Mellon's Muslims - Waging Philanthropic Jihad (Part 1)
- Why would Mellon Foundation sponsor a radical and violent political system whose main objective is conquering Western Civilization?
By Claudia Henneberry
July 2026
Part 2
A war is being waged for the soul of Western Civilization and the Foundation that advocates for “social justice” over the good, the true, and the beautiful, has chosen to fund that which is incompatible with the West – Islam.
According to Vince Coyner at the American Thinker, “From its very beginning, Islam was about conquering and conquest, through any means necessary, including deception…. At its very core, Islam is incompatible with Western civilization. It does not believe in freedom of speech. It does not believe in freedom of religion. Women are second-class citizens, and non-Muslim women fare even worse.”
Joel Richardson, in Chapter 15 of his book Will Islam Be Our Future?, writes “Islam views itself as the only true religion - indeed the only religion worthy to be practiced. As such Islam has as one of its goals, total world domination.”
Imtiaz Mahmood says, “The plan of Muslims is to exploit democracy in Western countries and get into positions of power. Once they seize enough power, they will implement Sharia. This is their grand plan for the Islamic takeover of the West. They say it openly.”
Craig Huey in My Christian Daily recently said, “Islam teaches that non-Muslims who do not convert to Islam and do not submit to Allah should be killed.”
And, according to Daniel Greenfield of Front Page Magazine, Muslims were able to kill over 200,000 people in 11 years – and got away with it - in the name of “tolerance”– and the international community insists on calling those genocides ‘decolonization’ because, they claim, Muslims are an oppressed minority.
Yet under the auspices of its social justice bent and $7.7 billion endowment, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has found a way to shoe-horn the study of Islam into its support for the humanities through various initiatives including grants for research and educational programs that explore Islam and Muslim communities globally. Supposedly, these grants satisfy Mellon’s objective to “elevate underrepresented perspectives in academia” as part of their Higher Learning grants.
So why would the prolific champion of the humanities, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, sponsor programs supporting a radical and violent political system whose main objective is conquering Western Civilization?
Mellon’s Key Initiatives and Grants for Islamic Programs
Some of the notable examples of the grants to colleges and universities, as well as examples of radical professors associated with the study of Islam or those who have received Mellon funding, are as follows:
Mellon gave grants in 2000, 2010, & 2012, to support a study for the feasibility of publishing digitally a multi-volume atlas that presents the social and intellectual history of the Islamic world, to the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. The total was $870,000.
The American University of Paris, Inc., received $100,000 for a program in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in March of 2007.
In 2008, Earlham College in Indiana got a $300,000 grant from Mellon to support the development of an Islamic Studies Program.
Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania was granted $670,000 in 2005 to support a program in modern Middle Eastern history and Islamic studies. The grant is to be shared between Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, and Haverford Colleges, assisting the three institutions in establishing the Tri-College Islamic/Middle Eastern Studies Initiative.
The president of Haverford College, Wendy Raymond, was berated by Republican lawmakers in a congressional hearing in 2025 on campus antisemitism. Lawmakers threatened to withhold federal funds from the College due to Raymond’s lack of detailing punishments for Haverford students and faculty accused of anti-Jewish bias.
In April of 2009, Lehigh University received a $1.4 million grant from the Mellon Foundation in support of an undergraduate program in global Islamic studies, the first step in establishing a new Center for Global Islamic Studies. Lehigh said the grant would “help heighten awareness surrounding Islamic culture and civilization.”
Following the horrific October 7, 2023 massacre of Israeli women, children, and families by Hamas, a Palestinian Islamic political and military organization, there were several hateful antisemitic incidents and a rally on Lehigh’s campus calling for the elimination of Israel. No punitive action was taken by the University leaving Jewish students in a “hostile antisemitic climate.” StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice and Alums for Campus Fairness were forced to send a legal demand letter to Lehigh University in 2024 requesting the administration take concrete steps to ensure the protection of its Jewish, Israeli and Zionist students.
The University of Chicago was given a $600,000 Mellon grant for an Islamic Studies Initiative in 2010. Subsequently, in 2013, the University received $800,000 more to “support further development of an Islamic studies initiative.” Through this grant, the Mellon Foundation was trying to raise “the profile of Islamic Studies on campus and firmly establish it as an interdisciplinary enterprise.”
Also associated with the University of Chicago is Noah Salomon, who earned his Ph. D. in Religious Studies from the University. He is currently a University of Virginia Associate Professor in Islamic Studies. Salomon received a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship in 2018 for the project “Thinking Islam across the Sunni-Shi‘i Divide: A New Approach to Islamic Studies.”
Saloman, was arrested in May of 2024 at the anti-Israel campus encampment at UVA. He had likewise signed an anti-Israel letter (#605), immediately following the October 7, 2023 massacre of Israelis, that ironically accused Israel of “genocide.”
Also affiliated with the U. of Chicago is an Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and current director of U. of Chicago’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Dr. Alireza Doostdar, who teaches courses on “liberatory violence” focusing on “Zionist settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid.” He is active in the Faculty for Justice in Palestine and supported anti-Israel encampments on campus. He was arrested during a “sit-in” protest in November 2023. Doostdar’s brother, Ahmadreza, was convicted with another Iranian in 2020 for spying on Iranian dissidents in California and Chicago.
In 2012, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded Duke University $750,000 to support the school's 10 international and area studies centers which includes the Duke Center for Islamic Studies.
