Showing posts with label SFSU. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SFSU. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 28, 2020



San Francisco State University Professor Rabab Abdulhadi said in an interview that students who expressed concern and outrage over her decision to host known terrorist hijacker Leila Khaled were part of a “Jewish caucus” and “a Zionist agenda."

“The Zionist movement is quite strong, it has resources, it has networking,” Abdulhadi remarked in a YouTube interview with Steve Zeltzer, “so they pressure- and actually, some of the legislation, not all of them, but some of them, went along with them, led by the Jewish caucus, which is all Zionist agenda, it has a Zionist agenda.”

Abdulhadi claimed the outrage over her invitation to Khaled was manufactured by the “Israel Lobby Industry," and said opposition to her was “catering to donors, catering to the right-wing agenda and catering to Islamophobia.” Abdulhadi doubled down on her comments later on in the video, stating that the university president “only talked to Zionists, only talked to one brand.”

“The university is participating in a very discriminatory, racist, defamatory, smearing campaign by the Zionist bullies and their right-wing, neoliberal and wealthy allies,” Abdulhadi said. She also claimed the talk with Khaled was only canceled because of the university’s desire to retain wealthy Jewish donors, alleging the school's president told donors she would “crush the Palestinians” and “crush AMED studies.”
That last sentence is only the most obvious lie.

The interview, which was posted on September 22 before the Leila Khaled event was dropped by Zoom, shows that Abdulhadi has no concept of truth. She [13:07] accuses SFSU president Lynn Mahoney of publishing a piece in J Weekly that is "Islamophobic" - you can read it yourself and see that all she condemned was terrorism and didn't use the words Islam or Muslim once.

The interviewer Steve Zeltzer directly accused Israel of funding universities through American Jews to further its agenda, comparing it to China and Russia influence campaigns:

When we talk about influence - there's a big campaign, both Democrats and Republicans talking about the influence of China, the influence of Russia, yet it seems when it comes to Israel and Israeli funding of institutions in the United States and campaigns to target professors such as yourself and others who are critical of Israel, there doesn't seem to be a problem with that role of Israel in the United States and operating through Jewish community councils and others it seems like a double standard.
Abdulhadi enthusiastically agrees with this accusation, which goes beyond the dual-loyalty trope of American Jews - the accusation is that Israel is paying American Jews to be loyal to it above the US. 

This is today's antisemitism, and the only defense they use (as Abdulhadi does in this video) is the one that Jew-haters have used throughout the centuries: "Some of my best friends are Jewish."



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Wednesday, September 30, 2020

The International League of Peoples' Struggle is proud to present a webinar featuring Leila Khaled.


This October, the ILPS, its member organizations, country chapters, and allied networks will be launching a month-long campaign of Global Solidarity with the Palestinian People.

As part of the Month of Solidarity, the ILPS will deal with issues such as the recently announced Imperialist/Zionist annexation plan, the history of Israeli colonialism and apartheid, the rejection of agreements of humiliation and “normalization” between Zionism and some Arab countries, the global campaign to return to Palestine, support for the Intifada, the liberation of the Palestinian people, the unified capital of Palestine, the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine and so on.

We are inviting everyone to tune in to the launching of this campaign on OCTOBER 3, 11 PM Melbourne time. Our keynote speaker is no other than Palestinian woman activist Leila Khaled, from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
For some reason, no Zionists are trying to "censor" this event. In fact, no one really cares. The problem with Khaled is when respectable institutions give her respect.

Interestingly, San Francisco State University specifically told the organizers of their Khaled webcast not to mention the PFLP, under the pretense that she was speaking in a private capacity, in their attempt to avoid violating US anti-terrorism laws.  The ILPS, on the other hand, is proud to trumpet Khaled's active ties to terrorism.

In fact, the webinar registration form starts off with "The International League of Peoples’ Struggles (ILPS) stands in militant solidarity with the Palestinian people," leaving no doubt of their support of terror. To Khaled's fans, her terrorism and her support for violence is a feature, not a bug. 

It would be a shame if Zionists would treat this webinar the way that Israel-haters treat pro-Israel events, by disrupting it and putting the organizers on the defensive. But if something like that should happen, it would be amusing to see if the ILPS response would be one that supports free speech.  






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Friday, September 04, 2020

San Francisco State University will be hosting a Zoom event called “Whose Narratives? Gender, Justice and Resistance: A Conversation with Leila Khaled,” on September 23.

Leila Khaled, of course, is the PFLP terrorist who hijacked planes in 1969 and 1970. Her image with a machine gun is ubiquitous at lots of leftist rallies.


