Georgetown Center Issues Controversial Statement on Academic’s Arrest

On 20 March 2025, George­town Uni­ver­si­ty’s Alwaleed Cen­ter for Mus­lim-Chris­t­ian Under­stand­ing (ACMCU) issued a state­ment claim­ing that the arrest of Badar Khan Suri is part of a broad­er polit­i­cal cam­paign by the Trump admin­is­tra­tion against high­er edu­ca­tion. The arti­cle begins:

The arrest of Badar Khan Suri must be under­stood in the con­text of the Trump Admin­is­tra­tion’s for­eign and domes­tic poli­cies. Specif­i­cal­ly, U.S. sup­port for geno­cide abroad and McCarthy­ism at home. Con­sid­er, for instance, that at the pre­cise moment that Dr. Khan Suri was arrest­ed, Israel, after coor­di­nat­ing with the Trump Admin­is­tra­tion, launched a bru­tal attack on the peo­ple of Gaza that accord­ing to Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al killed at least 400 peo­ple includ­ing 174 chil­dren. This event on March 17 is now known as “The Ramadan Mas­sacre.” As it con­tin­ues to enable geno­cide in Gaza, so too will the Trump admin­is­tra­tion expand its author­i­tar­i­an weaponiza­tion of the legal sys­tem to attack polit­i­cal speech that is pro­tect­ed by the First Amendment…

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Key Points:

• ACMCU claims Khan Suri’s arrest rep­re­sents gov­ern­ment tar­get­ing of aca­d­e­mics who defend Pales­tin­ian human rights, liken­ing it to “McCarthy­ism.”
• The state­ment draws con­tro­ver­sial par­al­lels between domes­tic arrests and inter­na­tion­al events includ­ing what it terms “The Ramadan Massacre.”
• Cen­ter con­tends that Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ties are under attack by admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials who have described them as “the enemy.”
• State­ment con­cludes with a call for Amer­i­cans to “mobi­lize and resist” what it char­ac­ter­izes as an “author­i­tar­i­an takeover” of the country.

On 20 March 2025, Badar Khan Suri, an Indi­an nation­al, was detained by the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty over “close con­nec­tions to a known or sus­pect­ed ter­ror­ist.” The Depart­ment also accused him of “active­ly spread­ing Hamas pro­pa­gan­da.” He is the hus­band of George­town stu­dent Mapheze Saleh, the daugh­ter of Ahmed Yousef, a for­mer high-lev­el advi­sor to Ismail Haniyeh. A pho­to­graph of their wed­ding shows the cou­ple pos­ing with a pic­ture of Hamas founder Ahmad Yassin. In anoth­er pho­to­graph, Suri can be seen hold­ing hands with Haniyeh.

Many of the ACMCU lead­er­ship and staff are known to have had close ties to the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood in the US.

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