Georgetown University is investigating a student organization’s plans to host a terrorist at its Washington, D.C. law school who was involved in the murder of an Israeli woman.
Georgetown Law Students for Justice in Palestine (LSJP) postponed its event slated for Tuesday honoring a convicted member of a Palestinian terrorist group amid “serious safety and security concerns,” the university told Jewish Insider. The student group has remained silent about the university’s probe and widespread outrage, instead blaming the cancellation on campus closures due to incoming snowy weather.
“Due to inclement weather, we expect the law school to close on Tuesday, Feb. 11,” reads a Monday Instagram post from LSJP, one day after the university notified the group that it was investigating the planned gathering. “Because of campus closure, we will not be able to hold our event that day.”
An anti-Israel student group under investigation by Georgetown University says it is cancelling an event featuring a convicted terrorist “due to inclement weather” on Monday, Feb. 10, 2025. (Instagram)
LSJP’s scheduled speaker, Ribhi Karajah, is a U.S. citizen who served three years in Israeli prison for his role in a bombing in the West Bank that killed a 19-year-old Israeli woman and injured her family members in 2019. LSJP lauded Karajah as a “student activist and former political prisoner” when announcing his talk in an Instagram post that it has since deleted.
LSJP did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Karajah was a member of the terrorist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in 2019, knew about its plans for the West Bank bombing and allowed it to happen, Israeli authorities found.
Georgetown’s law school did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Government officials and students, however, questioned the private university’s initial choice to schedule the event before news broke of its investigation.
“@GeorgetownLaw is allowing its radical SJP chapter to host a convicted terrorist at an event this month,” the House Education and Workforce Committee said in a Thursday X post. “In 2022, Georgetown Law launched an inquisition into [former law professor Ilya Shapiro] over a tweet.”
The post referenced the law school’s 2022 investigation into a tweet from Shapiro that criticized former President Joe Biden’s choice to appoint Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court because she is black. Shapiro resigned later that year over what he called a “hostile work environment” at the school due to his conservative views.
“Why is Georgetown okay with a terrorist, but not a conservative legal scholar?” the House committee wrote.
Shapiro told the DCNF that if Georgetown goes through with the event, it could lead to “legal repercussions” under federal law, which bans providing material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization. The Manhattan Institute senior fellow rejected the idea of hosting Karajah on the grounds of free speech.
“Hate speech and lies are protected both by the First Amendment and Georgetown free speech policy,” Shapiro said. “Deciding not to act as a PR agent for a terrorist is different from censoring offensive speech.”
“It’s a very different case from mine, where of course nobody accused me of committing any crimes,” Shapiro told the DCNF.
The Jewish group Georgetown Law Zionists called it “deeply troubling” that the institution “would allow a convicted terrorist to speak on campus under the guise of academic discussion.”
“Karajah’s presence does not promote free inquiry; it normalizes violence and gives legitimacy to those who seek to undermine fundamental human rights,” the organization said in a Thursday statement.
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