeing 747-8 airplane as a gift from the Qatari royal family. The plane may be outfitted to serve as an Air Force One plane.
Qatar, however, takes advantage of such arrangements to pose as a U.S. ally, while in fact playing a double game that includes a close alliance with Iran (with which it shares a large natural gas field under the Persian Gulf). On the benefits side, however, Qatar has acted as an intermediary for hostage negotiations, which have resulted in the release of dozens of Hamas captives, American, Israeli, and from other countries. U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff gets much of the credit for accomplishing this, but at the cost of refraining from criticism of Qatar, which many argue must at some point be held to account for its role in supporting the very Hamas organization responsible for taking and holding those hostages in the first place.
Neither the Attorney General’s Memo nor the DOJ’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism mentions Turkey or Qatar by name, but if those DOJ initiatives pursue the facts about the certain support and possible funding by these two in collaboration with U.S.-based elements of the Muslim Brotherhood for campus and street acts of antisemitism, especially the violation of the civil rights of Jewish students, those facts inevitably will lead to both.
Turkey is a founding member of NATO, and Qatar is a major non-NATO ally that hosts the U.S. al-Udeid Air Force Base. The question then will be how the U.S. and its new Attorney General will deal with NATO partners that are demonstrably supporters and possible funding sources for Muslim Brotherhood-directed antisemitism on the campuses of U.S. colleges and universities.
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