Faisal Al Mutar has been appointed to the Advisory Board of the Antisemitism Research Initiative (ARI) at The George Washington University.
ARI operates within GW’s Program on Extremism and focuses on the study of contemporary antisemitism and its links to extremist ideology and democratic erosion. The Advisory Board convenes senior scholars, policy experts, and civil society leaders to shape its research and strategic direction.
Faisal joins the board after years of leading direct interventions in Arabic-language discourse.
In much of the Arab world, antisemitic narratives circulate openly in media, classrooms, and digital platforms. For years, IBB has addressed that environment directly. Through Bayt al-Hikma 2.0 and Bel Arabi, we translate historical records, document erased Jewish communities, and produce original media that challenges conspiracy thinking and collective blame.
In 2025, IBB translated more than 109 Arabic Wikipedia articles, reaching over two million readers. These entries covered the history of antisemitism, the Holocaust, the Jewish diaspora, and the Jewish exodus from Arab countries — material rarely accessible in Arabic.
Our video productions have reached tens of millions:
- A profile of Dr. Raymond Schinazi, the Egyptian-Jewish scientist behind breakthrough hepatitis C treatments, viewed over 10 million times.
- A documentary on Henri Curiel and Arab-Jewish political coexistence, viewed more than four million times.
- The story of Dr. Mohamed Helmy, the Egyptian physician who saved a Jewish teenager during the Holocaust, viewed more than 1.1 million times.
- “Untold Stories: The Jewish Community of Iraq,” documenting the near-erasure of a once thriving community.
IBB also translated Bari Weiss’s How to Fight Anti-Semitism into Arabic, expanding access to contemporary scholarship on modern antisemitism and liberal democratic values.
“Antisemitism is not a marginal issue,” Faisal said. “It corrodes democratic culture and normalizes dehumanization. Confronting it is part of defending pluralism itself.”
This appointment recognizes work IBB has already been doing for years: bringing evidence, history, and principled argument into one of the region’s most contested conversations.
We welcome the launch of the Antisemitism Research Initiative’s Advisory Board and will support research that confronts antisemitism with rigor and intellectual seriousness.
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