The former director of the Duke Center for Islamic Studies, Dr. Omid Safi, faced repeated criticism from pro-Israel groups for harsh anti-Israel statements, equating Israeli actions to "war crimes," using Holocaust imagery in discussions of Palestinian issues (Holocaust inversion claims), and associations or rhetoric seen as excusing Palestinian "resistance." He has been revealed as an anti-Israel radical and an apologist for the Palestinian Hamas terror group and has “frequently described the worldwide Muslim community as one that is oppressed and marginalized.”
Also in 2012, Connecticut College was awarded a $100,000 planning grant by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a new program in Global Islamic Studies. “We are challenging preconceived notions and rethinking how we understand Muslims and the role of Islam in the world,” Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Director of Global Islamic Studies, Sufia Uddin, said at the time.
In 2018, Mellon renewed its support for Connecticut College’s Global Islamic Studies (GIS) Program to the tune of $806,000 “to continue to foster interdisciplinary study of Islam on a global scale.”
Connecticut College is “working to combat the narrative that Muslims are evil, violent, and only come from the Middle East.” The grant will help in adding faculty members to teach the courses. The College also partnered with Brown University to create a faculty exchange program with that institution’s Middle East Studies program. “Our partnerships should be with fields of study like Africana Studies, Latin American Studies, Native American studies– the struggles of other people who have been persecuted can help enlighten one’s own area,” Professor Sufia Uddin, former Director of GIS, expressed in 2018.
“Students come to Connecticut College and want to study, ‘why Muslims hate us’ or they say, ‘we have to do security studies because we are in conflict with Muslims and we must destroy them, or defeat them, or keep them contained. The language can vary from very blatantly racist and prejudicial to more subtle terms. We’re trying to undo that,” admitted Uddin.
“We’ve made it clear that what we want is to undo that knowledge construction … Mellon doesn’t just give money away. The grant represents a firm belief in what we’re doing– that what we’re doing is the right thing,” Professor Uddin confessed.
Mellon grants and radical professors will have a difficult time combating the “narrative” and the “knowledge construction” that ‘Muslims are evil and violent’ when the unforgivable barbaric horror of the October 7th massacre of Israelis is the norm. See up-to-date information on the Jihad & Terrorism Threat Monitor and Jihadis In Our Midst to decide what is true.
Ms. Uddin faced significant criticism for her role in the 2015 “Pessin Affair” where critics alleged that students (in consultation with her) misrepresented a Facebook post from Jewish professor Andrew Pessin comparing Hamas to a rabid dog during the 2014 Israel-Hamas conflict, leading to a cruel campaign against him. Uddin and students in her Global Islamic Studies program launched a mob attack against Professor Andrew Pessin, a popular philosophy professor.
Uddin is not alone in her GIS activism at Conn College. Associate professor of History and, yet, another former Director of Global Islamic Studies, Eileen Kane, recouped a $237,000 Mellon Foundation New Directions research fellowship in 2017.
A year earlier, Kane was embroiled in a scandal. Campus watch groups, faculty, and alumni have accused her of advising student groups like Conn Students in Solidarity with Palestine (CSSP) and their posting of materials labeling Birthright Israel as settler colonialism and “intimidated Jewish or pro-Israel students and faculty, while attempting to poison the minds of uninformed students and faculty with vicious falsehoods about Israel.”
Years later, in May of 2024, both Uddin and Kane signed a statement of solidarity with students and colleagues across the nation “who have been subjected to arrests, violence, and repression.” The statement echoed the national Faculty for Justice in Palestine’s despicable positions against Israel.
As of 2025, the student activist group CSSP that has ties to Kane’s Global Islamic Studies program, was still active and entirely aligned with Conn’s Muslim Students Association to support divestment and the College’s “acknowledgment of ongoing occupation and violence in Palestine.”
These cases of rogue professors stand out because Mellon funding directly supported the program’s creation and expansion.
The University of Michigan received $3 million in 2014 for the establishment of the Islamic Studies Virtual Curriculum, to develop and implement a collaborative, instructional program in Global Islamic Studies. Mellon’s grant is far-reaching, advancing its Islamic curriculum across all Big Ten universities. The Digital Islamic Studies Curriculum (DISC) at the University of Michigan’s Global Islamic Center, which is sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, aims to provide students with a global perspective on Islam and the Muslim world. They do this by coordinating Islamic studies courses through the Big Ten Alliance CourseShare program, which offers distance-learning courses to students at all member universities.
In 2024, “Motaz Azaiza, an award-winning Palestinian photojournalist from Gaza, spoke to about 1,700 University of Michigan students, faculty and community members” for the ninth annual Digital Islamic Studies Curriculum distinguished lecture. One of [DISC’s] goals is “to give a voice to Muslim communities being affected by current events,” an article said. The article went on to paraphrase DISC Director Pauline Jones as saying Azaiza was “the right choice for this year’s distinguished lecture because of how he has shed light on the ongoing violence in Gaza.” Jones said, “He is bringing to light a very horrific reality that Muslim communities are experiencing directly.”
Samer Ali, a former University of Michigan Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature, partook in a $225,000 Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar grant in 2022 for his work in connection with "The Africana Muslim and Genealogies of White Supremacy: Seminar for Interdisciplinary Study of Blackness and Muslimness". (Related information here.) Ali has accused the University of Michigan and Israel of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and called for Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions of Israel (BDS.) He complains of "white supremacy" legacies in Middle East studies/Orientalism and has been vocal on Palestine. His resignation letter, in 2025, proves his radical stance.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded a two-year grant of $350,000 in 2019 to UCLA to support a pilot project seeking to reframe how Middle Eastern studies are conceptualized and taught.
