We are two Muslim women who have each had a death warrant — a fatwa — placed on our heads. Not for committing a crime, but for opposing the extremists who claim to speak for our faith. One of us, Anila, came to America from Pakistan and built a life here as a public school teacher. After September 11, she founded an organisation to empower Muslim women and confront extremism. The other, Dalia, fled Egypt after Hamas’ attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023. Dalia was targeted for opposing the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, and has spent the years since tracing the money that radical movements use to buy influence in the West.

Though we have come to America from different countries, and to this work from different directions, we reached the same conclusion: the ideological transformation of American college campuses is not organic. It is funded — and the funding is too easily hidden.

We have seen faculty we respect go quiet on subjects they once engaged with openly, calculating what dissent might cost them. We recognise what we are seeing. It is what we left.

Qatar’s Billions and the Ideology That Travels With Them

Qatar alone has sent billions of dollars to American universities since 2001 — more than any other foreign country, including China. Qatar’s involvement should not be taken lightly, given its longtime backing of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and the Islamic Revolutionary regime in Iran. Qatar is also the home of Al Jazeera, the premier propaganda outlet that has spent three decades fuelling hatred toward Israel and Western democratic values.

Dalia, through her work with the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), has spent years following exactly these structures: the foundations, the shell entities, the endowed chairs that come with strings attached. Anila has watched the results in real time — in the students she taught in public school, and in the thinking of professors and students her own children encountered in American universities.

Moderate Muslims, reform-minded people who reject extremism, are being pushed out of the conversation on their own campuses. Their voices are replaced by a script they never agreed to and do not recognise as their own.

What the Research Shows

We have both watched goodwill between Muslim and Jewish students drain away. Students chant slogans about a conflict they cannot explain, shaped by talking points written by people with money and an agenda.

Congress Has Acted Before — The Senate Must Act Now

In the past, Congress has demonstrated the will to confront these threats when the evidence was presented. When Confucius Institutes were exposed, Congress responded by restricting Defense Department funding to schools hosting those programmes. When the 2020 Department of Education review revealed billions in hidden foreign money, universities were compelled to disclose. The precedent is there.

The House has passed the DETERRENT Act twice with bipartisan support. Both times, the Senate has sat on it. In May, a coalition of 26 academic, policy, and civil society organisations — spearheaded by ISGAP and others — called on Congress to take decisive action.

And it adds real penalties — including potential loss of federal student aid, which is the only consequence universities have ever taken seriously.

What America Has Given Us — and What We Will Not Watch Be Sold

America has given us the freedoms of open argument, honest inquiry, and the liberty to dissent without it costing our lives. We have both paid personally for holding those values. We are not willing to watch them be quietly sold off, one undisclosed donation at a time, to the same networks that threatened us.