After a freshman at George Mason University (GMU), was arrested on December 17 for plotting to attack the Israeli consulate in New York City, Robert Spencer asked rhetorically at Jihad Watch, “Could it have something to do with what is being taught there?”
George Mason University, the least prestigious of the three D.C.-area George universities (behind George Washington and Georgetown Universities) is rife with problems.
The student in question, Abdullah Ezzeldin Taha Mohamed Hassan, was arrested just weeks after a police raid at the home of sisters Jena and Noor Chanaa, GMU students and leaders of its Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter suspected of vandalism on the campus. The Fairfax County police seized weapons, jihadi materials, and antisemitic literature, as well as Hamas and Hezbollah flags.
Spencer answered his question by pointing out that GMU has received over $63 million from Saudi Arabia in just one seven-year period, 2011-2018, (third on the list behind MIT and George Washington University). While money from Muslim nations is part of the jihad problem on American college campuses, a bigger problem is the faculty who teach there. At GMU, the top anti-Zionist, pro-Hamas ideologue is Bassam Haddad.
Why George Mason University?
George Mason University, the least prestigious of the three D.C.-area George universities (behind George Washington and Georgetown Universities) is rife with problems. Islamism is a thriving force on campus. Take for instance the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies, founded in 2009 with a donation from Turkish businessman Ali Vural Ak. The center claimed “to advance a sound and nuanced understanding of Muslim societies and the Islamic faith, its role in world history and its current patterns of globalization.” It continued, “the center recognizes that Islam is a universal faith and a world civilization with a global community.” This sounds more like a CAIR press release than an academic project’s mission statement. It sounds like proselytizing rather than educating.
The AbuSulayman Center’s members include Ahmet Tekelioglu, Executive Director of CAIR, Philadelphia, and Abbas Barzegar, National Director of Research and Advocacy at CAIR.
In 2022, the Mirza Family Foundation, headed by former International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT) board member Yaqub Mirza, gave a $3 million gift to rename the center after notorious Islamist and Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Abdul Hamid AbuSulayman, whose book titled Violence, published in 2001, referred to Israel as a “foreign usurper” and called for it to be fought with “fear, terror and lack of security.” His Islamist bona fides include Secretary General of the World Assembly of Islamic Youth (WAMY) from 1973 to 1979, founding member of the board of directors of the SAAR Foundation in 1983, and rector of the Hamas-friendly International Islamic University Malaysia (IIIUM) from 1988 to 1989. He was also a founding member, chairman of the board, and former president of the IIIT. The IIIT is a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot that has been at the center of numerous terrorism investigations. But that’s no concern to GMU’s AbuSulayman Center which, incredibly, has an IIIT Chair in Islamic Studies and a graduate fellowship named after former IIIT founder and board member Jamal Barzinji.
The AbuSulayman Center’s members include Ahmet Tekelioglu, Executive Director of CAIR, Philadelphia, and Abbas Barzegar, National Director of Research and Advocacy at CAIR.
Who Is Bassam Haddad?
Sitting atop of GMU’s Islamism-heavy curriculum is Bassam Haddad, a graduate (M.A., 1994, Ph.D., 2002) from John Esposito’s Middle East studies empire at Georgetown University. In addition to being an associate professor at GMU’s Schar School of Policy and Government, he is the founding director of its Middle East and Islamic Studies Program. He is also one of the “Core Faculty” members at the AbuSulayman Center.
Haddad co-founded Jadaliyya (funded by George Soros’s Open Society Institute) with his wife, PLO royalty Noura Erakat, the top anti-Zionist, pro-Hamas ideologue at Rutgers University and also a Georgetown graduate.
In addition to his fiefdom at GMU, Haddad has a series of other projects that go back to his days as a graduate student at Georgetown University when he founded the Arab Studies Institute. According to its website, Haddad’s institute serves as an “umbrella” for the Arab Studies Journal, the Forum on Arab and Muslim Affairs (FAMA), Quilting Point Productions, Tadween Publishing, and the website/Ezine Jadaliyya. Haddad co-founded Jadaliyya (funded by George Soros’s Open Society Institute) with his wife, PLO royalty Noura Erakat, the top anti-Zionist, pro-Hamas ideologue at Rutgers University and also a Georgetown graduate. Together, Haddad’s five projects publish his books and articles, produce his films, and promote his anti-Israel, pro-Hamas views, effectively making him independent of the kind of objective oversight and ideological skepticism one might associate with peer review.