Dr. Daniel Neep, a political scientist specializing in the politics of Syria, received a Mellon’s New Directions Fellowship grant in 2021. Dr. Neep served as an American Druze Foundation Research Fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS).
Georgetown University established its campus in Qatar in 2005 and a continuing partnership with the Qatar Foundation whose funding affects faculty choices, research initiatives, and endowed chairs on the Washington, D.C., campus. The Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS), where Dr. Neep taught, along with Georgetown’s Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU), have become hubs for critical advocacy and political activism that is often co-sponsored by the Qatar campus. Qatar money has ushered in anti-Western and anti-Israel advocacy, with some faculty engaged in political activism
Several key faculties funded by Qatari endowments have taken public stands on contentious issues, expressing strong, anti-Western, anti-Israel, and pro-Palestinian activism, which permeates teaching and campus programming.
Dr. Daniel Neep is currently a Senior Fellow and Director of Publications at the Arab Center Washington DC and is no longer at Georgetown University.
In July of 2022, the University of Maryland received a $1.75 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to continue development of open-source technology to expand digital access to manuscripts and books from the premodern Islamicate world in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish and Urdu. Matthew Thomas Miller, assistant professor in the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, leads the interdisciplinary team of researchers:
“Over the past four years we have made incredible progress on the creation of digital infrastructure for Islamicate studies, and that is thanks in large part to the Mellon Foundation,” Miller said. “We are honored that the foundation continues to support our efforts to expand access to and digitally preserve such a rich and important cultural tradition.”
Funded through two grants from the Mellon Foundation, Phase One of the Open Islamicate Texts Initiative Arabic-script OCR Catalyst Project (OpenITI AOCP) was “the first undertaking of its kind to tackle the technical and organizational barriers that historically have stymied the development of Arabic-script OCR and digital text production for Islamicate Studies.” Mellon invested $1,749,722.00 from July 2022 to June 2025.
Phase II of OpenITI AOCP, in 2025, “brings together a highly interdisciplinary team of experts in Islamicate studies, digital humanities, and computer science to build textual resources for the digital study of the Islamicate world and transform open-source optical character (OCR)/handwritten textual recognition (HTR) technology for all languages. This project is led by investigators from the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies and Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland; Northeastern University’s (NU) NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks; University of California, San Diego; and the Centre for Digital Humanities at the Aga Khan University’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (London).”
In 2022, two faculty members at Syracuse University were recipients of a $500,000 Mellon grant for a project examining “Black-Arab Relationalities,” relevant to Muslim/Islamic studies, and “the impact of racism and discrimination on the interconnected histories and lived experiences of Arab and Black communities.” The grant included the study of racial politics in the United States. They are Dr. Carol Fadda and Dr. Dana Mohammed Olwan. (Query: Did any part of the project look at how Muslims in Africa sold blacks into slavery?]
Dr. Carol Fadda is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, signing a statement of BDS goals here. She has pushed for the academic boycott of Israel at Syracuse University. She has also defended disgraced antisemitic professor Steven Salaita who demonizes Israel and supports terrorists.
Dr. Dana Mohammed Olwan is an associate professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Syracuse, and is affiliated with the Middle Eastern Studies and the Native American and Indigenous Studies programs. She is also a staunch supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which she has attempted to link to the feminist cause. Olwan has also justified acts of Palestinian terrorism and incitement to violence against Israeli Jews.
Previously, in 2020, Olwan was awarded a Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders (MEFL) fund for a new research project in Palestine and Jordan. She was awarded the grant partly for her efforts in “building a more inclusive academic community” at Syracuse.
Dr. Dana Olwan, has used her position as an assistant professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Syracuse University (SU) to promote allegations against Israel and Zionism.
Olwan and Fadda both renounced their affiliation with the Middle Eastern Studies program after the inclusion of an “Israeli perspective” was required at an event.
In early 2024, following the massacre of Israelis by Palestinians/Hamas, there was a Teach-in for Palestine involving 315Students4Liberation and featuring as panelists none other than Syracuse’s activist professors, Fadda and Olwan, closely associated (one example here) with SU’s chapter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine.
At the teach-in, Fadda shockingly described the historical relationship between Israel and Palestine as an “ongoing genocide” of the Palestinian people. She believes Palestinians have been “under siege” by the Israeli government for the past 16 years leading up to Oct. 7, referring to the state of Palestine as the “largest open-air prison” and a “testing ground” for U.S. military technology.
During her teach-in presentation, Olwan said several Israeli state-enforced systems, such as its military checkpoints, are “routine forms of humiliation” intended to subjugate Palestinians in Gaza. She also said people should consider the “75-year history of Israeli settler colonialism” when discussing the current war and that “even non-violent resistance has been met with Israeli resistance.”
To add insult to injury, she spoke about “Palestinian women’s experiences of gender and sexual violence under Israeli settler colonialism” in 2024. There was no acknowledgement of the atrocities experienced by Israeli women.
Two additional professors who have let their extremism be known are Jemma DeCristo of UC-Davis and Russell Rickford, of Cornell. Both have received Mellon President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship grants, here and here. Rickford glorifies pro-Hamas terrorism, which he finds ‘exhilarating’.
DeCristo, a man posing as a black female and professor of American Studies, threatened Jewish journalists and their families who he suggested were spreading “misinformation.” His post on X read: “one group of ppl we have easy access to in the US is all these zionist journalists who spread propaganda and misinformation; they have houses w addresses, kids in school; they can fear their bosses but they should fear us more.” The last sentence was followed by emojis depicting a knife, an ax, and three droplets of blood.
