U.S. Professors Flocking to Terrorist-Run Turkish Think Tank

The United States banished former University of South Florida professor Sami al-Arian for supporting terrorism. But some U.S. academics have flocked to him, like flies to manure. Since his deportation in 2015, al-Arian has turned his pseudo-academic center in Turkey into a mecca for both terrorists and American academics sympathetic to their viewpoint.

The United States arrested al-Arian in 2003 and sentenced him in 2006 to 57 months in prison for conspiring to aid Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), an Iranian-backed and U.S.-designated terrorist organization that fights alongside Hamas in Gaza. Like Hamas, PIJ formed as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2017, shortly after being deported, al-Arian credited “the personal intervention of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan” for helping him “find a home in Turkey.”

Turkey has increasingly become a sanctuary for Islamist groups. While the United States and the European Union designated Hamas as a terrorist organization, Turkey has offered passports, residency, and a platform for global outreach to Hamas’s leaders. Erdogan stated last May, “we do not deem Hamas a terrorist organization … more than 1,000 members of Hamas are under treatment across our county.”

From his perch in Turkey, al-Arian established a university-based think tank in Istanbul, dubbed the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). Through his center, al-Arian has hosted not only members of Turkish parliament, like Hasan Turan, but also some of the most senior leaders in Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, including Osama Hamdan, Majed Al Zeer, and Khalida Jarrar.

Just as alarmingly, dozens of American professors have been active participants at CIGA events, where they have gloated over the “decline of the American empire” and spewed antisemitic tropes. At CIGA’s second Palestine conference in 2021, Jordanian-American professor Rami Khouri of the American University of Beirut claimed, “Zionist manipulation and lobbying” has skewed Western media coverage of Palestinians.

University of Michigan associate professor of political science David Myer Temin was part of a CIGA webinar in November 2023 in which he discussed “decolonization and self-determination in North American Indigenous Political Thought.”

Last August, al-Arian hosted both Princeton professor Richard Falk and Georgetown professor Nader Hashemi for his CIGA Ramadan series. The Palestinian Authority previously sought Falk’s dismissal from the United Nations for being too supportive of Hamas, which Falk has openly praised as “peaceful.” Hashemi served as an editor for a Hamas-linked publication in the 1990s.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor Sarah Shields attended and spoke with Lafayette College professor Hafsa Kanjwal on a panel at CIGA’s 2018 Muslim Ummah conference moderated by Abdullah al-Arian, Sami’s son, who is a professor at Georgetown’s Qatar campus. On last year’s anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 atrocities, Ohio State University law professor John B. Quigley discussed “the future of Zionism after the Al-Aqsa flood” in a CIGA webinar with Columbia University’s Joseph Massad, who previously called the killing spree a “stunning victory.”

Lawrence Wilkerson from William and Mary appeared alongside al-Arian himself at an event in 2021 about “U.S. foreign policy and the global war on terror.” Perhaps al-Arian was well-situated to present the terrorists’ perspective.

San Franscico State University professor of Ethnic Studies and founder of the university’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora Studies Rabab Abdulhadi has frequently been hosted by CIGA. Last spring, she helped organize and spoke at the SFSU Gaza Solidarity Encampment about how to “teach Palestine.”

Susan Abulhawa, organizer of the Palestine Writes Literature Festival conference at UPenn, which featured speakers with histories of antisemitism, was on a panel at CIGA’s “Second International Conference on Palestine” in June 2021. Omar Shakir of Human Rights Watch participated in a different panel.

The Global Coalition for Al Quds and Palestine (GCQP), whose former head led a U.S.-designated Hamas front, attended and sponsored this conference. The conference was also sponsored by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism and listed the Nader Hashemi-led Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver Korbel School as a sponsor. However, the dean of the Korbel School disavowed the sponsorship. Days before the Palestine conference, al-Arian and CIGA joined a webinar with Basem Naim, a Hamas politburo member.

Just last year, at CIGA’s Fourth International Conference on Palestine, fringe American journalist Max Blumenthal interviewed senior Hamas member Osama Hamdan.

The ideological overlap between American professors and designated terrorist groups is alarming. More alarming is that terrorists need not cross our borders to infiltrate our country. They have cooperative academics consorting with terrorists, importing their ideology, and teaching it to our nation’s next generation.

Melissa Sacks is the director of network analysis at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where David May is a research manager and senior research analyst. Follow FDD on X @FDD. Follow David on X @DavidSamuelMay. FDD is a Washington, DC-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.