A pair of Department of Education programs meant to boost national security are funding college departments that employ anti-American professors associated with campus anti-Semitism.
The National Resource Centers (NRC) Program and Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships program aim to bolster “the security and prosperity of the United States” by training future diplomats and foreign language experts. But these grants often go to university departments housing radical professors whose ideologies clash with that of the United States diplomatic corps.
According to an analysis from OpenTheBooks, Columbia University used its radical professor Dr. Joseph Massad as a selling point in a successful grant application to the Department of Education. Massad called Hamas’ October 7 attack “a stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance.” According to the Middle East Forum, students said Massad “takes a categorically anti-U.S. tack at every possible opportunity,” and lists “the West’s various cultural crimes ad nauseam.”
“In 2002, Massad gave a talk at Columbia called ‘On Zionism and Jewish Supremacy,’” OpenTheBooks said.
Between 2020 and 2024, Columbia received $2.8 million under the FLAS program alone, making it the second-highest recipient of Middle East FLAS funding, OpenTheBooks found. It also received numerous NRC grants, including one ongoing grant intended to shape how the Middle East is taught in American schools.
The top overall grant recipient was Indiana University, which employs professor Abdulkader Sinno, the faculty advisor for a group that protested Jewish students on campus and accused Israel of “Genecide” [sic] and “colonialism.” Sinno was suspended for the Spring and Summer 2024 semesters after violating the rules to host an event for the radical Palestinian Solidarity Committee.
The university’s vice provost had “concerns regarding [Sinno’s] judgment,” and noted his “threatening behavior toward a colleague.” and bias reports filed against him. Sinno eventually gave a speech at an “alternative” graduation for Palestinian students.
Georgetown University, long a breeding ground for U.S. diplomats, was the third-highest recipient of Middle East FLAS grants. The director of its Center for Contemporary Arab Studies in the School of Foreign Service is Fida Adely, who sits on the national advisory board of the Faculty for Justice in Palestine, the sister group of Students for Justice in Palestine, which has been banned from some campuses for supporting terrorism and promoting anti-Semitism.
“FJP’s ‘Back to School 2024’ statement criticizes ‘mechanisms for suppressing speech, criminalizing protest and weaponizing fragility.’ They say Israel’s war against Hamas exposes ‘the depths of settler colonial depravity,’” OpenTheBooks said. FJP collaborates with Birzeit University, a radical university in the West Bank where the student council is dominated by Hamas supporters. And Adely argued that a “dialogue” about Israel is not enough, and a boycott is necessary, not a “fantasy of ‘coexistence.’”
Georgetown has received more than $1 billion from foreign countries, a Daily Wire review of federal records showed, including more than $800 million from Qatar, where Hamas leadership operates. The university has also received $30 million from Saudi Arabia, in part to fund the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.
The Foreign Service department, which has a program named after Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, employs professor Jonathan A.C. Brown, who has defended slavery because it is authorized in the Quran, and is married to the daughter of a man who was deported for funding the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
In 2019, the Department of Education wrote to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to say that the money it received under the NRC program was not being used for its intended purpose.
“Federal funding is conditioned on a demonstration that a given center or program is a ‘national resource’ for teaching of any modem foreign language [and] for instruction in fields needed to provide full understanding of areas, regions, or countries in which such language is commonly used,” it said. “It is unlawful for institutions of higher education to use Title VI funds differently.”
The Department found “very little serious instruction preparing individuals to understand the geopolitical challenges to U.S. national security and economic needs but quite a considerable emphasis on advancing ideological priorities.”
Instead of teaching actual language skills, the university was offering low-effort programming film criticism in the Middle East or about “Love and Desire in Modern Iran,” and left-wing ideology like “gender-bending and subversion on the early modern Ottoman Intellectual History.”
“While the Duke-UNC CMES may certainly offer programs in Iranian art and film, these programs should not be funded or subsidized in any way by American taxpayers under Title VI unless you are able to clearly demonstrate that such programs are secondary to more rigorous coursework helping American students to become fluent Farsi speakers and to prepare for work in areas of national need,” it said.
The UNC program “appears to lack balance as it offers very few, if any, programs focused on the historic discrimination faced by, and current circumstances of, religious minorities in the Middle East, including Christians, Jews, Baha’is, Yadizis [sic], Kurds, Druze, and others.”
It was also training aspiring teachers to teach students about “the positive aspects of Islam, while there is an absolute absence of any similar focus on the positive aspects of Christianity, Judaism, or any other religion or belief system in the Middle East.”