- Why would Mellon Foundation sponsor a radical and violent political system whose main objective is conquering Western Civilization?
By Claudia Henneberry
July 2026
Part 2
A war is being waged for the soul of Western Civilization and the Foundation that advocates for “social justice” over the good, the true, and the beautiful, has chosen to fund that which is incompatible with the West – Islam.
According to Vince Coyner at the American Thinker, “From its very beginning, Islam was about conquering and conquest, through any means necessary, including deception…. At its very core, Islam is incompatible with Western civilization. It does not believe in freedom of speech. It does not believe in freedom of religion. Women are second-class citizens, and non-Muslim women fare even worse.”
Joel Richardson, in Chapter 15 of his book Will Islam Be Our Future?, writes “Islam views itself as the only true religion - indeed the only religion worthy to be practiced. As such Islam has as one of its goals, total world domination.”
Imtiaz Mahmood says, “The plan of Muslims is to exploit democracy in Western countries and get into positions of power. Once they seize enough power, they will implement Sharia. This is their grand plan for the Islamic takeover of the West. They say it openly.”
Craig Huey in My Christian Daily recently said, “Islam teaches that non-Muslims who do not convert to Islam and do not submit to Allah should be killed.”
And, according to Daniel Greenfield of Front Page Magazine, Muslims were able to kill over 200,000 people in 11 years – and got away with it - in the name of “tolerance”– and the international community insists on calling those genocides ‘decolonization’ because, they claim, Muslims are an oppressed minority.
Yet under the auspices of its social justice bent and $7.7 billion endowment, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has found a way to shoe-horn the study of Islam into its support for the humanities through various initiatives including grants for research and educational programs that explore Islam and Muslim communities globally. Supposedly, these grants satisfy Mellon’s objective to “elevate underrepresented perspectives in academia” as part of their Higher Learning grants.
So why would the prolific champion of the humanities, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, sponsor programs supporting a radical and violent political system whose main objective is conquering Western Civilization?
Mellon’s Key Initiatives and Grants for Islamic Programs
Some of the notable examples of the grants to colleges and universities, as well as examples of radical professors associated with the study of Islam or those who have received Mellon funding, are as follows:
Mellon gave grants in 2000, 2010, & 2012, to support a study for the feasibility of publishing digitally a multi-volume atlas that presents the social and intellectual history of the Islamic world, to the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. The total was $870,000.
The American University of Paris, Inc., received $100,000 for a program in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in March of 2007.
In 2008, Earlham College in Indiana got a $300,000 grant from Mellon to support the development of an Islamic Studies Program.
Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania was granted $670,000 in 2005 to support a program in modern Middle Eastern history and Islamic studies. The grant is to be shared between Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, and Haverford Colleges, assisting the three institutions in establishing the Tri-College Islamic/Middle Eastern Studies Initiative.
The president of Haverford College, Wendy Raymond, was berated by Republican lawmakers in a congressional hearing in 2025 on campus antisemitism. Lawmakers threatened to withhold federal funds from the College due to Raymond’s lack of detailing punishments for Haverford students and faculty accused of anti-Jewish bias.
In April of 2009, Lehigh University received a $1.4 million grant from the Mellon Foundation in support of an undergraduate program in global Islamic studies, the first step in establishing a new Center for Global Islamic Studies. Lehigh said the grant would “help heighten awareness surrounding Islamic culture and civilization.”
Following the horrific October 7, 2023 massacre of Israeli women, children, and families by Hamas, a Palestinian Islamic political and military organization, there were several hateful antisemitic incidents and a rally on Lehigh’s campus calling for the elimination of Israel. No punitive action was taken by the University leaving Jewish students in a “hostile antisemitic climate.” StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice and Alums for Campus Fairness were forced to send a legal demand letter to Lehigh University in 2024 requesting the administration take concrete steps to ensure the protection of its Jewish, Israeli and Zionist students.
The University of Chicago was given a $600,000 Mellon grant for an Islamic Studies Initiative in 2010. Subsequently, in 2013, the University received $800,000 more to “support further development of an Islamic studies initiative.” Through this grant, the Mellon Foundation was trying to raise “the profile of Islamic Studies on campus and firmly establish it as an interdisciplinary enterprise.”
Also associated with the University of Chicago is Noah Salomon, who earned his Ph. D. in Religious Studies from the University. He is currently a University of Virginia Associate Professor in Islamic Studies. Salomon received a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship in 2018 for the project “Thinking Islam across the Sunni-Shi‘i Divide: A New Approach to Islamic Studies.”
Saloman, was arrested in May of 2024 at the anti-Israel campus encampment at UVA. He had likewise signed an anti-Israel letter (#605), immediately following the October 7, 2023 massacre of Israelis, that ironically accused Israel of “genocide.”
Also affiliated with the U. of Chicago is an Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and current director of U. of Chicago’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Dr. Alireza Doostdar, who teaches courses on “liberatory violence” focusing on “Zionist settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid.” He is active in the Faculty for Justice in Palestine and supported anti-Israel encampments on campus. He was arrested during a “sit-in” protest in November 2023. Doostdar’s brother, Ahmadreza, was convicted with another Iranian in 2020 for spying on Iranian dissidents in California and Chicago.
In 2012, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded Duke University $750,000 to support the school's 10 international and area studies centers which includes the Duke Center for Islamic Studies.
