The following article is part of the IPT's Jihad University Series.
From their support for the BDS movement, to hosting terrorists to accepting terrorist tainted funding, some of the nation's top universities have become far too comfortable with connections that they would have shunned not long ago.
We see a critical need to investigate these connections and hold the universities accountable in their legitimation of the views of Middle East and Islamist terrorist groups. The IPT will be publishing new investigative pieces on a regular basis that will lift the curtain on this very repugnant side of academia today.
Bassam Haddad - Part 2: Interview With a Terrorist
by A.J Caschetta
Special to IPT News
January 13, 2025
 Screenshot: Jadaliyya - Academic Freedom and the War on Gaza w/ Sami Al-Arian |
Haddad's nonchalant schmooze fest with the confessed terrorist demonstrates his inability to discern scholarship from activism. George Mason University (GMU), currently the subject of an investigation by the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights for "failing to respond appropriately to incidents of harassment in October and November 2023," should be ashamed.
From his position as a professor of computer science at the University of South Florida (USF) beginning in 1986, al-Arian co-founded and directed two Palestinian terrorist front groups – the World and Islam Studies Enterprise (WISE) and the Islamic Concern Project (ICP), later renamed the Islamic Committee for Palestine. His PIJ connections were first exposed to the public in Steven Emerson's award-winning documentary Jihad in America (1994).
Were it not for Emerson and the Investigative Project on Terrorism, Sami al-Arian might still be teaching at USF.
For one hour and 35 minutes, Haddad conducted a softball interview that promoted al-Arian and gave him a platform to call for the destruction of Israel. Barack Obama's Justice Department deported al-Arian for conspiring to provide services to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but Haddad treats him as an esteemed colleague, introducing him as a "human rights activist."
 Screenshot Collage: The Many Faces of Bassam Haddad |
From his tenured position at the University of South Florida in the 1990s and early 2000s, Sami al-Arian served on PIJ's Shura Council or leadership board and repeatedly brought the PIJ's spiritual leader, Abdel Aziz-Odeh, to the United States for conferences and fundraisers.
Haddad also never acknowledged the evidence against al-Arian that compelled his guilty plea: hundreds of hours of recorded phone conversation between al-Arian and PIJ members.
The two bros volleyed back and forth, trading low-brow, zero-evidence riffs about Israeli genocide, apartheid, racism, and supremacism while referring to Hamas as a "resistance movement." When it came to Hamas's October 7 rape-torture-murder campaign, al-Arian called it a "prison break." The people of Gaza "tried peaceful protest, protest of return, negotiated settlements," he said, but "everything failed." So they carried out an attack that al-Arian insisted was "on Palestinian territory, not in Israel."
As al-Arian asked rhetorically of the post-October 7 war in Gaza, "See what the Palestinians have to go through when they challenged Israeli hegemony and power?" Haddad nodded in assent. Both men blame everyone for the plight of the Palestinians except the Palestinians themselves.
Al-Arian told Haddad that many people, including 12 of his own relatives, are being extorted for between $60,000 and $90,000 to leave Gaza through Egypt. The bribes go "to some mafia boss in Sinai that is splitting his money with Egyptian officials," he said. A real interviewer would have asked him how the allegedly impoverished people Gaza could raise that kind of cash. Haddad did not.
When it comes to demonizing the Jewish state, al-Arian has always been in his element. "I have been advancing my views for the liberation of Palestine and I speak very forcefully against these political solutions," he said, echoing the founding principles of PIJ as summarized in its 2018 "Political Document" which states that "Palestinian Islamic Jihad refuses to recognize the Israeli entity, to reconcile with it, or to negotiate with it."
Haddad was very comfortable in Sami's world, agreeing with every outrageous claim his guest could muster, laughing and chortling at his jokes. He agreed that Hamas is merely a resistance movement and that "Netanyahu, Smotrich, Galant, and Benny Gantz are war criminals." He nodded along as al-Arian ranted, "This state is settler-colonial, a supremacist, racist regime that wants to remove the indigenous people and bring people from the outside to replace them." He raised no objection when al-Arian screamed "Israel is a cancer. Yes, I said it, a cancer."
When Haddad invited al-Arian to offer some final thoughts in closing, the former PIJ shura council secretary thanked his obsequious comrade and offered a metaphor in which "Israel is a house held up by 12 columns." The most important column, he explained, is Israel's relationship with the U.S. "We need to undermine that unholy alliance," he sneered. "We need to bring awareness to everyone in the U.S." because "Palestinians can't do it alone. It will require a global movement." And that global movement, both men agreed, begins on college campuses.
At only one point in the entire "teach-in" did Haddad try to rein in al-Arian's madness and give him a chance to walk back his hyperbole. Perhaps he sensed that his buddy had gone too far in pronouncing that his "objective is to dismantle the Zionist regime." Or perhaps it was his repeated claim that "Zionism is the problem; de-Zionizing Palestine is the solution." Either way, Haddad offered him an out, suggesting that when some people hear his call to "dismantle Zionism" they might interpret it as a call to genocide.
Sami accepted Haddad's mulligan offer and disingenuously claimed that he was not calling to kill people but only to kill Zionism: "No ... this is not a call to genocide or kill or, or, get rid of people," he said, unconvincingly. "We're talking about an ideology, a system, a regime." In fact, al-Arian has been using the phrase "dismantle" since at least 2020 and actually called for "Death to Israel" during a 1991 speech in Chicago, as Abha Shankar has documented at the Investigative Project on Terrorism.
Conclusion
Like a persistent cough that won't go away, Sami al-Arian is a symptom of the Islamist pestilence that plagues Middle East studies programs and centers. But al-Arian is just a symptom. Credentialed academic terrorist fanboys like Bassam Haddad and the universities that employ them are the real illness. As long as institutions like George Mason University continue to tolerate terrorist apologists, honor Islamists like AbdulHamid AbuSulayman, and pretend that theInternational Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), a leading Muslim Brotherhood think tank in Northern Virginia, is something worthy of praise, we should expect more anti-Zionism, more antisemitism, and more violence from their students.
Bassam Haddad seems intent on trying to outshine Columbia's professor Joseph Massad, the rabid monster who celebrated the rape and infanticide of October 7. There is no doubt that Haddad, like Massad, is inculcating hatred for Israel in his students. There is no doubt that he is teaching them that Israel is a "settler-colonial" project (in spite of the evidence). He is absolutely teaching them that Israel is an Apartheid state (in spite of the evidence). And he is assuredly teaching them that Israel has been committing genocide (in spite of the evidence) against Arabs in general and Palestinian Arabs in particular for decades.
Haddad's page on GMU's AbuSulayman Center for Global Islamic Studies shows that he teaches classes about "Arab Uprisings," "Authoritarianism and Reform in the Middle East," "Orientalism and Terrorism," and "Contentious Themes in Middle East Studies/Politics." What are the chances that the classroom Haddad is any different from the online Haddad, that he delivers accurate, credible lectures instead of ahistorical, evasive, pro-Hamas propaganda? The odds are not good.
And what are the chances that his students will act on the mendacious, emotionalizing misrepresentations he is undoubtedly disseminating? What are the chances that George Mason University's most famous students – the would-be Israeli consulate bomber, Abdullah Ezzeldin Taha Mohamed Hassan, and the Jew-hating, terror-supporting SJP-leading Chanaa sisters – took classes from Bassam Haddad?
If I were a gambler, I'd take those odds.
Chief IPT Political Correspondent A.J. Caschetta is a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum where he is also a Milstein fellow.
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