Education City in Doha, Qatar
Education City in Doha, Qatar
A Project of Qatar for Vision 2030
Have you heard about Education City?
It’s “… an innovation district … in Doha, a 12 square kilometer precinct that houses Qatar Foundation and its associated institutions.”
According to Nilah Mohammed Al-Saleh, Director of Programming at Earthna, an environment and sustainability think tank based at the Qatari State’s Qatar Foundation, “Education City in Qatar started over 25 years ago as an Arab-Islamic renaissance project, promoting sustainable development in the Arab world and creating impactful changes from an academic, research, and societal perspective, and building future ready communities.” Qatar built Education City from the ground up, merging Arabist-Islamic culture with cutting edge globally sought after education innovation.
Qatar seeks to create a locus of control for intellectual innovation that rivals Silicon Valley. Education City provides a home to eight university campuses from America, Qatar, and France. In 2009 Qatar established the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE), another Qatar Foundation (QF) think tank, this one focussed on promoting and innovating education.
The Qatar Foundation has worked diligently toward fulfillment of its National Vision for 2030. An important pillar of the 2030 Vision, social development encompasses maintaining social care and protection in addition to guarding a sound social structure. Qatar envisions a social structure founded upon the engineering of moral and religious values in tandem with enhance[d] Arab and Islamic values and identity. Doesn’t this remind you of the western progressive social engineering project we call DIE, aka Diversity Inclusion and Equality?
Noticeably absent from this important new + edgy sprawling desert city of high tech innovation and progressive future-casting? Israel. Can we call Qatar’s National Vision for 2030 a Judenrein Middle East by 2030? How does Qatar’s ongoing support of Hamas and its diplomatic ties with the Iranian Regime fit into Qatar’s National Vision for 2030? It’s difficult to know which of the four pillars (see Figure 1) would include ethnic cleaning of Jews from the Middle East, isn’t it? I’m thinking Social Development.
Canadian progressive educational professionals have affiliation with WISE and Earthna, as have prominent American progressives, such as Michelle Obama. A quick search of the WISE site reveals several Canadian innovators, including Carolyn Acker founder of Pathways to Education and 2013 winner of the WISE prize. Dr. François Paulette, a Denesuline scholar and public policy researcher belongs to the Qatari Earthna think tank. Oh, did you know we have a UN University in Canada? Yeah, we do — the UNU Institute for Water, Environment and Health. Does this mean all indigenous communities in Canada can have clean running water now that we have an Institute for Water? Asking for a friend.
Anyway, I digress. Getting back to WISE—some interesting individuals appear in the WISE Speakers Bureau, including Al Jazeera presenters, UNESCO and UNHCR officials, an UN officials from a few developing countries, a few Qatar Government Comms representatives, and Marwan Awartani, the former Palestinian Minister of Education and recently appointed Senior Advisor to ICESCO Director-General. Deema Almasri, a Qatari scientist who is a senior associate with Earthna, will be based out of the new UNU Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UN IWE) in Richmond Hill, Ontario, according to her QF profile.
Canadian Denise Amyot caught my eye. A former Crown Corporation head, ADM, and also a former President and CEO of Colleges and Institutions Canada, Amyot sits on several provincial-national-international boards, including the Canadian Science Policy Centre and the Qatar state managed Qatar Foundation. Both organisations have a strong social engineering component—how do Amyot’s roles at the CSPC and QF align and integrate?
In 2016 Amyot accompanied the Governor General to Qatar. That delegation included the following private sector individuals :: | Izzeldin Abuelaish, Founder, Daughters for Life | Alejandro Adem, CEO and Scientific Director, Mitacs | Paul Davidson President, Universities Canada | Niv Fichman, President and Producer, Rhombus Media | Paul Gross, Actor, Cinematographic Production | Jean Lebel President, International Development Research Centre | Victoria Lennox Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Startup Canada | Victoria Lennox, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Startup Canada | Peter Singer, Chief Executive Officer, Grand Challenges Canada | Abdullah Snobar , Executive Director, Digital Media Zone (Ryerson University) |.
In March 2022 Mary Simon traveled with a sizeable delegation of staffers and government officials to Education City in Qatar for a visit to the Qatar Foundation. Simon met with Her Excellency Sheikha Hind bint Hamad Al Thani, Vice Chairperson and CEO of the Qatar Foundation, to discuss the future of education and according to The Peninsular Qatar, she was “given an overview of Qatar Foundations ecosystem of education, science, and community development”. What kind of social engineering for the future of education and community development did Their Excellencies discuss, one wonders? Did HE Ms Simon think about the optics of supposed indigenous rights champion in Canada, travelling to visit with representatives of a rabidly anti-Zionist + anti-Semitic gulf region country? Does HE Ms Simon not know that anti-Zionism is an anathema to indigenous rights globally? Probably not, huh?
I’ll end this missive by showing you the smallness of this wide world with a tragic, perhaps ironic, story. Former Palestinian Authority Education Minister Marwan Awartini’s great nephew is Hisham Awartini, the young Palestinian man who was shot and permanently disabled in November 2023. Hisham’s mother is an American from Vermont named Elizabeth Price, married to a Palestinian. The family resides in Ramallah and Hisham’s dad believed his son would be safer in America, away from the war zone. “The last six weeks have been a time of great suffering. We have grieved at the enormity of the loss and suffering of the Palestinian people,” stated Price just 6 weeks after Gazans and Islamist terrorists broke through the southern gate at Kfar Aza and committed the worst pogrom of Jews since the NSDAP death camps.
The Palestinians planned and celebrated the October 7 massacre and hostage taking. Among the hostages they took, Gazans took a baby and an elderly 86 year old survivor of 2 pogroms. The Jewish community grieves the enormity of its loss, it waits for the return of its people from captivity. The MENA region Jewish community has a lengthy history of pogroms and hostage taking and having to free their people (or escape) from captivity of tyrannical violent enemy rulers. October 7, 2023 has become a part of that Jewish legacy of persecution by Islamists Arabists.
Hisham Awartini has lost the use of his legs as a result of being shot.
“All of us have also seen a sharp increase in the volume and frequency of threats against Jewish, Muslim and Arab communities across our country since Oct. 7.” — Merrick Garland
The saddest thing in all this remains the fact that so much human suffering and geopolitical tension and violence has happened because, on October 7, 2023, Hamas committed its murderous rampage, pillaging + raping + looting at Southern Israeli kibbutzim and because, with the help of Gazans, it kidnapped over 200 pro-Palestinian Israelis. Was the October 7th pogrom part of Qatar’s National Vision 2030? Because that’s a dark and grim vision for the future.
Revenge is a dish best served cold. Repeating a lie doesn’t make it true.
I wish for an end to Jew hatred. The Arab and Islamic worlds must normalise Israel. I wish for end to the western infantalisation of the Islamic world. I wish for Canadians to see the power that comes from developing a nation’s natural resources.