Georgetown ‘Islamophobia’ Initiative Required To ‘Consult’ With Qatar on Guest Speakers, University Contract With Qatari Regime Reveals
Plus, anti-Israel activist who advised Adam Schiff to head Dem foreign policy group designed to staff a future White House
A contract between an “Islamophobia” initiative at Georgetown University and Hamas-allied Qatar includes a clause that requires Georgetown to consult with a Qatari group when selecting “speakers” and “themes” for events in Washington, D.C., documents released by the House Education Committee and reviewed by the Free Beacon show.
The contract, signed by Georgetown’s vice president of advancement in June 2024, notes that Qatar will make three payments of $210,000 to the Bridge Initiative—a “multi-year research project on Islamophobia housed in Georgetown University”—between 2024 and 2026. In order to receive the money, Georgetown agreed to “consult” with a Qatari group, the “Islam and Muslims Initiative,” when choosing “themes and speakers” for Islamophobia-related conferences and events. Georgetown’s Bridge Initiative has since hosted, promoted, or defended several figures whom the regime in Qatar has also boosted. They include Bridge Initiative advisory board member Dalia Mogahed and anti-Israel cleric Omar Suleiman, both of whom have promoted terrorism against Israel, as well as Brooklyn imam Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
“The contract provides the latest window into the control Qatar exerts over American universities as it showers them with cash, as well as its efforts to influence the conversation in the nation’s capital,” the Free Beacon‘s Collin Anderson and Zach Kessel report. The Gulf monarchy provided $1.2 billion to U.S. universities in 2025, and “much of that money comes through Qatar’s contracts with American universities, including Georgetown and Northwestern University, that operate satellite campuses in Doha. Those contracts require both Georgetown and Northwestern to abide by the ‘applicable laws and regulations of the State of Qatar’ and ‘respect the cultural, religious, and social customs of the State of Qatar.’”
The influential Democratic foreign policy group National Security Action is positioning itself to staff the next Democratic presidential administration and has tapped as its leader an anti-Israel staffer for Adam Schiff who was once pictured wearing a keffiyeh and dancing in front of a banner calling Israel an apartheid state, our Adam Kredo reports.
The staffer, Maher Bitar, is a Palestinian-American who served on the Biden National Security Council and most recently worked as Schiff’s chief counsel. He will now lead a reconstituted version of NSA, a Democratic foreign policy vehicle founded in 2018 by Biden national security advisor Jake Sullivan and Obama foreign policy guru Ben “Hamas” Rhodes. Out of “any of the significant staffers who could impact the White House’s foreign policy,” Bitar was “easily the most antagonistic to Israel and in direct opposition to the president under which he served,” one former senior foreign policy adviser to Biden told the Free Beacon. In NSA, he will lead an organization that offloaded many of its members into the Biden administration and is expected to peddle “similar influence in the 2028 election and the next Democratic administration,” Axios reported.
“With Bitar at its helm, the NSA is signaling that Democrats are leaning in to growing hostility to Israel in the party and among their elite foreign policy ranks,” Kredo writes. “Bitar spent years leading anti-Israel organizations that promote the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and, as a college student, led his campus’s branch of the antisemitic Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) advocacy group, whose chapters are now banned or suspended on dozens of college campuses due to violent, hateful language and related misconduct. A 2006 yearbook picture from Georgetown—where Bitar graduated from the elite School of Foreign Service that’s a pipeline to the Democratic foreign policy establishment—shows him dancing before a sign that reads, ‘Divest from Israel Apartheid,’ the Free Beacon reported in 2021, when he was hired as Biden’s senior director for intelligence programs at the National Security Council.”
The Philadelphia Museum of Art sits in a city where the Declaration of Independence was signed. It’s marking the 250th anniversary of the founding of America with an exhibit “that harps on our country’s flaws so obsessively that the wall labels read more like an indictment than a celebration,” the Free Beacon‘s Ira Stoll writes.
The guilt-mongering begins before you even enter a gallery to start looking at the art. In a hallway on the way into the American art is a land acknowledgment. “The Philadelphia Museum of Art recognizes Philadelphia as part of Lenapehokink, the ancestral homelands of the Lenape peoples. A long history of broken treaties, forced migrations, and fraudulent agreements such as the Walking Purchase of 1737 displaced many of the Lenape from this land. This museum and our staff strive to understand our place within the legacy of colonization … by committing to build a more inclusive and equitable space for all.”
Another panel distances the museum from the use of the words “Indian Chief” on a portrait frame. “Both words betray a European, colonial outlook that collapses the individual identity of the sitters and the varied leadership roles in Lenape society into generic, stereotypic terms,” the label says, engaging in precisely the same generic stereotyping and collapsing of individual identity that it is scolding about, just at different targets. As if stealing the lands of Native Americans is not bad enough, the museum proceeds to fault Europeans for bringing slavery to America, with the sweeping accusation that “Nearly all the works of art in the American galleries bear connections to slavery.”
Wander into another wing of the museum, devoted to European art, and the curators have somehow managed to display it without a lot of broad-brush editorial denunciation of the culture that created it, even though the evils of Communism and Nazism dwarf anything seen in America. I sent the museum an email asking for a response on that point and the overall concern and got no reply.
For such a terrible country, America sure has managed to produce some gorgeous art. It’s worth going to see in Philadelphia; just ignore the wall labels and concentrate on the paintings. The best of them convey what’s missing from the text that goes along with them: confidence, pride, and patriotic optimism that for all of America’s flaws, 250 years in, it remains humanity’s best hope.
READ MORE: Philadelphia Museum Marks America’s 250th By Dwelling on Its Faults
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The United States sank six Iranian small boats and intercepted a number of Iranian cruise missiles and drones on Monday as Project Freedom got underway. The operation is intended to open the Strait of Hormuz, and the head of U.S. Central Command, Admiral Brad Cooper, said the U.S. military has “all the authorities necessary to defend their units and to defend commercial shipping,” adding that “we’re already beginning to see movement” from shipping companies seeking to traverse the strait.
The United Arab Emirates also said its air defenses “engaged 12 ballistic missiles, 3 cruise missiles, and 4 UAVs launched from Iran” on Monday, and Israel’s Iron Dome was reportedly deployed to help shoot the projectiles down. Saudi Arabia issued a statement backing the UAE “in the measures it takes to preserve its sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity.”
The D.C. police department is in the process of firing a number of high-ranking officials in connection with an investigation into the manipulation of crime data aimed at making violent crime in the district appear lower than it actually is, the Washington Post reported. The Free Beacon‘s Alana Goodman was all over the manipulation scheme as President Donald Trump carried out his D.C. crime crackdown last summer. You can read her reporting here and here.
The National Education Association, the largest teachers’ union in the United States, was hit with a federal complaint alleging that it subjected Jewish members to an antisemitic environment. At the union’s 2025 annual gathering, for example, NEA members “shouted down Jewish participants” as they debated a resolution banning materials from the Anti-Defamation League from appearing in classrooms, creating “an atmosphere in which Jewish delegates reasonably feared retaliation and physical harm,” according to the complaint.
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Nothing going on at Georgetown University warrants one dollar of my tax money.
Who are the curators at the Philadelphia Museum of Art who have taken such a sophomoric revision of our colonial history to exhibitions? Is the new director leading this decline?