Radical Chic Continues at Georgetown | The American Spectator

While a Georgetown University administrator claimed to be “appalled” by the calls by Georgetown Professor Jonathan Brown for Iran to launch retaliatory strikes against United States military personnel in the region, no one should have been surprised by the treasonous rhetoric. Brown — a Muslim, and professor of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service — has been embroiled in controversy since his arrival on the Georgetown campus in 2012.

Serving primarily as an Islam apologist on campus, Brown’s book, Misquoting Muhammad, preposterously argues that the Qur’anic dictum “there is no compulsion in religion” served as a guarantee against forcing people to become Muslims. Denying forced conversions, Brown has been a dutiful son of Islam. Conversely, as a convert from Episcopalianism, Brown has been harsh in his criticisms of Christianity, even though a review of Misquoting Muhammad by Fr. Damian Howard SJ suggests that Brown was “generous to a fault when it comes to remarks about Christianity.” In Jesuitical style, Fr. Howard wrote: “Brown’s (fairly abundant) comments on Christianity are accurate and contribute to better understanding rather than laying down a limit to what can and cannot be discussed.”

This is not the first time Brown has caused controversy. In a lecture he gave at Georgetown in 2017, he claimed that:

Slavery cannot be treated as a moral evil in and of itself … I don’t think it is morally evil to own somebody because we own lots of people all around us. And we’re owned by people. And this obsession of thinking of slavery as property, it’s treated as this inconceivable sin. I think that’s actually a really odd and unhelpful way to think about slavery and kind of gets you locked in this way of thinking where, if you talk about ownership and people, that you’ve already transgressed some moral boundary that you can’t come back from. But I don’t think that’s true at all.

According to Arab News, Brown is a descendant of former U. S. President Grover Cleveland. He is currently married to Laila Al-Arian, a broadcast journalist for Al Jazeera who has published anti-Israel articles for The Nation. Brown’s wife’s father, Sami Al-Arian, was indicted in February 2003 on 17 counts under the Patriot Act. And although he was acquitted on 9 counts, he struck a plea bargain and admitted to one of the remaining charges in exchange for agreeing to be deported. In April 2007, Sami Al-Arian was deported to Turkey. However, when he refused to testify before a grand jury in a separate case, he was held under house arrest in Northern Virginia until 2014, when he was finally deported to Turkey in 2015.

None of this kept Georgetown University in Qatar’s Middle Eastern Studies Student Association (MESSA) from providing a speaking platform to Sami Al-Arian in 2017. Calling him a “civil rights activist,” Georgetown did not mention the terrorist indictment and deportation from the United States in their marketing materials. Promising that Al-Arian will speak on the “challenges facing the youth today, particularly in the Middle East,” Al-Arian was described by Georgetown in heroic terms as having decided to “relocate” to Turkey after “being pursued” by the United States:

A prominent Palestinian human rights advocate and community leader. While working as a tenured professor of computer science and engineering at the University of South Florida in 2003, he was pursued by the U.S. government on various charges, resulting in a prolonged legal battle over which he eventually prevailed. After ten years in detention, solitary confinement, and under house arrest, Al-Arian relocated to Turkey in 2015. His case was chronicled in the award winning documentary film U.S.A. vs. Al-Arian.

Georgetown’s Radical History

Georgetown University has a long history of Jesuitical marketing materials and an affinity for hosting radical Islamic apologists. In 2011, Georgetown competed to be the first to host a visit by Tariq Ramadan, the Muslim scholar once barred from the United States because of his alleged involvement in “endorsing or espousing terrorist activity.” Now free to travel to the United States under a decision by the Obama State Department, Ramadan chose Georgetown’s Prince Alwaleed Bin-Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding for his first Catholic campus visit in the United States. Although his April 12 Georgetown presentation was preceded by one at Cooper Union in New York City, Ramadan reassured his Georgetown audience that he had wanted to come to the Alwaleed Center first because of all the support shown to him by Georgetown faculty during his six-year exile.

For Ramadan, the warm welcome at Georgetown must have been gratifying. In 2003, he had been offered an endowed chair and tenured faculty position at Notre Dame and had been scheduled to teach courses during the fall semester until the U.S. State Department denied him a visa. It seems that in addition to a family history of support for terrorism (his grandfather was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the most powerful Islamist institution of the 20th century), Tariq Ramadan has his own terrorist ties, including giving material support to terrorist organizations such as Hamas.

But at Georgetown, questions about his terrorist ties were not allowed. The well-orchestrated presentation titled “Radical Reform” gave Ramadan 10minutes to address the audience, and then an additional 10 minutes to participate in a congenial conversation onstage with Professor (now Emeritus) John Esposito, then the director of the Alwaleed Center. Esposito was one of Ramadan’s strongest supporters during his exile, and one who has denigrated those who equate Islamist movements with radicalism and terrorism. In his book, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? Esposito maintains that Islamist movements are not anti-Western or anti-American, and he minimized the threat these movements pose. In his remarks at the April 12 gathering, Esposito compared Muslim religious extremists to “intransigent” Roman Catholic religious conservatives, and claimed that “reformers in Islam are like reformers in Catholicism… whose ideas came to fruition at Vatican II.”

Although Georgetown continued to honor Ramadan with speaking opportunities in Qatar, in 2014, his star began to fall once he began being pursued for rape charges throughout Europe. By 2020, Ramadan was facing five charges of rape — four in France, and one in Switzerland — and had spent nine months in detention in France before being released on probation. He has consistently denied all the charges against him. In June 2023, a Paris court of appeals ruled that Ramadan should be tried for raping three women between 2009 and 2016. In 2024, Tariq Ramada was convicted of rape in Switzerland and sentenced to three years in prison.

Georgetown continues its relationship with the Al-Arian family. Beyond Professor Brown, Sami Al-Arian’s son (and Professor Brown’s brother-in-law), Abdullah Al-Arian, is currently an assistant professor at Georgetown University’s campus in Qatar, teaching history in its School of Foreign Service. Al-Arian wrote his dissertation about the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood during the 1970s, a time when his father was allegedly a part of the global Islamist movement. His book, Answering the Call: Popular Islamic Activism in Egypt, was described as providing the historical context that has “never before” been examined by scholars. The Muslim Brotherhood has been declared a terrorist organization in Bahrain, Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Austria recently banned the organization under a new antiterrorism law.

Georgetown continues its commitment to bringing students a more positive view of Islam. This can be a noble goal. But Georgetown should not forget that Catholic colleges and universities have a duty to bring the Truth to their students, no matter how inconvenient and costly it may be.  The Jewish Insider has just reported that Professor Brown has been placed on leave. That could be a start.

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