Georgetown Islamic civilization professor retracts post saying he ‘hopes’ Iran conducts strike on US military base

Dr. Jonathan Brown, the Alwaleed bin Talal chair of Islamic Civilization in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, wrote in the since-deleted post, "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," he continued. "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*cked 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."

The post quickly went viral, resulting in Brown making a follow-up post. "I deleted my previous tweet because a lot of people were interpreting it as a call for violence. 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," he wrote, per WYMC. Brown has since locked down his X account.

On Monday, Iran targeted a US Air Base in Qatar. The missiles were intercepted, and no deaths or injuries, nor major damage to infrastructure, were reported.

Per Foundation for the Defense of Democracies CEO Mark Dubowitz, Brown is married to Al Jazeera journalist Laila Al-Arian, whose father is Sami Al-Arian.

Sami Al-Arian, a former Florida college professor who ran for Senate in Florida and California, was deported to Turkey in 2015 after a lengthy legal battle. He pleaded guilty to a single count of supporting terrorist organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad and agreed to be deported, per Politico.

A 2006 press release from the Department of Justice stated that "In the plea agreement, Al-Arian admits that he was associated with several organizations, including the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, in the late 1980s and early to mid-1990s. He also admits that co-defendants Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, Bashir Musa Mohammed Nafi and Mazen Al-Najjar were associated with PIJ."

"Al-Arian admits that he performed services for the PIJ in 1995 and thereafter, when he was a professor at the University of South Florida and after he knew that the PIJ had been designated by President Clinton as a terrorist organization. Al-Arian also acknowledges in the plea agreement that he knew the PIJ used acts of violence as a means to achieve its objectives. Nevertheless, Al-Arian continued to assist the terrorist organization, for instance, by filing official paperwork to obtain immigration benefits for PIJ associate Bashir Nafi, and concealing the terrorist associations of various individuals associated with the PIJ.

"He further admits to assisting PIJ associate Mazen al-Najjar in a federal court proceeding, a proceeding in which al-Najjar and Nafi both falsely claimed under oath that they were not associated with the PIJ. Moreover, Al-Arian acknowledges that in late 1995, when Ramadan Shallah, co-conspirator and former director of Al-Arian’s “think tank,” the World and Islam Studies Enterprise (WISE) was named as the new Secretary General of the PIJ, Al-Arian falsely denied to the media that he knew of Shallah’s association with PIJ."