An academic center at Georgetown University that sits within its prestigious School of Foreign Service has a history of fostering support for Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other Islamist groups, a Washington Free Beacon review found.
Georgetown’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU), founded in 1993, has hosted scholars sympathetic to Islamism since its inception. John Esposito, the center’s founder and a professor of religion and international affairs and of Islamic studies at Georgetown, has long defended terrorist groups and collaborated with jihadist figures.
As the Free Beacon reported in June, approximately 25 percent of all graduates from the ACMCU—which operates within the School of Foreign Service—enter government positions around the world after receiving their degrees. The ACMCU’s history appears likely to draw congressional scrutiny during a Tuesday morning House Education and Workforce Committee hearing featuring Georgetown interim president Robert Groves, as does the funding it has received from the Muslim Brotherhood-linked International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT).
The IIIT, the Free Beacon reported, had a relationship with the now-defunct SAAR Foundation, which ceased operations after the FBI raided its offices on suspicion of terrorism financing. Georgetown acknowledged that the IIIT “contributed $1 million or more to Georgetown” in 2017 when the university invited the organization’s leadership to its 1789 Society for large donors.
Esposito’s scholarly and professional history includes many instances of either the defense of or support for terror groups and figures. When asked whether Hamas was a terrorist organization during a 2000 interview with the Middle East Affairs Journal, for instance, Esposito hedged.
“One can’t make a clear statement about Hamas,” he said. “One has to distinguish between Hamas in general and the action of its military wing, and then one has also to talk about specific actions. Some actions by the military wing of Hamas can be seen as acts of resistance, but other actions are acts of retaliation, particularly when they target civilians.”
Esposito had more charitable words for Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a late Islamic scholar and intellectual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood whom the Clinton administration banned from entering the United States.
“If you look at Qaradawi’s work—I actually just finished working on him for a new book that I have—he goes out of his way to say that he is not anti-Jewish but he is anti-Israeli, anti-Israeli occupation of Palestine, and that is what he is talking about,” Esposito said. “So, he will talk about Jews again as ‘People of the Book,’ et cetera, but when it comes to Palestine, he defines that situation politically.”
Al-Qaradawi’s work, which Esposito referenced, included praise for Adolf Hitler.
Hellbound and Down 