PHILADELPHIA – July 8, 2025 – Over the past three decades, Georgetown University’s flagship Islamic studies center, the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU), has become America’s ground zero for malign foreign influence actors from Qatar, Turkey, and Malaysia.
“Beachhead: Georgetown University: How Foreign and Domestic Radical Actors Captured a U.S. University,” published by the Middle East Forum (MEF), reveals how Georgetown’s leaders invited anti-American, anti-Western, and antisemitic operators to entrench themselves and their pernicious ideology into their institution to ensure that academics, diplomats, and thousands of students emerged sympathetic to America’s enemies and hostile to U.S. interests.
A collaborative research effort by the Middle East Forum, the Pearl Project, and the Clarity Coalition, “Beachhead” presents clear evidence of past and ongoing collaboration between Georgetown’s faculty and terror operatives, terror supporters, and terror financiers.
Georgetown’s partnership with three foreign terror-tied governments—Qatar, Turkey, and Malaysia—traces back to the Safa Network, a Virginia-based web of charities, businesses, and think tanks run by a cabal of influential Islamists previously investigated by federal law enforcement agencies over apparent involvement with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Al Qaeda.
Some 40 past and present staff at ACMCU have been involved with institutions in the Safa Network, whose officials secured millions of dollars of direct donations for Georgetown and arranged Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal’s $20 million donation to the Center in 2005.
Information uncovered by MEF researchers writing the report led to action against two current ACMCU fellows: former South African ambassador to the U.S. Ebrahim Rasool was declared persona non grata by the State Department, while Badar Khan Suri was arrested by the Department of Homeland security for close links to Hamas.
Report co-author Sam Westrop stated, “The Safa Network spent years buying influence at major universities close to D.C. These terror-tied radicals, closely linked to autocratic foreign regimes, seized control of one of America’s leading academic institutions, through which they have shaped generations of academics, diplomats, intelligence officers, and policymakers.”
Gregg Roman, MEF executive director, said, “The federal government should reopen its investigation of the Safa Network and launch investigations into Georgetown’s connivence with domestic and foreign extremists—plus its apparent undisclosed funding from the Turkish regime. All federal funding and collaboration should be cut if Georgetown does not abandon these nefarious partnerships and benefactors.”
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