Islamist Influencers Bought Their Way Into Georgetown University, Report Claims, as School Prepares To Address Congressional Committee

An Islamist network with ties to Hamas and Islamic Jihad has dropped millions of dollars to buy influence at Georgetown University, a foreign policy think tank is charging in a damning report released just ahead of a House hearing on antisemitism in higher education.The report alleges that the private Jesuit research institution located at the nation’s capital has been overtaken by “malign foreign influence actors” who have radicalized and miseducated generations of academics, diplomats, and policymakers by propagating anti-American, anti-Western ideology. The findings by the Middle East Forum are likely to place pressure on Georgetown’s interim president, Robert M. Groves, who will be one of the featured witnesses at Tuesday’s House education and workforce subcommittee hearing examining the role of faculty, funding, and ideology in the rise of antisemitism on college campuses.The report details the evolution of Georgetown’s flagship Islamic studies center, the Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, which the authors claim is “ground zero” for Islamist foreign influence in America. The Alwaleed Center operates under Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service — one of the top-ranked international relations programs in the world — and is named after the billionaire Saudi prince who donated $20 million to the school to “teach about the Islamic world to the United States.”The center was “established, developed, funded, and staffed” by a Virginia-based conglomerate of charities, business, and think tanks called the Safa Network, according to the report, which describes the network’s mission as working “to homogenize Muslim communities, theocratize education, and propagate Islamist ideology.” The Safa Network has previously been linked to violent foreign regimes, terror financers, and extremism. In 2001, federal investigators launched a probe into Safa Network’s alleged ties to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist organizations on suspicion that the network was “providing material support to terrorists, money laundering, and tax evasion through the use of a variety of related for-profit companies and ostensible charitable entities under their control.” The investigation was eventually dropped, a collapse that the Middle East Forum attributes not to lack of merit but to a changing political climate that included unease over prosecuting domestic Muslim organizations as well as the Obama administration’s embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood as a possible means to counter Al Qaeda and other Salafi jihadist groups. Over the past three decades, Georgetown’s Islamic studies center has hired at least 40 faculty and advisory members previously or presently associated with Safa. They include a postdoctoral fellow, Badar Khan Suri, who currently faces deportation by the Trump administration over his support for Hamas and relationships with senior figures in the terror group. Another is a visiting research fellow, Farhan Mujahid Chak, who once called a late Kashmiri jihadist leader, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, a “legend.” The Safa Network is also connected to hundreds of millions of dollars funneled into the university by Qatar. Much of the $927.6 million in grants and contracts given to Georgetown by Qatar between 2005 and 2023 was routed through the Qatar Foundation, which is closely tied to Safa, the report notes. The university has also received at least $4.4 million in funding directly from organizations within the Safa Network. Georgetown, which opened a campus at Doha, Qatar, in 2005, has long defended its relationship with the Gulf nation, emphasizing the importance of dialogue with the Middle East. “Being engaged is better than not. We are contributing, I think, to building a common good in the region,” the school’s former president, John J. DeGioia, who shepherded the Islamic studies center’s creation, said in 2015. The consequences of Safa’s infiltration of Georgetown are “utterly astonishing,” one of the report’s co-authors, Sam Westrop, who is the director of Middle East Forum’s Islamist Watch, says. “Not only has it affected students’ politics on campuses, but it has fundamentally shaped Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in the United States,” he tells the Sun. The center has “trained generations of diplomats, civil servants, intelligence officers, law enforcement and other academics who have guided U.S. policy both domestically and foreign,” Mr. Westrop says. He names as an example the founder of the Alwaleed Center, John Esposito, who held an advisory relationship with the Department of State and other federal agencies. Mr. Esposito also served as a defense witness on behalf of five members of an American-based Islamic charity, Holy Land Foundation, which was shut down by federal authorities for financially supporting Hamas. “It’s an extraordinary juxtaposition,” Mr. Westrop says.The report recommends the university and the federal government take steps to address its “terrible failing.” “Georgetown must act on this information. The Department of Justice should investigate the potential abuse of foreign agent laws. Law enforcement should begin, once again, to study the terror ties of the Safa Network. The Department of Education should investigate” the center, the authors write in the report. Until Safa’s influence is “expunged,” they argue, “not a cent of public funding should subsidize Georgetown’s pursuits.” Mr. Groves is one of three university presidents scheduled to attend the subcommittee hearing Tuesday. He will be joined by the chancellors of the City University of New York and the University of California-Berkeley and a former deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.Mr. Westrop says he hopes that lawmakers will grill Mr. Groves during the session on the findings of the Middle East Forum’s report. Namely, he’d like answers to what Georgetown’s administration knew of Safa’s terror ties before it embraced the group as one of the school’s biggest partners and donors. Mr. Westrop added that he would also like the House committee to dig into Georgetown’s spotty history of reporting foreign donations and probe whether the school’s reliance on funding from foreign governments essentially makes its officials “foreign agents for those regimes.” “Universities have enjoyed a certain sanitized shield from scrutiny — until now, I think,” Mr. Westrop says. “The Trump administration is going after higher education institutions and whatever you think of the administration’s position, I welcome the bit of sunlight that is being shown on these universities’ activities.”Georgetown has not responded to the Sun’s request for comment.

Islamist Influencers Bought Their Way Into Georgetown University, Report Claims, as School Prepares To Address Congressional Committee

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