The former director of the Duke Center for Islamic Studies, Dr. Omid Safi, faced repeated criticism from pro-Israel groups for harsh anti-Israel statements, equating Israeli actions to "war crimes," using Holocaust imagery in discussions of Palestinian issues (Holocaust inversion claims), and associations or rhetoric seen as excusing Palestinian "resistance." He has been revealed as an anti-Israel radical and an apologist for the Palestinian Hamas terror group and has “frequently described the worldwide Muslim community as one that is oppressed and marginalized.”
Also in 2012, Connecticut College was awarded a $100,000 planning grant by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a new program in Global Islamic Studies. “We are challenging preconceived notions and rethinking how we understand Muslims and the role of Islam in the world,” Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Director of Global Islamic Studies, Sufia Uddin, said at the time.
In 2018, Mellon renewed its support for Connecticut College’s Global Islamic Studies (GIS) Program to the tune of $806,000 “to continue to foster interdisciplinary study of Islam on a global scale.”
Connecticut College is “working to combat the narrative that Muslims are evil, violent, and only come from the Middle East.” The grant will help in adding faculty members to teach the courses. The College also partnered with Brown University to create a faculty exchange program with that institution’s Middle East Studies program. “Our partnerships should be with fields of study like Africana Studies, Latin American Studies, Native American studies– the struggles of other people who have been persecuted can help enlighten one’s own area,” Professor Sufia Uddin, former Director of GIS, expressed in 2018.
“Students come to Connecticut College and want to study, ‘why Muslims hate us’ or they say, ‘we have to do security studies because we are in conflict with Muslims and we must destroy them, or defeat them, or keep them contained. The language can vary from very blatantly racist and prejudicial to more subtle terms. We’re trying to undo that,” admitted Uddin.
“We’ve made it clear that what we want is to undo that knowledge construction … Mellon doesn’t just give money away. The grant represents a firm belief in what we’re doing– that what we’re doing is the right thing,” Professor Uddin confessed.
Mellon grants and radical professors will have a difficult time combating the “narrative” and the “knowledge construction” that ‘Muslims are evil and violent’ when the unforgivable barbaric horror of the October 7th massacre of Israelis is the norm. See up-to-date information on the Jihad & Terrorism Threat Monitor and Jihadis In Our Midst to decide what is true.
Ms. Uddin faced significant criticism for her role in the 2015 “Pessin Affair” where critics alleged that students (in consultation with her) misrepresented a Facebook post from Jewish professor Andrew Pessin comparing Hamas to a rabid dog during the 2014 Israel-Hamas conflict, leading to a cruel campaign against him. Uddin and students in her Global Islamic Studies program launched a mob attack against Professor Andrew Pessin, a popular philosophy professor.
Uddin is not alone in her GIS activism at Conn College. Associate professor of History and, yet, another former Director of Global Islamic Studies, Eileen Kane, recouped a $237,000 Mellon Foundation New Directions research fellowship in 2017.
A year earlier, Kane was embroiled in a scandal. Campus watch groups, faculty, and alumni have accused her of advising student groups like Conn Students in Solidarity with Palestine (CSSP) and their posting of materials labeling Birthright Israel as settler colonialism and “intimidated Jewish or pro-Israel students and faculty, while attempting to poison the minds of uninformed students and faculty with vicious falsehoods about Israel.”
Years later, in May of 2024, both Uddin and Kane signed a statement of solidarity with students and colleagues across the nation “who have been subjected to arrests, violence, and repression.” The statement echoed the national Faculty for Justice in Palestine’s despicable positions against Israel.
As of 2025, the student activist group CSSP that has ties to Kane’s Global Islamic Studies program, was still active and entirely aligned with Conn’s Muslim Students Association to support divestment and the College’s “acknowledgment of ongoing occupation and violence in Palestine.”
These cases of rogue professors stand out because Mellon funding directly supported the program’s creation and expansion.
The University of Michigan received $3 million in 2014 for the establishment of the Islamic Studies Virtual Curriculum, to develop and implement a collaborative, instructional program in Global Islamic Studies. Mellon’s grant is far-reaching, advancing its Islamic curriculum across all Big Ten universities. The Digital Islamic Studies Curriculum (DISC) at the University of Michigan’s Global Islamic Center, which is sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, aims to provide students with a global perspective on Islam and the Muslim world. They do this by coordinating Islamic studies courses through the Big Ten Alliance CourseShare program, which offers distance-learning courses to students at all member universities.
In 2024, “Motaz Azaiza, an award-winning Palestinian photojournalist from Gaza, spoke to about 1,700 University of Michigan students, faculty and community members” for the ninth annual Digital Islamic Studies Curriculum distinguished lecture. One of [DISC’s] goals is “to give a voice to Muslim communities being affected by current events,” an article said. The article went on to paraphrase DISC Director Pauline Jones as saying Azaiza was “the right choice for this year’s distinguished lecture because of how he has shed light on the ongoing violence in Gaza.” Jones said, “He is bringing to light a very horrific reality that Muslim communities are experiencing directly.”
Samer Ali, a former University of Michigan Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature, partook in a $225,000 Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar grant in 2022 for his work in connection with "The Africana Muslim and Genealogies of White Supremacy: Seminar for Interdisciplinary Study of Blackness and Muslimness". (Related information here.) Ali has accused the University of Michigan and Israel of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and called for Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions of Israel (BDS.) He complains of "white supremacy" legacies in Middle East studies/Orientalism and has been vocal on Palestine. His resignation letter, in 2025, proves his radical stance.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded a two-year grant of $350,000 in 2019 to UCLA to support a pilot project seeking to reframe how Middle Eastern studies are conceptualized and taught.