The PFLP, which she is still involved with, was behind the murder of 17-year old Rina Shnerb last year. 

But no progressive groups march with photos of Rina Shnerb. They fetishize female terrorists, not female Jewish victims of terror.

Khaled is not the only heroine of the progressive crowd. They love Rasmea Odeh, responsible for the murder of two people. Also a PFLP member, Odeh has admitted that she was involved in bombing attacks against civilians.  and fought to have photo-ops with her before she was deported from the US.

Odeh, a violent terrorist, was treated like a rock star by the supposedly anti-violent BDSers.




Palestinian "moderates" have been the originators of this mindset where female terrorists are role models. The Miftah NGO, which is headed by Hanan Ashrawi and is in the forefront of Palestinian feminism, has multiple articles in Arabic that praise female suicide bombers as role models - and they had English articles praising female suicide bombers as well before I exposed them.

Palestinian women have also participated in the resistance. As the conflict grew more intense and young men were recruited to carry out military operations against Israeli targets, several young women also decided to join the ranks of the resistance movement. In January 2002, 28-year-old nurse Wafa Idrees, detonated a bomb in Jerusalem’s Jaffa Street, killing one Israeli and injuring 150 others. She was also killed in the blast.

This marked the beginning of a string of Palestinian women dedicated to sacrificing their lives for the cause. Over the next two years, seven other women carried out similar operations, the most deadly of which was carried out by Hanadi Jaradat, a 29-year-old attorney from Jenin. Hanadi detonated explosives strapped to her body in a busy Haifa restaurant, killing 19 Israelis and injuring 50 others.
The "moderate" PLO has become a cult of sorts for Dalal Mughrabi, responsible for murdering 38 civilians. Numerous institutions are named after her and her likeness can be seen all over Palestinian towns. 

And "moderate" Jordan has been sheltering another celebrity female terrorist, Ahlam Tamimi, who murdered 15 civilians including seven children

It appears that the "progressive" Left in the West has embraced the idea of female terrorists as role models. It is this immoral and disgusting thinking that is behind a university effectively honoring a terrorist as if she can teach students something about life, and behind prominent American and European progressives literally embracing a murderer.




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Sunday, May 01, 2016



wong
San Francisco State University President, Leslie Wong, very much admires the General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS).

He even said that "GUPS is the very purpose of this great university."

The problem that president Wong has is that GUPS, while according to him representing the very purpose of SFSU, also incites violence against Jewish supporters of Israel, which is the great majority of the Jewish people.

Why would the president of a significant American university support a student organization that quite literally calls for the murder of Jews?

Let that question sink in for a second.

By going out of his way to compliment GUPS - an organization friendly with terrorists like plane-hijacker, Leila Khaled - Wong signals to Jewish people that inciting violent hatred toward us is acceptable to himself, and to SFSU, as a matter of "social justice."

The Context

Rates of violent anti-Semitism are dramatically rising around the United States and throughout Europe.

Jews are killed by jihadis in places like Paris or Marseilles or Malmo, while within Israel Junior-Jihadis are chasing after old ladies with knives and hand-axes.

Meanwhile, throughout the Muslim Middle East, imams and ayatollahs regularly teach their congregants that Jews are the children of orangutans and swine and screech to the heavens for our genocide.

They love to tell one another that butchering Jews is beautious within the heart of Allah.

Iran inches closer to an operable nuclear weapon that it has promised to use against Israel in order to bring about genocide and the progressive-left could hardly care less. In fact, the western-left generally blames anti-Semitic violence on the victims of that violence. Of course, such a scenario would also result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Arabs, but Tehran does not seem to particularly care and neither does its western supporters.

In Europe and the United States, the Red-Green Alliance between progressives and advocates for political Islam is flourishing. And the movement to Boycott, Divest from, and Sanction Israel (BDS) - supported by Wong if he supports GUPS - is seeking to undermine the viability of the tiny Jewish state by seeking to turn universities, corporations, governments, and NGOs against it and, therefore, against the Jewish people, more generally, in an effort to eventually bring down both the country and the well-being of the Jewish people.

Israel and the Rise of the Crybullies

Of course, it is in the universities that the crybullies (snowflakes) demand their "safe spaces" while refusing to allow Jewish students any such courtesy. They complain about "microaggressions" and "micro-rapes" - like commenting on a cute sweater - even while inciting deep hatred toward Jews in the most raw terms possible.

Anti-Semitic anti-Zionists incite hatred toward Jewish supporters of Israel, and Israeli Jews, via "the Palestinian narrative." The narrative depends upon defamation, unjust insinuations, and highly biased historical conclusions that leave the great Muslim majority in the Middle East, which represents perhaps the most successful and vicious political project in human history, as innocent victims among among the minority population that they have victimized.

