Six days after America marks 25 years since Islamic terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 people on September 11, 2001, George Washington University in Washington, D.C. will open its doors to a two-day conference dedicated to the proposition that the real villain of the last quarter century is the United States, and that jihadists and their sympathizers around the world are the real victims of 9/11.
The event, titled “Weekend of Resistance: 25 Years Of The War On Terror,” is scheduled for September 17 and 18 at GW’s Elliott School of International Affairs, a few blocks from the White House. It is organized by a group called the Muslim Counterpublics Lab, and is being co-sponsored by GW’s own Institute for Middle East Studies, whose director, Dr. Melani McAlister, is slated to deliver the opening remarks alongside the Lab’s founder, Dr. Maha Hilal.
The organizers are not subtle about their purpose. According to the conference’s own description, the goal is to “imagine a future where infrastructure of the War on Terror is finally abolished” and to “demand accountability, justice and reparations.” The United States, in their telling, deploys “Islamophobia and xenophobia” to “manufacture consent” for “campaigns of ethnic cleansing, genocide, occupation, and extractivism.” A lunchtime panel is titled “State Violence by Design: Anti-Indigenous Racism, Anti-Blackness and the Historical Legacy of Amerikkka.” Another is called “Who’s the Terrorist?”
There’s not a single word on the conference website about the men, women and children who were incinerated in the Twin Towers, crushed at the Pentagon, or who fought back the hijackers over a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The “About” page mentions September 11 exactly once, as the date nine days before President Bush “gave a speech to Congress announcing the launch of the War on Terror.” The 2,977 people murdered by al-Qaeda that morning do not exist in this conference’s universe. The only victims the organizers intend to “mourn and remember” are what they call “the millions of victims of the War on Terror.”
Then there is the lineup.
Friday morning’s centerpiece is a plenary titled “We Refuse to Be Silent: Testimonies of Survivors and Political Prisoners Post 9/11.” The “survivors” GW is putting on stage include Mansoor Adayfi, who spent more than 14 years in Guantanamo Bay before being transferred to Serbia in 2016 and who now works as the “Guantanamo Project coordinator” for CAGE, the British advocacy group whose research director infamously described ISIS executioner “Jihadi John” as “a beautiful young man.”
Sharing the stage with him is Nida Abu Baker, whose conference bio explains that her advocacy began with “the unjust incarceration of her father, Shukri Abu Baker of the Holy Land Five.” Shukri Abu Baker was the CEO of the Holy Land Foundation, which a federal jury in Dallas found had funneled more than $12 million to Hamas. He was sentenced to 65 years in federal prison in 2009 in what remains the largest terrorism financing prosecution in American history.
Also on the panel: Mariam Abu-Ali, a Northern Virginia native and Georgetown graduate who has spent years writing about her brother Ahmed, whom she calls “a US political prisoner.” Her brother is Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, who was convicted in 2005 of joining an al-Qaeda cell in Saudi Arabia and conspiring to assassinate President George W. Bush. He is serving life in prison at the federal Supermax in Colorado. GW is presenting his sister to its students as a “survivor.”
The conference’s closing plenary features Kairi Al-Amin, whose bio proudly identifies him as the son of “Imam Jamil Al-Amin fka H. Rap Brown.” Jamil Al-Amin was convicted in 2002 of murdering Fulton County Sheriff’s Deputy Ricky Kinchen, who was shot while trying to serve a warrant. Al-Amin died in federal prison last November. His son’s bio describes the case as “the unlawful but complete destruction of an innocent man.”
The opening plenary is headlined by Alka Pradhan, the defense lawyer for Ammar al-Baluchi, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s nephew and one of the five men charged at Guantanamo with plotting the September 11 attacks. She will be joined by Baher Azmy of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who represents Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University agitator the Trump administration moved to deport. Other panelists include Steve Downs, co-founder of the Coalition for Civil Freedoms, an organization that advocates on behalf of people convicted in federal terrorism cases, and a “Movement Attorney” from Project South moderating a session on “Palestine” that describes Israel as a “settler state” carrying out “genocide.”
This is who George Washington University has decided to platform just days after 9/11 in the same month our nation relives burying its dead for the 25th time.
The Muslim Counterpublics Lab founded in 2022 by Hilal, describes itself as a “radical discursive space focused on combating systems of oppression rooted in Islamophobia.” Hilal is the author of a book called Innocent Until Proven Muslim, the title of which is also the name of Friday morning’s opening session. The Lab has called for dismantling the Department of Homeland Security and defunding ICE and Customs and Border Protection, and Hilal has compared Israel’s response to the October 7 Hamas massacre to America’s response to 9/11, calling both a pretext for “genocidal war.” This is not a scholarly institute. It is a jihadist and communist activist machine whose founding premise is that the American response to the deadliest terrorist attack on US soil was the real crime.
