The Department of Education has granted millions of dollars in funding to university programs taught by anti-Israel professors, a new report from Open the Books revealed on Tuesday.
More than $22 million has been allocated to support at least a dozen foreign-studies programs at top universities that feature anti-Israel staff members. The DOE awards universities Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) grants “to assist graduate students in foreign language and either international studies or area studies,” the department says on its website, which Open the Books found have been used to support the work of multiple anti-Israel faculty members.
Columbia University’s Middle East program received $2.8 million in FLAS grants between the years 2020–24, Open the Books reported, which it secured by way of grant applications that spotlighted the work of Joseph Massad, among others. A professor in the school’s Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies (MESAAS) Department, Massad, called Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel “a stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance” and has spoken before at Columbia on “Zionism and Jewish Supremacy.” On a 2018 FLAS grant application, Columbia listed Massad as a faculty member who is “strong on contemporary politics, with tremendous geographic range” and said that lauded his work teaching “courses that focus on the modern history, gender, political economy, international relations, politics and culture of the region.”
Massad described the attack as “stunning,” “awesome,” and “remarkable” in an essay published on October 8, 2023, just one day after terrorists killed some 1,200 Israelis. But Massad’s anti-Semitic views were on display long before 2023 and even before 2018 when the university promoted him as an accomplished faculty member on its DOE grant. A 2005 Columbia investigation found that Massad kicked a student out of class when the student questioned his anti-Israel beliefs. In 2007, two years before Columbia granted Massad tenure, Candace de Russy wrote for National Review that Massad had demonstrated “a soft spot for Hamas.”
Indiana University received $2.84 million in FLAS grants from 2020–23. The university’s Middle East program highlighted in a 2018 foreign-studies grant application the work of Abdulkader Sinno, an associate professor of political science and Middle Eastern studies who was sanctioned last semester for inviting anti-Israel activist Miko Peled to speak at the university.
Georgetown University received $2.6 million in FLAS grants from 2020–23, grants which supported students learning from Fida Adely, an associate professor and director at the School of Foreign Service’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Adely is a member of the National Advisory Board of the anti-Israel group Faculty for Justice in Palestine, which supports “the cause of Palestinian liberation through education, advocacy and action.” She has argued that Israel participates in ethnic cleansing and said in a 2015 article that engaging in “dialogue” about Israel, as opposed to just boycotting Israel, disguises “the real issues of settler-colonialism, oppression and occupation, and act[s] as a kind of marketing tool rebranding the reality of separation and apartheid as a fantasy of ‘coexistence.’”
Georgetown listed Adely as a “select faculty expert” in Middle East and North Africa studies on a grant application.
At least ten more Middle Eastern programs at universities, many of which have been hotbeds of campus anti-Semitism since October of last year, have received similar funding. Institutions that receive FLAS grants then select eligible undergraduate and graduate students to receive the fellowships, during which they study foreign languages and cultures.
The grants are supposed to “support the national interest” by helping students to better understand geopolitics in certain regions, but “we found quite a few red flags where radical professors were instead benefitting, and turning out people who hate the United States, and the West, and Israel, and aren’t afraid to say it,” Open the Books Deputy Public Policy Director Rachel O’Brien said.
Haley Strack is a William F. Buckley Fellow in Political Journalism and a recent graduate of Hillsdale College.