Dr. Daniel Neep, a political scientist specializing in the politics of Syria, received a Mellon’s New Directions Fellowship grant in 2021. Dr. Neep served as an American Druze Foundation Research Fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS).
Georgetown University established its campus in Qatar in 2005 and a continuing partnership with the Qatar Foundation whose funding affects faculty choices, research initiatives, and endowed chairs on the Washington, D.C., campus. The Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS), where Dr. Neep taught, along with Georgetown’s Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU), have become hubs for critical advocacy and political activism that is often co-sponsored by the Qatar campus. Qatar money has ushered in anti-Western and anti-Israel advocacy, with some faculty engaged in political activism
Several key faculties funded by Qatari endowments have taken public stands on contentious issues, expressing strong, anti-Western, anti-Israel, and pro-Palestinian activism, which permeates teaching and campus programming.
Dr. Daniel Neep is currently a Senior Fellow and Director of Publications at the Arab Center Washington DC and is no longer at Georgetown University.
In July of 2022, the University of Maryland received a $1.75 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to continue development of open-source technology to expand digital access to manuscripts and books from the premodern Islamicate world in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish and Urdu. Matthew Thomas Miller, assistant professor in the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, leads the interdisciplinary team of researchers:
“Over the past four years we have made incredible progress on the creation of digital infrastructure for Islamicate studies, and that is thanks in large part to the Mellon Foundation,” Miller said. “We are honored that the foundation continues to support our efforts to expand access to and digitally preserve such a rich and important cultural tradition.”
Funded through two grants from the Mellon Foundation, Phase One of the Open Islamicate Texts Initiative Arabic-script OCR Catalyst Project (OpenITI AOCP) was “the first undertaking of its kind to tackle the technical and organizational barriers that historically have stymied the development of Arabic-script OCR and digital text production for Islamicate Studies.” Mellon invested $1,749,722.00 from July 2022 to June 2025.
Phase II of OpenITI AOCP, in 2025, “brings together a highly interdisciplinary team of experts in Islamicate studies, digital humanities, and computer science to build textual resources for the digital study of the Islamicate world and transform open-source optical character (OCR)/handwritten textual recognition (HTR) technology for all languages. This project is led by investigators from the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies and Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland; Northeastern University’s (NU) NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks; University of California, San Diego; and the Centre for Digital Humanities at the Aga Khan University’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (London).”
In 2022, two faculty members at Syracuse University were recipients of a $500,000 Mellon grant for a project examining “Black-Arab Relationalities,” relevant to Muslim/Islamic studies, and “the impact of racism and discrimination on the interconnected histories and lived experiences of Arab and Black communities.” The grant included the study of racial politics in the United States. They are Dr. Carol Fadda and Dr. Dana Mohammed Olwan. (Query: Did any part of the project look at how Muslims in Africa sold blacks into slavery?]
Dr. Carol Fadda is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, signing a statement of BDS goals here. She has pushed for the academic boycott of Israel at Syracuse University. She has also defended disgraced antisemitic professor Steven Salaita who demonizes Israel and supports terrorists.
Dr. Dana Mohammed Olwan is an associate professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Syracuse, and is affiliated with the Middle Eastern Studies and the Native American and Indigenous Studies programs. She is also a staunch supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which she has attempted to link to the feminist cause. Olwan has also justified acts of Palestinian terrorism and incitement to violence against Israeli Jews.
Previously, in 2020, Olwan was awarded a Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders (MEFL) fund for a new research project in Palestine and Jordan. She was awarded the grant partly for her efforts in “building a more inclusive academic community” at Syracuse.
Dr. Dana Olwan, has used her position as an assistant professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Syracuse University (SU) to promote allegations against Israel and Zionism.
Olwan and Fadda both renounced their affiliation with the Middle Eastern Studies program after the inclusion of an “Israeli perspective” was required at an event.
In early 2024, following the massacre of Israelis by Palestinians/Hamas, there was a Teach-in for Palestine involving 315Students4Liberation and featuring as panelists none other than Syracuse’s activist professors, Fadda and Olwan, closely associated (one example here) with SU’s chapter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine.
At the teach-in, Fadda shockingly described the historical relationship between Israel and Palestine as an “ongoing genocide” of the Palestinian people. She believes Palestinians have been “under siege” by the Israeli government for the past 16 years leading up to Oct. 7, referring to the state of Palestine as the “largest open-air prison” and a “testing ground” for U.S. military technology.
During her teach-in presentation, Olwan said several Israeli state-enforced systems, such as its military checkpoints, are “routine forms of humiliation” intended to subjugate Palestinians in Gaza. She also said people should consider the “75-year history of Israeli settler colonialism” when discussing the current war and that “even non-violent resistance has been met with Israeli resistance.”
To add insult to injury, she spoke about “Palestinian women’s experiences of gender and sexual violence under Israeli settler colonialism” in 2024. There was no acknowledgement of the atrocities experienced by Israeli women.
Two additional professors who have let their extremism be known are Jemma DeCristo of UC-Davis and Russell Rickford, of Cornell. Both have received Mellon President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship grants, here and here. Rickford glorifies pro-Hamas terrorism, which he finds ‘exhilarating’.
DeCristo, a man posing as a black female and professor of American Studies, threatened Jewish journalists and their families who he suggested were spreading “misinformation.” His post on X read: “one group of ppl we have easy access to in the US is all these zionist journalists who spread propaganda and misinformation; they have houses w addresses, kids in school; they can fear their bosses but they should fear us more.” The last sentence was followed by emojis depicting a knife, an ax, and three droplets of blood.
