New Report Chronicles Radical Muslim Entrenchment at Georgetown University

Over the past three decades, Georgetown University’s flagship Islamic studies center, the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU), has become America’s ground zero for malign foreign influence actors from Qatar, Turkey, and Malaysia, according to the nonprofit Middle East Forum. A new report published by the think-tank, titled “Beachhead: Georgetown University: How Foreign and Domestic Radical Actors Captured a U.S. University,” reveals how "Georgetown’s leaders invited anti-American, anti-Western, and antisemitic operators to entrench themselves and their pernicious ideology into their institution to ensure that academics, diplomats, and thousands of students emerged sympathetic to America’s enemies and hostile to U.S. interests."

According to a press release from MEF, the report resulted from collaborative research effort by the Middle East Forum, the Pearl Project, and the Clarity Coalition, The “Beachhead” report claims to present evidence of past and ongoing collaboration between Georgetown’s faculty and terror operatives, terror supporters, and terror financiers. Georgetown University, long regarded as the flagship of Catholic education in the United States, was founded in 1789 and has been operated by the Jesuit order ever since.

Georgetown’s partnership with three foreign governments implicated in supporting terrorists—Qatar, Turkey, and Malaysia—traces back to the Safa Network, a Virginia-based web of charities, businesses, and think-tanks run by influential Muslisms that has been investigated by federal law enforcement agencies over apparent involvement with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Al Qaeda. 

Some 40 past and present staff at ACMCU have been involved with institutions in the Safa Network, whose officials secured millions of dollars of direct donations for Georgetown and arranged Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal’s $20 million donation to the Center in 2005, according to MEF.

Information uncovered by MEF researchers writing the report led to action against two current ACMCU fellows: former South African ambassador to the U.S. Ebrahim Rasool was declared persona non grata by the State Department, while Badar Khan Suri was arrested by the Department of Homeland security for close links to Hamas.

Report co-author Sam Westrop stated, “The Safa Network spent years buying influence at major universities close to D.C. These terror-tied radicals, closely linked to autocratic foreign regimes, seized control of one of America’s leading academic institutions, through which they have shaped generations of academics, diplomats, intelligence officers, and policymakers.”

Gregg Roman, MEF executive director, said, “The federal government should reopen its investigation of the Safa Network and launch investigations into Georgetown’s connivance with domestic and foreign extremists—plus its apparent undisclosed funding from the Turkish regime. All federal funding and collaboration should be cut if Georgetown does not abandon these nefarious partnerships and benefactors.”

Graduates of Georgetown University include former President Bill Clinton, and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The latter, however, disassociated himself from the institution. In 2014, Justice Scalia declared that “Georgetown University is not Catholic anymore.” He recalled that while he was a student there in the 1950s, “they rolled you out of bed to attend Mass. Not anymore.”