Schools for Scandal

Jul 18, 2025

Guest

Brandy Shufutinsky

Guest

Sam Westrop

Guest

Asra Nomani

Asra Nomani, an investigative reporter and co-author of a revealing report on Georgetown University, joins Sam Westrop, an expert on nonviolent Islamist networks, and Brandy Shufutinsky, director focused on education and national security. They unveil how foreign funding, particularly from Gulf states, is reshaping ideologies in American campuses, promoting anti-American and extremist sentiments. The discussion also addresses the infiltration of educational institutions by radical ideologies and advocates for urgent policy reforms to protect academic integrity and national security.

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INSIGHT

Ideological Capture of Campuses

Woke ideology, anti-Americanism, Islamism, and anti-Semitism have overtaken elite U.S. campuses.
Radical foreign and domestic actors embed adversarial views to influence future policymakers and students.

INSIGHT

Qatar's Islamist Influence Role

Qatar is the world's second Wahhabi state and a Muslim Brotherhood supporter.
It uses influence operations globally, including funding and staffing universities like Georgetown's Islamic centers.

ANECDOTE

Danny Pearl's Murder Story

Danny Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter, was beheaded in Pakistan by Islamists following an FBI trail.
The killers prayed after the murder, exemplifying the lethal consequences of Islamist extremism.

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Woke ideology, anti‑Americanism, Islamism and antisemitism have gripped America’s elite campuses. How? Follow the money.

Researchers at the Middle East Forum have been doing exactly that, and the result is a new report that's shocking but not surprising. It’s titled: “Beachhead: Georgetown University: How Foreign and Domestic Radical Actors Captured a U.S. University.”

Host Cliff May is joined by his FDD colleague Brandy Shufutinsky and report co-authors Asra Q. Nomani and Sam Westrop to discuss the Gulf autocrats and Saudi‑linked SAFA network pouring millions of dollars into Georgetown’s Al‑Waleed Center, warping future diplomats and even infiltrating K‑12 classrooms—and the actions that must be swiftly taken by policymakers to solve it.

Sam Westrop

Sam Westrop is an expert on nonviolent Islamist networks and has headed the Middle East Forum’s Islamist Watch project since March 2017. He previously ran Stand for Peace, a London-based counter-extremism organization that monitored Islamist movements throughout the UK and which guided British policy on terror finance and violent extremism. Combining open-source research with big data coding and scraping, his investigative work in the United States on the financial activities of seven leading Islamist movements active across America has sparked multiple congressional inquiries, generated law enforcement investigations, and effected federal policy changes.

Asra Nomani

Asra Q. Nomani is an investigative reporter, journalist, private investigator, author, educator, editor and former reporter for the Wall Street Journal. She is founder of the Pearl Project a nonprofit initiative dedicated to doing journalism in the public interest, defending press freedoms and preserving the legacy of a great journalist and friend. Asra is widely recognized for rational commentary, analysis and advocacy work across a diversity of issues and media platforms, including MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, the Washington Post, the New York Times and BBC, among others.

Brandy Shufutinsky

Brandy Shufutinsky serves as director of FDD’s Program on Education and National Security. Prior to joining FDD, Brandy was director of education and community engagement at the North American Values Institute. Brandy has been published in Newsweek, Jewish Journal, The Jerusalem Post, Sapir, White Rose Magazine, and JNS. She was a 2021 scholar-in-residence at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy Oxford Summer Institute, where she worked to develop curriculum in critical antisemitism studies.