Free Republic

A Jihad Watch reader attended the Georgetown University presentation on “Islamophobia” last week and kindly sent in this report. I wrote about this presentation here before it happened, saying that it would not be a true academic inquiry, amassing the facts and training the student to make an informed judgment, but an exercise in propaganda, attempting to manipulate attendees into holding certain opinions and skewing the presentation to ensure that those opinions would be the only ones anyone could come away with. This report shows that that was indeed what it was, with professors Daniel Varisco and John Esposito openly...

WASHINGTON, May 14, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The Archdiocese of Washington has weighed in on Georgetown University’s invitation of U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius as a commencement speaker in clear terms, saying that the school has unmoored itself from Catholic identity and chosen a stance against the country’s Catholic bishops. Secretary Sebelius is the primary figure behind the HHS mandate forcing religious groups to provide free sterilizations, abortifacient drugs, and other forms of birth control to employees under the new health care law. She is also known for her extreme pro-abortion record, most notably her close ties with...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate Republicans blocked another of President Barack Obama's picks for one of the nation's top courts on Tuesday, the latest skirmish in a nominations battle that has intensified partisan tensions in the chamber. The vote derailed Obama's selection of Georgetown University law professor Cornelia Pillard to fill one of three vacancies on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The roll call was 56-41 in favor of ending GOP procedural delays that have blocked Pillard from winning confirmation — four short of the 60 votes Democrats needed.

Ignore, for a moment, the pea soup. Forget the head swivel, the crucifix, those 75 stone steps that tumble from Prospect to M Street. Forget that demonic voice and what your mother may or may not be doing in Hell. The creator of the scariest movie of all time would like very much if you’d remember that he wrote the Peter Sellers caper “A Shot in the Dark,” that his early collaborator in Hollywood was the comedy director Blake Edwards, that an esteemed book critic once wrote that “Nobody can write funnier lines than William Peter Blatty.” This career in...

WASHINGTON, D.C., October 25, 2013 (Cardinal Newman Society) - A class at Georgetown University’s law school scheduled for next semester will have students working with a pro-abortion rights advocacy organization, taught by that organization’s senior counsel, Kelli Garcia. Garcia, a radical pro-abortion rights lawyer, wrote the poem titled, “Planned Parenthood, Why Do I Love Thee?” in 2011. The poem was part of a larger effort by Garcia and her group to halt the potential defunding of Planned Parenthood, which is the nation’s largest abortion provider. The Georgetown law class, titled Regulatory Advocacy: Women and the Affordable Care Act, will have...

REP. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN (D-Md.) told an audience at a Georgetown symposium today that he is confident the immigration bill the Senate passed in June has enough bipartisan support in the House of Representatives. “In the House, in my judgment, that bill would actually pass today if you put it up for a vote,” he said. “In fact, I don’t think there is much dispute over that fact.” Van Hollen and former Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) were part of the “Implementing Immigration Reform: Imagining the Possibilities” symposium, co-hosted by Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM) and Deloitte....

Elizabeth O’Bagy is listed as a Political Director for the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF) in the group’s Washington, D.C. office. SETF lobbies Congress on behalf of the Syrian rebels. During a Senate hearing this week, Senator John McCain, perhaps the most vocal supporter of the Syrian rebels in Congress, pointed to an op-ed by the twenty-six year-old O’Bagy that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on August 30th. He then asked Secretary of State John Kerry, who agrees with him, if O’Bagy’s assertions were correct... *snip* Georgetown University is under the very strong influence of Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin...

Not a single person showed up at the Georgetown waterfront Tuesday for a climate change agenda event put on by Organizing for Action, the shadowy nonprofit advocacy group born out of President Obama’s 2012 campaign, the NRCC wrote in its blog.The event page for the “Climate Change Day of Action Rally” disappeared after rainy weather appeared to drive away whatever people planned to attend. The embarrassing showing follows the news that only one volunteer stayed for an OFA Obamacare event in Centreville, Va., last week to work the phones: ZERO PEOPLE at the OFA rally at the Georgetown Waterfront this...

A Georgetown University student blamed the Republicans for allowing student loan rates to double, while another said that all Republicans should be put to death.Campus Reform interviewed Georgetown students about their thoughts on student-loan reform and the GOP in general. One student gave a startling answer when asked whether he supported the Republican plan.“I don’t think I support anything the Republicans do,” he said. “I think all of them should probably be put to death.” Another student, who was watching the interview, chimed in with, “That was a little harsh.”Off camera, the first student said, “No, it wasn’t.”Another student complained...

On Tuesday, Georgetown University Professor Michael Eric Dyson told MSNBC’s Martin Bashir that he believes, if the racial distinctions were reversed in the case against George Zimmerman for the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin, the public’s reaction to the cases would be dramatically different. He added that the “George Zimmermans of the world continue to get away” with “the killing of our children” without facing justice. Dyson began by lamenting the course of court proceedings in which, he said, Martin was “dying again the death of a thousand qualifications, which is what our legal system is about.” “I don’t have...

