In the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s brutal October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, which left over 1,200 dead and 3,000 injured, professors of Middle East studies wasted no time jumping into the fray—by siding with Hamas. From Columbia University in New York to UC-Berkeley and San Francisco State, those paid to enlighten instead displayed the moral turpitude for which they have long been known. Below is extensive analysis of tweets from Brown and fellow Middle East Studies academics, since Hamas’s brutal October 7, 2023, jihadist assault. This is merely a sampling of their X posts; there are many more.
Georgetown University’s Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization Jonathan Brown, the Islamist son-in-law of convicted terrorist supporter Sami Al-Arian and a prominent voice in his discipline, is a “full clown,” retorted conservative commentator Jordan Schachtel on X.
Genocide is a recurring motif in Brown’s X rants about Israel, which in his perfervid imagination “will go down in history as a genocidal state.”
Brown, former director of its Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU), asserted as a “full professor” that “Israel has been engaged in a genocidal project for decades.” Numerous analysts rejected this unfounded slander, particularly during Israel’s ongoing military operation to destroy Hamas in Gaza, where the IDF have taken extraordinary steps to avoid civilian casualties.
Genocide is a recurring motif in Brown’s X rants about Israel, which in his perfervid imagination “will go down in history as a genocidal state.” He even declared the devastated Gaza warzone’s health hazards intentional, for “Israel’s plan is to use disease to commit the worst genocide since WWII.” An outrageous Holocaust inversion, “Israel will go down in history as a country whose main claims to fame are genocide, racial fanaticism on the level of the Third Reich and religious fanaticism that makes ISIS look mellow.”
For Brown, “why many Jews would insist that this genocidal project, which is premised on ethnic cleansing and has embraced genocide as a core tenet, is an inalienable part of their faith is beyond me.” The IDF are “objectively the most effective child-killing machine in modern history,” forming “Israel’s new claim to fame,” he added. Most Jews and decent people would take deep offense at this denigration of their ancestral homeland.
“No matter how hard I try, I just don’t really care about all squawking about ‘from the river to the sea.’ The images of dead kids in Gaza just overwhelm me,” Brown tweeted, trivializing a common antisemitic call for Israel’s destruction. Other times on X, he has forthrightly exclaimed “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free!” Such hyperbolic polemics ignore that, since Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza strip, Hamas continuously attacked Israel and despite such combat conditions, Gaza living standards have compared favorably to many parts of the world.
To deny the “humanity of Palestinians” is the “foundation of Zionism,” according to Brown. “Israel is an apartheid state built on the rubble of Palestinian homes and their mass graves. If you’re confident it’s not, dig up the parking lots by the Lidd mosque and church,” Brown tweeted. He apparently believes without hesitation dubious theories that Israeli forces committed a massacre in Lydda (modern Lod near Tel Aviv in Israel) during Israel’s 1948 independence war.
While condemning Israel’s government as “such a bottom-feeding, immoral outfit,” Brown sees defunding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) as a means to “cut off UN food for kids.” This supposed charitable organization has become key to jihadist infrastructure in the Gaza strip and other Palestinian territories, contrary to Brown’s “preposterous idea that donating to a UN program is ‘terrorist financing.’” His hyperventilating about Western “governments and financial institutions” as “proxies for an apartheid regime” cannot change amply documented UNRWA facts.
Anti-Israel genocide rants also characterize the X accounts of academics like Barnard College religion department chairman Najam Haider, who tweeted as a “statement of fact” that President Joe Biden “*is* facilitating genocide.” University of California-Berkeley Continuing Lecturer Hatem Bazian—founder of pro-Hamas organizations Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine—Rashida Tlaib was a “witness to shame and genocide” while protesting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s July 2024, congressional address. University of California-Berkeley history professor Ussama Makdisi even wrote of the “world’s first livestreamed genocide.”
Bassam Haddad, director of George Mason University’s Middle East and Islamic Studies Program, mused about what would “stop/deter Israel’s Genocide except a nuclear deterrent,” seemingly arguing for a nuclear-capable Iran. “Do not ever compare Israel to any other monstrous entity in the modern world because Israel is waging this Genocide live in 2024” following “76 years of brutal and racist colonial cruelty,” he has tweeted. “Make no mistake, Israel will set the new and unprecedented reference point and textbook case of mass killing, suffocation, and starvation, for decades to come. … and they’re not finished yet.
While condemning Israel’s government as “such a bottom-feeding, immoral outfit,” Brown sees defunding UNRWA as a means to “cut off UN food for kids.”
Haddad is happy to call for genocide against Israelis: “Zionism is racism,” he propagandized in a long diatribe, and therefore Israel must disappear. “It is strongly advisable for all colonizers of Palestine to leave the country immediately due to moral security” and “take your racism with you. Pack it in,” he has stated. “We are calling for the end of Israeli apartheid just like we called for the end of South Africa’s apartheid. No one was killed there,” he has argued, as if Hamas jihadists will be just as nonviolent as Archbishop Desmond Tutu. “Proud to stand with Israel,” as Senator Tom Cotton proclaimed, only “neo-Nazis agree,” Haddad thinks.
To such professors, Israel has no right to self-defense, as Georgetown University adjunct professor and Middle East Institute senior fellow Khaled Elgindy indicated. “The mass pager attack in Lebanon should be called what it is—terrorism,” he tweeted in reference to Israel’s recent “Operation Below the Belt” against Hezbollah leaders. Rutgers University associate professor of Africana studies Noura Erakat even mused that little Israel threatened the post-World War II international order and its institutions such as the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). “If a global order built after WWII falls,” or “Israel can commit genocide, turn humans into walking bombs, and decimate countries while the UNSC watches passively – you are not safe either,” she tweeted.
In contrast to inveterately evil Israel, San Francisco State University associate professor of ethnic studies and terrorism-apologist Rabab Abdulhadi squelched any suggestion that Israel’s majority-Muslim neighbors present any dangers. Notorious “blasphemer” of Islam Salman Rushdie, who lost sight in one eye during a 2022 Muslim assassination attempt, correctly foresaw in an interview that any foreseeable Palestinian state would be “Taliban-like.” “To native informants who have no dignity or self-respect, truth & justice mean nothing,” Abdulhadi snorted in response to Rushdie, who is far more perspicuous than she.
Makdisi catalogued Israel’s battle for freedom as just another example of Western violence against native and enslaved populations, “The deliberate, savage & indiscriminate Western-backed Israeli bombardment of Gaza has a long history in Western settler-colonial societies: From Pequot War, to French in Algeria, to now,” he tweeted. “Virginia’s sadistic reaction to Nat Turner’s violent slave rebellion is akin to Israeli reaction to Pal resistance. Oppressive system is the rotten core, not insurgent rebels that it provokes,” he tweeted. Such twisted views explain why University of California–Santa Barbara Associate Professor of History Sherene Seikaly on October 7, before the bodies of Hamas’s victims were cold, tweeted: “Decolonization is not a metaphor.”
These screeds help explain the shocking degree of antisemitism that rocked campuses in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks. In fact, the sentiment they express is nothing new among Middle East studies professors, where anti-Israel, anti-American, and anti-Western ideologies have been the norm for decades. October 7 didn’t create this hatred, but the perverse reaction by academics allowed Americans from all walks of life to see it in action.