In 2017, Haddad’s work was recognized by the anti-Israel, BDS-supporting Middle East Studies Association (MESA) when it named him the recipient of the Jere L. Bacharach Service Award. MESA called Haddad “an assertive and ambitious visionary” and lauded his “numerous collaborations, networks, and projects” for having “provided educators with a rich array of discerning and hip new materials for the classroom.” On Haddad’s personal website, the hip visionary fails to discern the correct spelling of his award, calling it the “Jerry L. Bacharach Award,” which he superimposed against the MESA announcement showing the correct spelling.
In the event that he corrects the spelling after this article is published, here’s a screenshot from his (not secure) website, captured on January 8, 2025.
Gaza In Context?
In the post-October 7 era, Haddad has devoted himself to demonizing Israel and making excuses for Palestinian terrorism while generally making a fool of himself on video in a series of cringe-inducing performances dubbed the “Gaza in Context” project.
According to Jadaliyya, “Gaza in Context” has 23 co-organizers, making each equally responsible for the trash Haddad emits. The list reads like a who’s who of anti-Israel activism posing as scholarship:
1. Arab Studies Institute
2. Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies
3. George Mason University’s Middle East & Islamic Studies Program
4. Rutgers University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies
5. Birzeit University Museum
6. Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies
7. Brown University’s Center for Middle East Studies
8. University of Chicago’s Center for Contemporary Theory
9. Brown University’s New Directions in Palestinian Studies
10. Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding
11. Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies
12. Georgetown University-Qatar
13. American University of Cairo’s Alternative Policy Studies
14. Middle East Studies Association’s Global Academy
15. University of Chicago’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies
16. CUNY’s Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center
17. University of Illinois Chicago’s Arab American Cultural Center
18. George Mason University’s AbuSulayman’s Center for Global Islamic Studies
19. University of Illinois Chicago’s Critical Middle East Studies Working Group
20. George Washington University’s Institute for Middle East Studies
21. Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies
22. New York University’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies
23. Security in Context Project
“Emergency Teach-ins”
The “Gaza in Context” project is a full-blown anti-Israel, pro-Hamas propaganda machine. Shortly after October 7, it began running a series of “Emergency Teach-ins” with Haddad and two friends, calling themselves “3 Arabs &.” The other two Arabs are Sinan Antoon, an associate professor at New York University, billed as an “Arabic Language Specialist,” and Adel Iskandar, director of the Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies at Simon Fraser University, billed as a “Media Landscape Specialist.” Haddad bills himself as a “Social Scientist Specialist.”
Interestingly enough, none of the “3 Arabs” is a Muslim. Haddad ended a Twitter fight just weeks ago with someone by denying that he is a Muslim. Antoon complained in an interview in 2020 about being pigeonholed as a “Christian writer.” A group called “Progressive Copts” claims on Facebook and Instagram that Iskander as a Coptic Egyptian.
They must have read somewhere that all comedy operates on exaggeration, so they distort and exaggerate, attempting to display their wit. The 3 Amigos of anti-Zionism aim at Swiftian satire but always fall short.
Each “emergency teach-in” revolves around an event, media theme, or popular idea that the “3 Arabs” consider absurd. They must have read somewhere that all comedy operates on exaggeration, so they distort and exaggerate, attempting to display their wit. The 3 Amigos of anti-Zionism aim at Swiftian satire but always fall short.
The very first “emergency teach in” was a four-minute video titled “What Does ‘Intifada’ Mean?” It followed Elise Stefanik’s questioning of the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT. The premise is that Stefanik mistranslated the word “Intifada” when she claimed that it is a call for genocide. They counter, deadpan, that the correct translation is “uprising” and not “genocide.” Hilarious.
Teach-in #6 is titled “Is Anyone or Anything NOT Hamas?” Its premise is that Israel’s defense against South Africa’s accusation of genocide is the claim that “everything except the IDF and Golda Meir is Hamas.” They spend 16 minutes listing everything imaginable, claiming that Israel believes each has been infiltrated by Hamas. Again, about as funny as a toothache.
Probably the most inane of all the teach-ins (a crowded category) is #13, titled “None of This Would Have Happened Had It Not Been for the Attacks of October 7th.” The premise here is that a media cliché has emerged claiming October 7 “changed everything” that must be cleverly and sarcastically deflated by Haddad and his friends, who prove themselves the three least funny humans on earth in their half-hour (it feels much longer) attempt.
Among the phenomena that “would not have happened had it not been for October 7,” they list the Sunni-Shia split, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the collapse of the Soviet Union, Socrates’s death, and so on. The video culminates with Haddad claiming to prove mathematically (complete with bogus formula) that “Israel is an atrocity.”
Flooding the internet with imbecilic humor posing as satire is not Bassam Haddad’s only avocation. He’s also an entirely non-satirical cheerleader for Palestinian terrorists and their organizations, the topic of part 2, tomorrow at the Investigative Project on Terrorism.