This results in violence against Jews supported by western academic institutions as driven by their most hateful and racist students.

Enter the General Union Palestine Students (GUPS) and their patron saint, San Francisco State University President Leslie Wong.

As Dusty over at Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers reminds us:
The president of the organization, Mohammad Hammad posted a photo on his tumblr account, declaring "I seriously can not get over how much I love this blade. It is the sharpest thing I own and cuts through everything like butter and just holding it makes me want to stab an Israeli soldier.

San Francisco State University General Union of Palestinian students neither condemned Hammad's words, nor distanced themselves from them.

Why does SFSU continue to tolerate the intolerable?
Indeed. That is an exceedingly good question, although, as we have just learned via the video below, it is not that the SFSU tolerates the intolerable so much as it positively encourages the intolerable.

GUPS is a student organization that is calling directly for the murder of Jews and it is supported by the president of the university.

Check the video clip. Wong's relevant remarks begin around 18:20.




"I want to offer my personal congratulations to the student leadership of GUPS. They have been an inspiration for me. And they have helped me when I have to tell other community groups to mind their own business. GUPS is the very purpose of this great university."



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Saturday, June 20, 2015




profProfessor Andew Pessin is a Professor of Philosophy at Connecticut College.  He studied at Yale and earned a PhD at Columbia University.  He is the author of five books, including most recently Uncommon Sense: The Strangest Ideas From The Smartest Philosophers.  He is also friendly to the Jewish State of Israel and in opposition to political Islam for reasons having to do with social justice and human rights.

Professor Rabab Abdulhadi is an Associate Professor of Race and Resistance Studies at the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University.  She studied at Yale and earned a PhD from that university.  She is the author of many papers and a contributor and co-editor to the recent Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging (Gender, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East).  She is also unfriendly to the Jewish State of Israel and highly critical of Zionism for reasons having to do with social justice and human rights.

Both of these professors are sometimes thought of as controversial for reasons concerning the Arab-Israel conflict - although one is more the political activist than the other - and both were recently involved in difficulties within their respective universities over that conflict.

The difference is that while SFSU stood behind Professor Abdulhadi, Connecticut College was far less supportive of Professor Pessin.

The question is "why?"

Understanding the answer to that question depends upon not only understanding the specific differences between the two controversies, but also the ideological atmosphere within American academia concerning the Arab-Israel conflict.

The short answer is that Abdulhadi is highly critical of Israel during a period of rising anti-Semitic anti-Zionism in the West and, therefore - given this political moment - receives financial and moral backing in the academe.

Pessin, on the other hand, is highly critical of Hamas, an organization that calls specifically for the genocide of the Jewish people and he is, therefore, reviled as a "racist."

Let's dig into the specifics.

Professor Andrew Pessin

On August 11, 2014, during the midst of the Israeli military push-back, Operation Protective Edge, Pessin posted the following on his Facebook page as part of a larger discussion concerning Hamas and the other genocidally-inclined rocketeers in Gaza who had been giving little Israeli kids post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) over the course of the preceding years.


pessin
Pessin compared Hamas to a "rabid pit bull chained in a cage."

For this he was excoriated as a racist not only by hard-left students in organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine, but also by faculty.

The fact of the matter is that Pessin was referring to Hamas and other such violent Islamist organizations operating within Gaza.

The ironic thing is that it is not he who is conflating all Gazans with terrorists, but his allegedly "anti-racist" detractors who are doing so.

Pessin's Facebook page, above, needs to be understood within the larger conversation.

He was not referring to Palestinian-Arabs, nor Gazans, in general.  He was speaking quite specifically about the kinds of Islamists who call directly for the genocide of the Jews, as Hamas does in its charter, a document that is not quoted nearly enough, but reads in part:

Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious. It needs all sincere efforts. It is a step that inevitably should be followed by other steps. The Movement is but one squadron that should be supported by more and more squadrons from this vast Arab and Islamic world, until the enemy is vanquished and Allah's victory is realised.
 As David Bernstein writes in the Washington Post:

I have seen his previous Facebook posts on the Gaza war last Summer, and they are full of criticism of Hamas, and don’t say anything nasty about Palestinians more generally, suggesting that he was, in fact, referring to Hamas.
I have seen those Facebook posts, as well, and concur.


Professor Rabab Abdulhadi

Professor Abdulhadi's circumstances are a tad different and I have previously written about her and my disappointment with San Francisco State University.

