The Measured, Thoughtful Voice of a True Academic: Georgetown Full Professor Jonathan Brown

Georgetown has decided not to investigate antisemitism on its campus, or to collaborate with the Department of Homeland Security in its campaign to deport aliens who promote terrorism against the Jewish state. Instead, the school, which houses the Alwaleed bin Talal School of Muslim-Cristian Understanding, founded by John Esposito, the sweet singer of tales about a tolerant and splendid Islam that the ghost of Scheherazade could not have bettered, is standing tall for Muslims calling for the destruction of Israel and its replacement by a 23rd Arab state. More on Georgetown’s decision to remain all in for “Palestine” and the postdoctoral student whom the government would like to deport, can be found here: “Georgetown University under the microscope as White House scrutinizes campus antisemitism,” by Haley Cohen, Jewish Insider, March 28, 2025:

At a time when some elite universities are acquiescing to the Trump administration’s demands to crack down on antisemitic activity on campus, Georgetown University is pushing back by issuing statements supportive of a university professor and postdoctoral scholar who was detained by federal authorities last week for his reported affiliations with Hamas.

Badar Khan Suri, an Indian national who was studying and teaching as a postdoctoral fellow at the university on a student visa, was detained by federal immigration authorities outside of his home in Virginia last Wednesday. The Department of Homeland Security alleges he was “spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media” and “has close connections to a known or suspected terrorist, who is a senior advisor to Hamas,” according to a statement from Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at DHS….

Among Georgetown’s faculty, Jonathan Brown, chair of the university’s Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies and son-in-law of convicted terror supporter Sami Al-Arian, has gone on several X tirades since Oct. 7 slamming Israel.

Shortly after the attacks in November 2023, Brown tweeted, “Israel has been engaged in a genocidal project for decades. I’m a full professor.”

Jonathan Brown is pulling rank to make you accept what he says. It’s his argumentum ad verecundiam, the Argument From Authority, the answer to anyone who might question him. “I’m a full professor.” Well then, who are we to say him nay? That appetizing thing, a “full professor” — how dare we question Full Professor Jonathan Brown? And therefore, you must unquestionably believe Jonathan Brown when he claims that “Israel has been engaged in a genocidal project for decades.”

“Israeli security forces are lunatics. Israel is insanely racist,” Brown, who serves as the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization, tweeted in March 2024.

Ah, the measured, thoughtful voice of the true academic, Jonathan Brown: “Israeli security forces are lunatics, Israel is insanely racist.” Is that why people in Gaza and in Judea and Samaria (a/k/a the West Bank) before October 7 were clamoring for jobs inside Israel? Is that why the Palestinian Authority’s head, Mahmoud Abbas, has insisted on being treated for a heart ailment by Israeli doctors, and why he had his brother, Abu Louai, treated for cancer in a private Israeli hospital, and his brother-in-law underwent lifesaving heart surgery in Israel’s Ichilov Hospital, which is where Abbas’ wife was also treated? When Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian Authority’s chief negotiator, came down with Covid-19, he insisted on being treated by Israeli doctors. And the daughter of the late Ismail Haniyeh, who was once the undisputed leader of Hamas, was admitted to Icholov Hospital in Tel Aviv after a routine operation in a Gazan hospital went wrong and she required an emergency treatment. Haniyah’s sister was treated in an Israeli hospital several years ago following an emergency. And his granddaughter was once airlifted by helicopter from Gaza to the hospital.

Apparently Mahmoud Abbas disagrees with Jonathan Brown, as did the late Haniyeh. They were eager to entrust the treatment of their close relatives to Israeli doctors. Might Jonathan Brown be wrong to describe Israel as an “insanely racist” state? Has he not noticed that Israeli Arabs have full civil and political rights? Is he unaware that Arabs sit on the Supreme Court, serve in the Knesset, go abroad as Israeli diplomats? Until recently, the head of Israel’s largest bank, the Bank Leumi, was an Arab. Jews and Arabs in Israel play on the same teams and in the same orchestras as Jews, work in the factories and offices with Jews ,own businesses — everything from restaurants to high tech start-ups — with Jews? Isn’t it insane, therefore, to call Israel “insanely racist”?

At a Middle East symposium in 2015, Brown said, “The problem is that the Israeli political creature, the Israeli political establishment, has not told Jews in Israel that they are not allowed to take stuff that doesn’t belong to them, and that is, I think, a fundamental problem. … If you can tell people that your religious belief does not give you the right to take the possessions of someone else.”

From Morocco to Iran, the Muslims who swept to power between 622 and 750 A.D. not only took what property they wanted from the Infidels they conquered, but also imposed the jizyah, a stiff capitation tax that all non-Muslims had to pay annually to the Muslim state in order to avoid being attacked; it was a form of religiously-based extortion.

What “stuff” have the Jews taken from the Arabs that “doesn’t belong to them”? Is he referring to the Land of Israel, on which Jews have lived continuously for 3500 years, some two thousand years before a single Muslim Arab appeared in the land or, indeed, in the world? Is he talking about the state and waste lands that according to the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine, Article 6, were supposed to be settled by Jews? “The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.” Of course, the Jews also bought land from Arab and Turkish landlords, paying exorbitant prices —paying more for scarcely arable land in Mandatory Palestine that was being paid at the same time for the richest farmland in the world, in Iowa. And to this day, Jews have been buying land from Arabs in Israel, including Judea and Samaria.

The only mass seizure of property in the Middle East has been that by Muslims of the Jewish property that was left behind when 850,000 Jews, who had lived for centuries in Arab lands, had to flee those places between 1948 and the mid-1950s. The estimated value of that Jewish property left behind amounts, according to official Israeli estimates, to $250 billion, a staggering sum, and many times more that the value of the property left behind by the Arabs who left Israel during and after the war.