Jonathan Brown, a professor at Georgetown University, is a living, breathing illustration of a great deal that’s wrong with academic life today. His public statements give the strong impression that he hates America and has contempt for those who live in it, or at least for those who aren’t on the far left. In fact, his hatred doesn’t stop with America alone; as a convert to Islam, Brown has allied himself with a force that has tried to destroy Western civilization for 1,400 years and has even enthusiastically embraced the most noxious aspects of that force, endorsing slavery, including the sex slavery of infidel women.
Given the state of the American intelligentsia, you’d expect such a man to become a cosseted and celebrated member of the academic scene, and you’d be right. Brown stands for so much that is not only un-American but anti-American, that it was inevitable that he would become a rising star on campus, despite the intellectual poverty of his actual output. And sure enough, Georgetown not only gave Brown tenure but made him chair of its Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies and Alwaleed bin Talal chair of Islamic Civilization in the School of Foreign Service.
Now, however, Brown appears to have crossed the line even for Georgetown. It would have been less surprising if university officials had made him president of the university after he called on the Islamic Republic of Iran to carry out a “symbolic strike” against a U.S. military base, but instead, against all expectations, Georgetown has actually placed him on leave and removed him as chair of the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies. Is sanity returning to American academia? Well, no. But this certainly is a welcome step in that direction.
Georgetown University interim President Robert M. Groves told a congressional hearing Tuesday: “Within minutes of our learning of that tweet, the dean contacted Professor Brown, the tweet was removed [and] we issued a statement condemning the tweet. Professor Brown is no longer chair of his department and he’s on leave, and we’re beginning a process of reviewing the case.”
Good start. Now: if Georgetown really wants to shake itself loose of the influence of all the Qatari and Saudi money it has raked in, it should revoke Brown’s tenure and fire him outright. Those who think that would be too harsh should consider Brown’s X post that started all the controversy:
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. I’m surprised this is what these FDD/Hasbara people have been auto-erotically asphyxiating themselves for all these years. Ironically, the main takeaways (in my non-expert opinion, and I’m happy to be corrected) from all this have nothing to do with a US attack: 1) Iran can take a licking; 2) if Israel attacks Iranian cities, it gets f***ed up pretty bad. I mean I’ve been shocked at the damage Iranian missiles caused; 3) despite his best efforts, Reza Pahlavi HVAC repair services still only third best in Nova.
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Consider for a moment what would be the fate of an academic in the Islamic Republic of Iran who posted on X that the U.S. or Israel should carry out a “symbolic strike” on an Iranian military base. That’s not to say that the U.S. should follow the example of the Islamic Republic, but it would be refreshing and salutary if its cosseted academics recovered a bit of the instinct for self-preservation. Brown himself lives a life of comfortable affluence in the Washington area. If the America he so despises were to crumble into anarchy and civil war, or if his friends in the Islamic Republic somehow found a way to make good on their longstanding and oft-stated goal of bringing death to America, Brown himself might suffer some discomfort, as would the legions of leftist academics who look at the nation and the world the same way he does.
It is good to see Georgetown take action against Brown. It would be even better if every university in the country began to take similar action against its own anti-American professors, as they enjoy the delights of living in a land they detest and want to see destroyed. Why should American universities continue to be incubators of leftism, Marxism, jiha,d and treason? Brown’s enforced leave and loss of one of his chairmanships should be just the beginning.
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