“With all of the people struggling so hard to preserve freedom of religion, and with all that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has said in defense of this important value, Georgetown's choice of the architect of the radical challenge of such freedom for special recognition can only be seen as a statement of where the university stands - certainly not with the Catholic bishops.” Blatty said that the university’s stubborn support for Sebelius was “the last straw” for him. “Commencement speakers generally give advice to graduates on how to live their lives,” Blatty said. “[Georgetown] wants advice on...

Jesuit split over Israel may result in a Vatican showdown. Every time I a new pope is elected, the Amen corner goes into full swing as if every Pope is automatically the perfect choice. I can understand that. Catholics are naturally excited to have a new leader with a bright future, and few are willing to criticize a new religious leader despite knowing nothing about him. I am not going to criticize the new Pope, but I do have concerns about the possible direction of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis at the helm, and the future of the Church’s...

Senator Ted Cruz grilled Obama defense chief nominee Chuck Hagel over his controversial appearance on Al Jazeera, the Arab propaganda channel, during which the former Republican Senator had agreed with a viewer that the United States was a "bully" in global affairs. It has now been revealed that the government of Qatar, which owns Al Jazeera, was a major contributor to the Atlantic Council when Hagel was its chairman. But Hagel also has an Al Jazeera connection through Georgetown University, where he is a professor, and which maintains a campus in Qatar.

A law professor from Georgetown University, Louis Michael Seidman, went on CBS TV and said we should give up on the Constitution: I’ve got a simple idea: Let’s give up on the Constitution. . . . This is our country. We live in it, and we have a right to the kind of country we want. We would not allow the French or the United Nations to rule us, and neither should we allow people who died over two centuries ago and knew nothing of our country as it exists today. If we are to take back our own country,...

Georgetown University constitutional law professor Louis Michael Seidman has just about had it with the focus of his 40 years of academic study. As he writes in the New York Times on Monday, it is the Constitution itself which has allowed for the series of legislative follies that finally resulted in the “fiscal cliff.” Seidman says that it is time for Americans to realize what lawmakers have known since the constitution’s inception – it is okay to ignore it. “As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government...

Until recently, Americans were used to hearing about threats to religious freedom in other countries. “From the end of World War II, for about 50 years, our understanding of religious liberty was relatively stable,” Notre Dame professor Gerard Bradley said in a Georgetown University seminar on October 24, 2012. “Our understanding was that the greatest threat to religious liberty was public authority. But somewhere around the turn of the millennium, that changed.” “At around this time, what has previously been thought of as a canonical definition of religious freedom turned into a relativistic one,” Bradley said. “There are two kinds...

Archbishop Gomez LOS ANGELES, September 14, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A priest who helped found a gay ‘marriage’ advocacy group for Catholics has been suspended from distributing the sacraments or representing himself publicly as a cleric by his bishop. The National Catholic Register reported Monday that Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles had spoken to Rev. Joseph Palacios, co-founder of “Catholics for Equality” (CFE), a small group created two years ago with strong connections to the Human Rights Campaign. Palacios described the purpose of his outreach at Princeton University in February 2011, where he called the Church’s faithful the key target...

Ninety professors from Georgetown have gone public with a letter attacking Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s budget proposal but the bill of particulars in the missive does not match up to the content of his plan. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., chairs the U. S. House Budget Committee. “Cuts to anti-hunger programs have devastating consequences,” they wrote. “Last year, one in six Americans lived below the official poverty level and over 46 million Americans – almost half of them children – used food stamps for basic nutrition. We also know how cuts in Pell Grants will make it difficult for low-income...

William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel The Exorcist—which went on to become an Oscar-winning movie—depicts an epic battle of good versus evil waged under the auspices of the Catholic Church. Reportedly based on a real exorcism Blatty heard about as an undergraduate on a scholarship at Georgetown University, the novel is steeped in Catholicism. Indeed, the “hero” of The Exorcist is the fictional Father Damien Karras, a Georgetown Jesuit, who, at great personal cost, drives out the demon. Now Blatty, a longtime financial contributor to his alma mater, says that Georgetown is no longer true to the Catholic identity he knew...

The author of best-selling novel “The Exorcist” says he plans to sue alma mater Georgetown University in a Vatican court after the Catholic school invited Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to speak on campus. The author, William Peter Blatty, says the Jesuit-founded university in Washington has for the past two decades invited speakers who support abortion rights and has refused to comply with orders by the late Pope John Paul II for church-affiliated colleges and universities. The “last straw” was the university allowing students to invite Sebelius to speak May 18, considering she was instrumental in helping President...