Abdulhadi was the faculty adviser to the General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS) at a time when the SFSU president of that organization, Mohammed G. Hammad, took to social media in order to threaten violence against Jews.

As he held aloft blade in a "selfie," this is what he wrote:
I'm sitting here looking through pictures of that f—ing scum (name removed to protect the soldier) … Anyone who thinks there can be peace with animals like this is absolutely delusional, and the only ‘peace’ I’m interested in is the head of this f—ing scum on a plate, as well as the heads of all others like her, and all others who support the IDF. The Liberation of Palestine can only come through the destruction and decimation of this Israeli plague and it can’t possibly come soon enough.
otmnIt is not Abdulhadi's fault, of course, that some of her students want to kill Jews for political reasons.

She just happened to be standing nearby.

She was also the adviser to GUPS during the celebration of a mural to the late anti-Semitic professor, Edward Said, on that campus, wherein members of GUPS, and other student organizations, held aloft signs reading, "My heroes have always killed colonizers." 

Just who these "colonizers" in need of killing are is speculative, but I feel reasonably certain that when students associated with the General Union of Palestine Students hold up little signs calling for the murder of "colonizers" that they are not referring to the Amish.


How Connecticut College Responded to Pessin:

Pessin, as a consequence of opposing Hamas, was subject to a campaign of defamation that became international.  He was initially condemned as a "racist" or "Islamophobe" by a former student, Lamiya Khandaker who previously founded a branch of Students for Justice in Palestine at Brooklyn Technical High School and is quoted as saying:
I truly believe that if more American citizens gain more knowledge on this conflict, then we can pressure our government to do something, and if necessary, break our bond with Israel.
Break our bond with Israel.

Other students, following Khandaker's lead, wrote into the school newspaper that “Professor Pessin directly condoned the extermination of a people. A member of our community has called for the systematic abuse, killing, and hate of another people.”  As David Bernstein notes, writing in the Washington Post, such a charge is probably libelous.  If that is the case, it would also be actionable.

Pessin, however, probably just hoping that the non-controversy would go away so that he could do his actual work in peace, made the mistake of apologizing.

Bernstein tells us:
The result was an international controversy that included threats against Pessin and his family, knee-jerk reactions from academic departments throughout Connecticut College denouncing their colleague’s purported racism, denunciation without investigation by the usual suspects in the world of academic philosophy, and a school-sponsored “community conversation on free speech, equity and inclusion” that was so “inclusive” that the two Jewish students who spoke who criticized the Pessin witchhunt were, depending on the account, either booed or at least “met with derision.”
The Connecticut College history department, not wishing to be outdone by its own students, put out this note as a rebuke to Pessin, which reads in part:

To the Campus Community,

The history department would like to clearly state that we condemn speech filled with bigotry and hate particularly when that speech uses dehumanizing language and incites or celebrates violence and brutality. In response to the many events that transpired on campus prior to and during spring break regarding a Facebook post by a member of our faculty, we join the CCSRE in condemning hate speech.

How SFSU Responded to Abdulhadi:

While many people in the local Jewish community in California, most notably Tammi Benjamin of the AMCHA Initiative and "Dusty" at Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers, objected to this outrageous behavior of students under Abdulhadi's authority or tutelage, the university was largely indifferent to such concerns. Even Professor Fred Astren, the head of the Jewish Studies Department, could not rouse himself to condemn much of this in a public manner, although one presumes that he spoke up behind the scenes.

SFSU, nonetheless, funded a trip for Abdulhadi and a few select students to travel to the "Occupied Palestinian Territories" in order to meet with terrorist plane hijacker, Leila Khaled.  This visit was not merely an academic exercise for purposes of research.  It was a political trip among student activists with a professor who has a serious bone to pick with the Jewish people in the Middle East and who is not the least bit shy about buddying-up with violently inclined racists like Khaled.

In fact, SFSU even went so far as to reward Abdulhadi by agreeing to partner with An-Najah National University in Nablus which is probably the most anti-Israel / anti-Jewish university on the entire planet.  It was students at An-Najah who put together a "grotesque shrine" in celebration of the Sbarro pizza parlor massacre and which the Anti-Defamation League has referred to as a "greenhouse for martyrs." 

Abdulhadi, in gratitude to the university, wrote this:
Today San Francisco State University's All University Committee on International Programs unanimously voted to recommend that SF State formally collaborate with An-Najah National University in Nablus, Palestine. This is the first time that SFSU will collaborate with any university in a Palestinian, Arab or Muslim community.

