Georgetown University ‘appalled’ by department chair’s call for Iran to strike U.S. base

Georgetown University, that bastion of academic propriety, finds itself “appalled” by one of its own, a professor no less, who has taken to the digital agora to muse about Iran launching a “symbolic strike” on a U.S. military base. 

One might wonder what passes for symbolism in such a mind, but let us not get ahead of ourselves. The culprit [aka scumcrumpet] is Jonathan Brown, a tenured professor and chair of the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies, who also holds the rather grandiloquent title of Alwaleed bin Talal chair of Islamic Civilization. A man of such credentials, one assumes, ought to know better than to tweet something so breathtakingly reckless and traitorous. 

Yet on Sunday, following the U.S. strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities, Brown took to X with the following gem: “I’m not an expert, but I assume Iran could still get a bomb easily. I hope Iran does some symbolic strike on a base, then everyone stops.” 

Pause for a moment to marvel at the casualness of it all: a professor, not an “expert” mind you, but sufficiently confident to opine that Iran, a regime not exactly known for its restraint, could whip up a nuclear bomb with the ease of a Starbucks barista frothing a latte. And then, the pièce de résistance: a hope, no a prayer, that Iran might lob a missile at an American base, all in the name of symbolism, before everyone, presumably, shakes hands and calls it a day.

Georgetown, to its credit, was swift to express its horror. “We are reviewing this matter to see if further action is warranted,” a university spokesperson told the outlet Jewish Insider, adding that the administration is, naturally, “appalled” by Brown’s since-deleted tweet. 

One wonders what such a review entails; perhaps a sternly worded email, or a committee meeting to debate the precise boundaries of academic freedom when it veers into fantasizing about geopolitical violence. The tweet, of course, has vanished, but not before Brown, son-in-law of convicted terror supporter Sami Al-Arian, offered a defense as limp as a wet noodle: “I deleted my previous tweet because a lot of people were interpreting it as a call for violence,” he lied. “That’s not what I intended. I have two immediate family members in the US military who’ve served abroad and wouldn’t want any harm to befall American soldiers… or anyone!”

So a nuke on an American sight is not a call for violence the jihadi professor wants us to believe. How touching. A man who has spent considerable energy since October 7, 2023, denouncing Israel as “insanely racist” now wishes to assure us that his heart bleeds for American soldiers, his own kin, no less. 

One might ask why, if harm to “anyone” is so anathema to him, he felt compelled to float the idea of an Iranian missile strike in the first place. But such is the intellectual contortionism of the modern academy, where one can condemn with one breath and backpedal with the next, all while cloaked in the sanctity of tenure.

This is not Brown’s first brush with controversy, nor is it Georgetown’s. 

The university has been under scrutiny for its handling of campus anti-Semitism, with the House Education and Workforce Committee summoning interim president Robert Groves to testify on July 9. You might think, with such a spotlight trained upon it, Georgetown would be more circumspect, but the institution has a curious habit of digging in its heels. 

Take, for instance, its defense of Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral scholar detained by federal authorities, or the questions swirling around the funding it receives from Qatar for its campus in Doha. These are not the actions of a university eager to demonstrate its moral clarity.

In an era when elite institutions are bending, however reluctantly, to demands for accountability,

Georgetown’s defiance is as notable as it is disgusting.

It is a defiance that seems less principled than performative, a refusal to grapple with the rot within its own ranks. Brown’s tweet, however ill-conceived, is not an aberration but a symptom of an academic culture that too often indulges dangerous ideas under the guise of discourse, and of a university that, when faced with the consequences, can muster only a performance of being “appalled.”

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