Anna Stanley, a research associate at the Middle East Forum’s Islamist Watch project, spoke to a March 25 Middle East Forum Podcast (video). Stanley previously worked as an Open-Source Intelligence Analyst at the British Foreign Office and as an Intelligence Researcher and Investigation Practitioner for the U.K. Police. The following summarizes her comments:
GU’s administration was notified by email about MEF’s exposure of Suri, as was its board and members of its Jewish chaplaincy program. No one replied.
A 2018 Hindustan Times article featured an interview with Mapheze Ahmad Yousef Saleh, a Palestinian Arab from Gaza, and Saleh’s Indian husband from Delhi, Badar Khan Suri. Suri is currently in the U.S. on a student visa as a postdoctoral fellow at the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) within Georgetown University’s (GU’s) Walsh School of Foreign Service. The 2018 profile described Saleh as the daughter of Ahmad Yousef, who was then senior advisor to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Hamas, a U.S. designated foreign terrorist organization, “seeks to wipe out Israel and commit a genocide against the Jews.” Haniyeh, killed by the Israel Defense Forces in July 2024, “oversaw Hamas’s military strategy,” including responsibility for suicide bombings, rocket attacks, and kidnapping of civilians. However, Saleh “doesn’t see Hamas as a terrorist organization.”
A subsequent search of Suri’s public social media, which a Middle East Forum February 2025 Campus Watch article exposed, found he was not only “sharing Hamas propaganda and deeply antisemitic posts,” but also denying the October 7 atrocities. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently arrested Suri on March 19 under the Immigration and Naturalization Act 237(a)(4)(C)(i), which empowers DHS to deport non-citizens on the “reasonable grounds” that their presence in the U.S. “has potentially [serious] adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” Since Suri’s arrest, CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, has provided further evidence of Suri and Saleh’s close relationship with terrorist leaders. Suri plans on challenging the allegations in court.
MEF will soon release a report exposing ACMCU’s “major links to a domestic radical Islamist network with terror ties.”
Apologists for the couple “jumped to their defense,” citing the “artificial distinction” that Saleh’s father was in Hamas’s “political wing,” rather than its “military arm.” Most Western security operators “acknowledge that there is no differentiation” between the two. GU’s administration was notified by email about MEF’s exposure of Suri, as was its board and members of its Jewish chaplaincy program. No one replied: “I was completely blanked.” It was only after Suri was arrested that Georgetown’s ACMCU issued a statement referencing the “context” of Suri’s arrest, alleging that the Trump administration’s policies resulted in “support for genocide abroad and McCarthyism at home.” ACMCU’s director, Nader Hashemi, compared Suri’s arrest to “what they do in Putin’s Russia. That’s what they do in Xi Jinping’s China.”
Georgetown’s dean of the Foreign Service school, Joel Hellman, said that “Khan Suri has not posed a danger to the Georgetown community and he’s reaffirmed the university’s commitment to free speech.” Yet, it is false to claim that Suri’s arrest is a free speech issue. “This isn’t a free speech issue; it’s a national security issue, and it’s an immigration issue.” The danger Suri poses as an academic “who has known links to Hamas” and “openly shares” its propaganda and espouses “anti-Semitic rhetoric,” is that he, along with other like-minded instructors and academics at ACMCU, is “informing the future students who are going to be choosing and creating policy for the United States, but also the West everywhere.”
MEF will soon release a report exposing ACMCU’s “major links to a domestic radical Islamist network with terror ties.” It is no accident that, with its eye on influencing policy, ACMCU is in the heart of Washington, D.C. It receives massive funding from foreign countries “trying to perpetuate the type of worldview or understanding that’s beneficial to their home country.” The report will expose the depth of foreign influence in the School of Foreign Service from countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and Malaysia. In particular, Qatar has “funded hundreds of millions into ACMCU” and now hosts a GU branch campus in Doha. “So, universities in the West are absolutely Petri dishes for a lot of foreign influence.”
ACMCU’s Bridge Initiative is “a database of fact sheets of figures [people] that they deem Islamophobic. This is basically anyone who criticizes Islam.”
One of ACMCU’s original founders was a Palestinian activist, and the center is “completely antithetical to Western and American values.” An example is ACMCU’s Bridge Initiative, “a database of fact sheets of figures [people] that they deem Islamophobic. This is basically anyone who criticizes Islam,” as its “seeks to demonize people who speak against radical Islam.” “I think in some ways you could perceive this whole situation as a kind of civilizational war of people on one side completely opposed to the people on the other side. From my perspective, you have people on that side [anti-Western] who are advocating for a terrorist organization which has genocidal aims, but they obviously see it as the opposite. They see themselves as being oppressed, people who are victim to their freedom of speech being undermined. So, we’re at a real loggerheads.” This danger is not limited to the United States, as “pretty much all the universities within the West are facing this problem.”
The available options for combatting the extremism spreading across college campuses is “better vetting for roles advertised in academia.” Another option is removing government funding. Even if universities, such as Columbia University in New York City, agree to conditions set by the Trump administration, “I don’t think they can be trusted in this regard.” The practical option is “deportation, particularly for non-U.S. citizens.” Ultimately, “there needs to be more legislation” to provide “more oversight and audit over foreign influence” in American universities.
