Former Georgetown fellow İbrahim Kalin (l) still faithfully serves his master, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (r). |
Two years ago Campus Watch called for Georgetown University to cut ties with Georgetown University Alwaleed Center for Muslim Christian Understanding (ACMCU) senior fellow İbrahim Kalin, who has served as press secretary for Turkey’s Islamist, bellicose president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s since December 2014. The good news is that Kalin is no longer associated with Georgetown. The bad news is that his departure more likely stems from the routine completion of his appointments (he had two) than to a praiseworthy decision by the university. The American-educated Kalin (Ph.D. in Middle East studies, George Washington U.), who also serves as Erdoğan’s chief advisor, faithfully supported his boss’s brutal persecution of thousands of political opponents, including imprisoning professors and teachers, in the aftermath of the failed July 2016 coup attempt. Ever his master’s lapdog, this week Kalin declared that the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo‘s lewd cartoon of Erdoğan (here) could not be considered freedom of expression.
It was therefore – initially, at least – a pleasant surprise to read in Kalin’s updated biography on the Saudi-funded ACMCU’s website that he’s now a “former fellow.” His tenure at ACMCU (2016 – 2018) overlapped with his service to Erdoğan, although his bio omits that inconvenient fact. But the university deserves no credit for Kalin’s exodus, as he appears to have rotated out after a standard appointment. Unlike most other former fellows, however, he retains his own biographical entry at ACMCU. Breaking up, after all, is hard to do.
So is getting enough of a “good” thing. Kalin had an appointment at Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs that has also ended, as a header in his bio there notes. Thanks to the Wayback Machine website (which didn’t capture his ACMCU bio), we know this change occurred between March 7, 2016, when no such header appeared, and October 8, 2018, by which time it did. It’s reasonable to assume his appointments at ACMCU and the Berkley Center coincided.
So Kalin’s association with Georgetown has ended, but not because it took decisive action to rid itself of an apologist for a warmongering brute. No shock in that: it still harbors Islamists like Jonathan Brown, the Alwaleed Chair of Islamic Civilization, and Arsalan Iftikhar, a senior research fellow at ACMCU’s Bridge Initiative and the former national legal director of the Hamas-linked Council on American Islamic Relations. Georgetown’s moral cleansing will have to wait.
Winfield Myers is director of academic affairs at the Middle East Forum and director of its Campus Watch program.