GW has a long history of promoting and platforming Islamic jihadists and their supporters. In 2001, the same year al-Qaeda struck, Anwar al-Awlaki was a part-time doctoral student at GW’s Graduate School of Education and served as an assistant to the university’s Muslim chaplain on its Interfaith Board of Chaplains, a fact GW’s own spokeswoman confirmed to the student newspaper in 2010. His education was funded, in part, by USAID. Awlaki, who the 9/11 Commission found had contact with two of the hijackers at his Northern Virginia mosque, went on to become al-Qaeda’s most effective English-language recruiter, inspiring the Fort Hood shooter and the underwear bomber before he was killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2011. A quarter century later, GW is once again lending its campus and its name to people who believe the Islamic terrorists were the real victims of 9/11.
Jihadists find an open and engaged audience at GW. For three years, the university has been a showcase for the same ideology the conference will promote. In the fall of 2023, just weeks after October 7, GW students projected “Glory to our martyrs” onto the side of Gelman Library, the main campus library. In April 2024, protesters seized University Yard for two weeks, and a demonstrator was photographed holding a “final solution” banner. Over the following days they draped the statue of George Washington in a keffiyeh and Palestinian flags, projected “Long Live The Student Intifada” onto campus buildings, and chanted “Guillotine, guillotine” at the university’s president and provost by name. It took D.C. police, pepper spray and more than 30 arrests to clear them out at 3 a.m. on May 8, 2024.
Within hours of the belated raid, the school ringed University Yard with metal fencing, then barricaded Kogan Plaza and Anniversary Park as well, citing “heightened safety concerns related to the recent illegal demonstrations.” University Yard is the main campus Quad. In December 2024 GW replaced the temporary barriers with permanent fencing and gates, and administrators have locked those gates whenever a protest cropped up on campus, shutting the entire community out of the quad. GW’s own security page, since scrubbed, explained that fencing was “the most effective way to prevent large numbers of non-GW-affiliated demonstrators from joining an attempted encampment, living on GW property, and disrupting our university operations.” Student government passed a resolution begging for the fences to come down. Instead, this summer GW tore out the old fence and is installing a new, nicer one that “aesthetically integrates” with the campus, with the work due to finish in early August, just in time for the fall semester and this conference.
More than two years after the disgusting and embarrassing encampment, GW still has to fence its own students off their own quad, not to protect them from some outside threat, but to keep them and the outside agitators they invite in from reoccupying the campus and going back to intimidating Jewish classmates in the name of the “intifada”. That is the student body the Muslim Counterpublics Lab will be addressing when it explains how the “terrorism paradigm” is a tool of “Amerikkka” and that the families of convicted terrorists are the real victims.
GW does all of this while accepting massive federal funding – your tax dollars. The university reported $227 million in externally funded research in the 2023-24 academic year, much of it from federal agencies, on top of a $3.4 billion endowment.
On August 12, 2025, the Justice Department formally found that GW violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by acting with “deliberate indifference” toward antisemitic harassment of Jewish and Israeli students and faculty. “No one is above the law,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said at the time, “and universities that promulgate antisemitic discrimination will face legal consequences.”
While on notice from the Justice Department, GW’s administration thought it would be a good idea to co-sponsor an event that brands Israel a genocidal “settler state,” America as “Amerikkka,” and the families of convicted terrorists as survivors of American oppression. The Trump Administration should cut off every federal dollar flowing to George Washington University.
This isn’t the only event in the US that seems to celebrate the perpetrators of Islamic terror. As Loomer Unleashed reported last week, Muslim Michigan Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is throwing a “Mexican fiesta” themed campaign party on the 25th anniversary of 9/11 itself, and the Democrats’ entire midterm message has been about impeachment, communism and Islam.
Meanwhile, at Guantanamo Bay, a military judge ruled on August 29 that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s confessions to the FBI cannot be used against him, with the 9/11 mastermind’s trial not scheduled until 2028. Why hasn’t KSM been given the death penalty already?
Twenty-five years ago, Islamic terrorists flew planes into buildings full of Americans. This September, a university across the river from the Pentagon, next to the US Department of State, will host a conference whose organizers cannot bring themselves to mention it because they sympathize with and support Islamic jihad.
Never forget means never forget who carried out these Islamic terrorist attacks that murdered 3,000 Americans, and it means we must never forget who spent the next 25 years making excuses for them.
