Topline: The Department of Education has given $22.1 million in grants to Middle Eastern Studies departments at universities across the U.S. since 2020, some of which have professors who supported the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel or broke university rules to further the pro-Palestine movement.
Key facts: OpenTheBooks identified 12 schools that received the Foreign Language and Area Studies grants, with Columbia University, Indiana University and Georgetown University each receiving nearly $3 million.
Columbia bragged about the expertise of professor Joseph Massad on their grant application, who in 2002 gave a lecture about “Zionism and Jewish Supremacy.”
He later published an article calling the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack that killed 1,200 people a “stunning victory.” Some of the grant money supported his course “Gender and Sexuality in the Arab World.”
Grant funds also supported Dr. Abdulkader Sinno at Indiana. As faculty advisor to the Palestinian Solidarity Committee, he broke school rules by allowing his club to host a speaker without direct approval from the university.
The school’s vice provost also said coworkers had reported threatening behavior and several bias incidents surrounding Sinno, according to the Indiana Daily Student.
Sinno was put on suspension earlier this year, but came to campus in May to host an “alternative” graduation ceremony exclusively for pro-Palestine protestors.
Sinno and Massad are both tenured professors and remain on the staff payroll.
At Georgetown, Dr. Fida Adely co-authored an article in 2015 arguing that “dialogue” is not the correct way to solve the conflict in the Middle East.
Adely is on the national board of Faculty for Justice in Palestine, which collaborates with staff at the Hamas-affiliated Birzeit University.
Search all federal, state and local government salaries and vendor spending with the AI search bot, Benjamin, at OpenTheBooks.com.
Background: Few of the grants receive oversight from the federal government once the money is spent.
In 2019, Duke University and the University of North Carolina were told to change their Middle East programming or lose grant funds. The schools were using taxpayer money on conferences such as “Love and Desire in Modern Iran,” and were criticized by the Department of Education for placing “considerable emphasis on advancing ideological priorities.” But that was five years ago. Newer grants deserve oversight as well, especially given the rise in campus antisemitism over the last year.
The Department of Education did not return OpenTheBooks’ questions about how they currently monitor grant applications.
The grants are just one piece of the massive amounts of taxpayer money that flow into private universities. OpenTheBooks previously reported that over $23 billion of federal grants and contracts were sent to the eight schools of the Ivy League from 2018 to 2022.
Summary: Government funds should be used in the best interest of all taxpayers, not to promote violence or advance principles that are ideologically opposed to Western ideals.
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