DeCristo also wrote “HELL YEAH,” in response to a report that protesters had set fire to the Israeli embassy in Jordan. Reposting news of protests at the United States embassy in Lebanon, Decristo added, “[fire icon] to the US embassy. US out of everywhere. US GO HOME. US GO HOME.”
The Mellon Foundation is either clueless or intentional in its support of those who are aligned and affiliated with nefarious anti-Israel efforts, and those who are evidently trying to justify the atrocities of October 7.
When Mellon Money and Influence Become Governance, Not Philanthropy
“Sarah Lawrence College’s president, Cristle Collins Judd, arrived in 2017 directly from the Mellon Foundation, where she served as a senior program officer overseeing higher education and humanities scholarship. [At Mellon,] Judd helped decide who received Mellon’s money and on what terms.”
Judd’s relationship with Mellon did not end when she became president of Sarah Lawrence College. Mellon has directed roughly $2.8 million to Sarah Lawrence under Judd’s presidency. When Mellon’s influence shapes priorities, staffs leadership, and defines what counts as injustice and what does not, “philanthropy becomes governance.”
The following accounts define Sarah Lawrence College under the leadership of Mellon’s Cristle Collins Judd:
Mellon funding produced a leader who could not recognize antisemitism as a “justice” concern because it does not fit the framework of leftist leadership. Even Congress noticed the pro-Hamas terrorizing of Jewish students at Sarah Lawrence.
Whether Mellon’s funds are specifically conveyed upon professors or upon social justice initiatives at a school, its vast funding seems to sustain rich environments where antisemitism is allowed to percolate and fester.
Ties to CAIR
Anti-Israel agitators who spread disruption at US colleges, some that have received Mellon funding, and were punished by authorities, were awarded checks for $1,000 by a Muslim nonprofit. The cash was awarded from a “Champions of Justice Fund”, set up by the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ (CAIR).
In October 2024, CAIR awarded $20,000 in loans and scholarships to 20 student protestors from the “Champions of Justice Fund”.
The identities of the student recipients have never been revealed, but the institutions they attended were in CAIR’s literature, and included Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. These universities have received substantial Mellon grants, here, here, and here with Columbia being the single biggest recipient of Mellon funding with a whopping $33.4 million.
Could it be that the Mellon Foundation gives grants to these schools to start Islamic programs, thereby paving the way for foreign and/or nefarious influences to take control of them?
Abbas Barzegar, a recipient of Mellon Foundation grants, directs multiple projects exploring the causes and consequences of anti-Muslim bigotry and Muslim engagement in contemporary American life. Barzegar is Founding Director of the Horizon Forum, term-member and past Director of Research and Advocacy at CAIR, Research Director for BAMI (Black American Muslim Internationalism Project) at George Mason University, and Aljazeera contributor,
The Mellon Foundation supported Abbas Barzegar's work on the Black American Muslim Internationalism (BAMI) Project that focuses on capturing the historical significance and legacy of the African-American Islamic tradition, aiming to advance public knowledge on race, justice, and religion in America. It is housed at the AbuSulayman Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University
Barzegar’s was co-author of Hijacked By Hate – American Philanthropy and the Islamophobia Network (2019), which promotes animus towards groups they deem as part of “the Islamophobia Network” defined in the executive summary as “a close-knit family of organizations and individuals that share an ideology of extreme anti-Muslim animus, and work with one another to negatively influence public opinion and government policy about Muslims and Islam.”
The Mellon Foundation is either clueless or intentional in its support of those who are aligned and affiliated with nefarious anti-Israel efforts, and those who are evidently trying to justify the atrocities of October 7.
When Mellon Money and Influence Become Governance, Not Philanthropy
“Sarah Lawrence College’s president, Cristle Collins Judd, arrived in 2017 directly from the Mellon Foundation, where she served as a senior program officer overseeing higher education and humanities scholarship. [At Mellon,] Judd helped decide who received Mellon’s money and on what terms.”
Judd’s relationship with Mellon did not end when she became president of Sarah Lawrence College. Mellon has directed roughly $2.8 million to Sarah Lawrence under Judd’s presidency. When Mellon’s influence shapes priorities, staffs leadership, and defines what counts as injustice and what does not, “philanthropy becomes governance.”
The following accounts define Sarah Lawrence College under the leadership of Mellon’s Cristle Collins Judd:
- Two days after the worst attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust, on October 7, 2023, by Hamas, the Islamic militant group, Sarah Lawrence’s DEI director called for Jewish students on campus to participate in a “Solidarity With Palestine” event sponsored by Students for Justice in Palestine, the group that celebrated the massacre - a hateful slap in the face for Jewish students who looked to their institution for basic acknowledgment of the massacre, and protection!
- April 2024 - the college’s SJP chapter—which had visibly celebrated the October 7 atrocities—received the school’s Group Excellence Award at the college’s Annual Leadership Awards ceremony, which is given under administrative oversight. President Judd proudly shared the award on her social media here.
- November 2024 – “masked students seized the main administrative building, distributing materials glorifying Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and declaring they had ‘answered Hamas’s call.’” The administration yielded to protesters’ demands rather than enforce its own conduct code. (More here.) Hillel International’s president later described the environment for Jewish students at Sarah Lawrence as “among the worst we’ve seen.”
