Georgetown University hosted terrorist, former Hamas official at Qatar conference

Over the weekend, a conference hosted by Georgetown University took place in Qatar, titled the “Reimagining Palestine” conference, which featured speakers from terrorist organizations as well as pro-Hamas and anti-Israel speakers.

As the Washington Free Beacon reported, the conference featured dozens of individuals who have made a career out of opposing Israel, including the chief of an Israel-designated terrorist organization, a former Hamas official, and many Hamas acolytes along for good measure.

The purpose of the conference, along with "Reimagining Palestine," was to discuss the "ideological shifts" of Zionism, "art as resistance," and "anti-colonial struggles," while having a "dialogue that challenges the status quo.” Among the nearly 70 academics who spoke was Shawan Jabarin, a former senior member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the general director of the Al-Haq organization, which Israel has designated as a terrorist group. Another speaker was Wadah Khanfar, a former local Hamas leader in Sudan.

Working with the PFLP, Jabarin was a chief recruiter for the organization and was convicted in 1985 for doing so and sentenced to two years in prison. He was infamously called "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" by the Israeli Supreme Court because he managed to provide his services to both Al-Haq and the PFLP, the Jerusalem Post reported.

Al-Haq proclaims itself as a human rights watchdog with its eyes on the Gaza strip but Israel classified the group as a terrorist entity in 2021 and called it "an inseparable arm" of the PFLP that works "on its behalf and upon its instructions as part of the terror organization's struggle against Israel,” the Free Beacon noted. Wesam Ahmad, another Al-Haq asset, also spoke at the Georgetown conference. He once said Israel was "a colonial project from the very beginning." 

Georgetown opened its Qatar campus in 2005 "to extend its international presence to an important region of the world," as the university’s president, John J. DeGioia, put it. The Qatar Foundation, which is responsible for promoting the goals and objectives of Qatar, paid for a significant portion of the campus and has a corresponding level of influence on the facility's curriculum and faculty, the Free Beacon notes.

The conference also featured a myriad of pro-Hamas speakers that included Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British-Palestinian surgeon who once praised a Hamas leader suspected of plotting a rabbi’s murder as a "hero." He also lauded the work of another PFLP co-founder involved in the hijacking of an Israeli airplane.

Others at the conference have defended Hamas’ bloody and terrifying attack on Israeli citizens on Oct. 7, 2023. Hamas apologist Tareq Baconi maintained that the killing wasn’t "driven by hatred and bloodlust" but was "inevitable" "anti-colonial violence" prompted by Israel as a "regime of oppression." In his book, Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance, Baconi declared that Hamas was not "a terrorist group" but "a multifaceted liberation organization."