Add Georgetown to the List of Prestigious Schools With an October 7th Denialism Problem

Add Georgetown to the List of Prestigious Schools With an October 7th Denialism Problem

This problem in higher education is far worse than many people realize.

Liel Leibovitz writes at City Journal:

Georgetown’s Extremist Turn

Appointed on the recommendation of Benjamin Franklin, John Carroll became the first head of the Roman Catholic Church in the U.S. in 1784. Being a Jesuit, he soon set up a school, buying some land near the Potomac and quickly convincing President James Madison to confer on it the first-ever federal university charter. The school soon became known as Georgetown University, and its first student, William Gaston, went on to become a congressman, foreshadowing his alma mater’s reputation as the training ground for Washington’s elite. Glance at the resumes of many current ambassadors, cabinet secretaries, representatives, and special advisors to presidents, and you’ll see that the school’s reputation is warranted—making it all the more concerning that, over the past few months, Georgetown has embraced a professor who speculated in a podcast that Israel was behind the recent attack on Salman Rushdie and an academic organization that defended his comments, as well as defending those of another professor who called Hamas’s October 7 attacks “awesome.”

The Middle East Studies Association, or MESA, is the largest and most influential association of scholars studying the region. Or at least, it was, before deciding, about a decade ago, to focus its efforts on boycotting Israel. In 2022, after years of internal struggles, MESA officially issued a sweeping resolution endorsing the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel, strongly urging “MESA program committees to organize discussions at MESA annual meetings” dedicated exclusively to Israel’s purported evils.

This focus put off many MESA members, even those with no love for the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. As Middle East scholar Martin Kramer reported, in 2010, before the anti-Jewish fever fully seized MESA, the group boasted 62 institutional members. By 2022, as the organization was negotiating and passed the BDS resolution, that number stood at 43. By late 2023, it had dropped to 31, meaning that the organization had lost precisely half of its member universities in just over a decade.

MESA lost its academic home, too, twice, leaving the University of Arizona in 2019 and George Washington University four years later, declining to elaborate on the circumstances behind these changes.

MESA’s leadership, however, remained committed to its biases. Confronted with GoPro footage and other evidence of Hamas terrorists beheading Israeli children, raping women, and binding families together before setting them on fire on October 7, 2023, MESA waited more than a week to release a tepid statement, which cleared its throat with verbiage about suffering on both sides before focusing on the plight of the Palestinians and warning against any attempt to curb pro-Palestinian enthusiasm on campus.

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