Birzeit University, a Palestinian institution based near Ramallah, has been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons. Five of its students, all members of the student council, were arrested for planning a “significant terror attack” at the behest of Hamas. They were caught with an assault rifle and thousands of dollars provided to them by the terrorist organization.
Several days earlier, members of Congress expressed alarm over the terrorist hotbed masquerading as a university. “We find Harvard’s relationship with Birzeit University…to be extremely concerning,” reads a July 15 letter sent by nearly thirty members of Congress to Harvard University’s Interim President Alan Garber. Of concern to them: a “student government [that] openly supports Hamas” and “names buildings after convicted terrorists”; a “policy of barring Israeli Jews from campus”; and the university’s praise for the October 7 massacre, posting “Glory for martyrs, recovery for wounded ones, and freedom for the captives.”
Wait until Congress hears about Birzeit’s relationship with another Ivy League institution, Brown University.
Last year, a CAMERA report exposed the antisemitism and extremism emanating from Brown University’s Center for Middle East Studies. The founding director of the center was a man by the name of Beshara Doumani, who led it for several years before moving on to advance a number of “Palestinian studies” programs within the center. As extensively detailed in the report, students in these programs are being fed horrific messages. Professors openly spread antisemitic blood libels. Terrorist organizations are legitimized. Historical massacres of Jews are normalized simply as Arabs “rising up.” The Brown Undergraduate Journal of Middle East Studies even openly declares it is opposed to only one form of self-determination: Jewish self-determination.
But here’s where Birzeit University comes into the picture. For a two-year period, from 2021-2023, Doumani served as president of Birzeit University. While Birzeit had long been known as a hotbed of extremism, under Doumani’s tenure, it reached new heights.
Members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s student faction at Birzeit University parading a replica of the bomb used to kill 17-year-old Rina Shnerb.
Hamas’s student faction, the Islamic Bloc, won stunning landslide victories. This gave Hamas material benefits, from university funds to opportunities for recruitment and propaganda on campus. The Islamic Bloc, along with the other student factions of terrorist organizations, repeatedly held military-style parades on campus where, for example, students: dressed as terrorists and carried a replica of a bomb that killed a 17-year-old Israeli girl on a hike; “saluted the ‘body parts scattered’” by suicide bombings; and chanted for members of another terrorist organization to “Blow up the settler’s head.” This all occurred under Doumani’s watch even though the university had previously banned “activity of a military nature” on campus.
Worse, Doumani’s university itself glorified terrorism. One of the graduation ceremonies during his tenure saw two imprisoned terrorists honored with degrees. Their degrees were, in the words of one Birzeit University official, “a success for Palestine, for the fighter’s rifle.” At another event, Doumani himself participated in the book launch for the biography of a terrorist who, after carrying out a shooting attack, fled back to Birzeit University grounds.
This environment of extremism had deadly consequences. Students were incited into carrying out terror attacks during this period. Several were killed in the process, and at least one was honored by a symbolic funeral on campus. Many other Birzeit University students-turned-terrorists were lucky to end up arrested instead of dead.
Which brings us back to Brown University. Doumani makes no secret of his intention to bring this same type of extremism and hatred to American universities. The academic boasts of promoting an “agenda…driven” area studies and rejects traditional notions of academic freedom in order to advance favored ideas. He regularly brings extremist professors from Birzeit University to indoctrinate students at Brown University. Worse, his Palestinian studies initiatives are explicitly aimed at spreading his form of “knowledge production” throughout the academic world. Even schoolchildren are being targeted, as another CAMERA report exposed.
One need only look at how Brown University students responded to the October 7 massacre to understand the danger. Dozens of student organizations – including at least one which appears to take the direction of Doumani – declared that Hamas’s murder, rape, torture, mutilation, and kidnapping of Israeli civilians was “just.”
It’s a level of moral perversion that should stir university administrators and government agencies into immediate action. This type of extremism and bigotry has no place in higher education, as it stands contrary to the very values that higher education was built on.