- January 2026 – Graffiti appeared labeling Ezra Klein, a Jewish journalist, a “Zionist pig” and a banner termed him a “Nazi normalizer”. At a campus event featuring Klein, organized disruptions created an atmosphere of intimidation. “Masked protesters held a banner reading “Nazi” at audience members and chanted “Sarah Lawrence, we know you—you protect Zionist Jews.” (More here.) Judd sat on the stage and did not intervene. When the protesters finally left, she turned to Klein and minimized the entire episode, uttering, “Welcome to Sarah Lawrence College.”
Mellon funding produced a leader who could not recognize antisemitism as a “justice” concern because it does not fit the framework of leftist leadership. Even Congress noticed the pro-Hamas terrorizing of Jewish students at Sarah Lawrence.
Whether Mellon’s funds are specifically conveyed upon professors or upon social justice initiatives at a school, its vast funding seems to sustain rich environments where antisemitism is allowed to percolate and fester.
Ties to CAIR
Anti-Israel agitators who spread disruption at US colleges, some that have received Mellon funding, and were punished by authorities, were awarded checks for $1,000 by a Muslim nonprofit. The cash was awarded from a “Champions of Justice Fund”, set up by the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ (CAIR).
In October 2024, CAIR awarded $20,000 in loans and scholarships to 20 student protestors from the “Champions of Justice Fund”.
The identities of the student recipients have never been revealed, but the institutions they attended were in CAIR’s literature, and included Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. These universities have received substantial Mellon grants, here, here, and here with Columbia being the single biggest recipient of Mellon funding with a whopping $33.4 million.
Could it be that the Mellon Foundation gives grants to these schools to start Islamic programs, thereby paving the way for foreign and/or nefarious influences to take control of them?
Abbas Barzegar, a recipient of Mellon Foundation grants, directs multiple projects exploring the causes and consequences of anti-Muslim bigotry and Muslim engagement in contemporary American life. Barzegar is Founding Director of the Horizon Forum, term-member and past Director of Research and Advocacy at CAIR, Research Director for BAMI (Black American Muslim Internationalism Project) at George Mason University, and Aljazeera contributor,
The Mellon Foundation supported Abbas Barzegar's work on the Black American Muslim Internationalism (BAMI) Project that focuses on capturing the historical significance and legacy of the African-American Islamic tradition, aiming to advance public knowledge on race, justice, and religion in America. It is housed at the AbuSulayman Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University
Barzegar’s was co-author of Hijacked By Hate – American Philanthropy and the Islamophobia Network (2019), which promotes animus towards groups they deem as part of “the Islamophobia Network” defined in the executive summary as “a close-knit family of organizations and individuals that share an ideology of extreme anti-Muslim animus, and work with one another to negatively influence public opinion and government policy about Muslims and Islam.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) “is a large and prominent advocacy organization for Muslims in the United States. Throughout its history, CAIR has been suspected of supporting Islamic political movements, especially the Muslim Brotherhood.” Based on documented ties, some observers call CAIR ‘Hamas in America’.
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Recent activity concerning CAIR:
In 2019, when President Trump designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, Barzegar said "The Muslim Brotherhood is simply a social movement. It is simply an 80-year-old network of organisations and ideas that are very different and very vast," he told MEE (Middle East Eye). "We will fight back. We will fight back in the media. We will fight back in politics. And we will defend ourselves according to the constitution of the United States," he went on to say.
Claims that CAIR is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood are false, stressed Barzegar, who said the accusation is intended to stoke Islamophobia. Also in 2019, Dr. Barzegar launched the “After Malcolm [X] Digital Archive” with George Mason University’s Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies.
Why would the Mellon Foundation choose to support the work of a Director for Research and Advocacy of an organization with links to terror and that has been designated a terrorist organization itself, here, here, here, and here?
CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood are interchangeable, and, like Mellon Foundation grants, the Muslim Brotherhood is all over college campuses. The Mellon Foundation does not disappoint when it comes to bankrolling those who are aligned and affiliated with nefarious anti-Israel and anti-American movements and organizations.
- 2014 – CAIR was designated a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates due to its alleged ties to the Muslim Brotherhood
- At least five individuals connected to CAIR as employees and local chapter board members have been arrested, convicted, deported, or otherwise linked to terrorism-related charges and activities
- 2023 - CAIR executive director Nihad Awad spoke at an event for American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) praising the Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel on October 7, 2023
- 2024 – came out against stripping tax-exempt status of any nonprofits identified as supporting terrorist organizations
- CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in 2007 in the Holy Land Foundation federal court case related to terrorism financing and has since become a leading force in the pro-Hamas campus movement that erupted after Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attacks
- Congressman Chip Roy (R-TX) introduced the Designating Hamas Affiliates in America Act of 2026 to categorize the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Organization
In 2019, when President Trump designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, Barzegar said "The Muslim Brotherhood is simply a social movement. It is simply an 80-year-old network of organisations and ideas that are very different and very vast," he told MEE (Middle East Eye). "We will fight back. We will fight back in the media. We will fight back in politics. And we will defend ourselves according to the constitution of the United States," he went on to say.
Claims that CAIR is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood are false, stressed Barzegar, who said the accusation is intended to stoke Islamophobia. Also in 2019, Dr. Barzegar launched the “After Malcolm [X] Digital Archive” with George Mason University’s Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies.
Why would the Mellon Foundation choose to support the work of a Director for Research and Advocacy of an organization with links to terror and that has been designated a terrorist organization itself, here, here, here, and here?
CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood are interchangeable, and, like Mellon Foundation grants, the Muslim Brotherhood is all over college campuses. The Mellon Foundation does not disappoint when it comes to bankrolling those who are aligned and affiliated with nefarious anti-Israel and anti-American movements and organizations.