I am proud, excited and grateful to my colleagues @ An-Najah. It is my honor to be working with you. Thank you Mira Nabulsi for your amazing help in writing and producing the proposal. Thank you Dean Kenneth Monteiro and the College of Ethnic Studies for your consistent and unwavering support.

At The End of the Day

The essential point is that San Francisco State University is standing behind a professor that normalizes terrorism and, ultimately, hatred toward Jews.  Connecticut College, on the other hand, both students and faculty, harassed a Jewish professor who opposes anti-Semitism and the spreading of political Islam.

The reason for this is not because of anything peculiar about either institution.

The real problem is not San Francisco State University, nor Connecticut College.  The problem is a rising atmosphere of hatred toward the Jewish State of Israel and, thus inevitably, toward the Jewish people, themselves, not only in Europe, but increasingly within the United States.

What we are witnessing, and what these two cases illustrate, is not merely a new phase of Jewish and Israeli relations to western academia and to western culture and civilization.  It is, in fact, a new phase in what it means to be "liberal" in the West today.

The western-left is passing down the toilet the very values of social justice and universal human rights that it claims to ground itself within.

The sympathies of western academia will go wherever the combined sensibilities of the professors and the students take it, but when it favors Hamas over the Jews in that part of the world it has forfeited any right to be considered "liberal."

By accepting political Islam it has also betrayed women in the Middle East, Gay people in the Middle East, and Christians in that part of the world.  It even has betrayed Muslims in the Middle East to the extent that Muslims are the primary victims of political Islam.

This little story of two professors in the Age of Obama is a story bigger than San Francisco State University and Connecticut College.

It encapsulates a moment of shifting political sands in which the very notion of universal human rights and social justice are being thrown aside in favor of a failing multicultural ideal.


Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.

Sorry, I posted this on the wrong day...

Sunday, October 12, 2014





Rabab AbdulhadiSan Francisco State University is probably not the most Israel-friendly university in the United States.

In truth, I feel quite confident in suggesting that the opposite is true.  Among SFSU faculty most hostile to Israel, however, is professor Rabab Abdulhadi of the ethnic studies department.

Back in the 1960s, the University of California in Berkeley had the reputation for being the most radical school on the west coast of the United States.  SFSU, however, was always more hard-core.  That is part of what I liked about the place when I was there in the late 90s.

A Warning to Parents:

The truth of the matter, unfortunately, is that any Jewish family would be well advised to keep their kids away from San Francisco State; that is unless they wish to expose them to malice, and potential violence, grounded in anti-Semitic anti-Zionism of the type promoted on campus by professor Abdulhadi.

Unless Jewish parents want their kids to be physically confronted over Israel, as were Jewish students when I was there, I very much recommend sending them to universities elsewhere... either that or make sure that they know how to fight.  Get them enrolled in Krav Maga classes, perhaps.  And make damn sure that they know something about the history of the Jews in the Middle East, and just why a Jewish State is necessary, before trundling them off to campus as idealistic freshmen.

This is the only reasonable conclusion that I can come to given the fact that SFSU funds student organizations, such as Abdulhadi's General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS), that calls for violence against us.  The reason that SFSU funds violent hatred toward Jews - which it clearly does when it funds GUPS - is because they believe that Israel may, in fact, be as awful as Abdulhadi claims that it is.

And lest anyone doubt that GUPS does, in fact, call for violence against Jews, this is the image currently at the very top of their Facebook page.


gups


Although the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre was a massacre of Arab Muslims by Lebanese Christians, anti-Semitic anti-Zionists at SFSU always blame the Jews.

The image obviously shows a masked man with a rifle being greeted as something of a hero by a poor Arab woman somewhere either in Gaza or in the disputed territories.  The message is clear.  GUPS favors organizations devoted to driving out Jewish sovereignty on historically Jewish land.

From my perspective this would be something akin to funding a student Klan organization because maybe the white majority in the nineteenth-century American south had a point.  This is a criticism, by the way, coming from GUPS left, not its right.  Jewish national liberation is as much a progressive value, or should be, as is Tibetan national liberation or Kurdish national liberation.


SFSU Faculty:

While Professor Fred Astren, the head of the Department of Jewish Studies, is responsible for simply watching too much of this go on during his tenure - although it is unclear to me what he can do to stop it - the main culprit at SFSU is his colleague, professor Abdulhadi of the Department of Ethnic Studies / Race and Resistance Studies and the Senior Scholar of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative, at the College of Ethnic Studies, San Francisco State University.

I kid you not.

fistAbdulhadi is a "post-colonial" Arab left-feminist academic from Yale who believes that Muslims in the Middle East have every right to murder Jews as a matter of "resistance" and, thus, as a matter of "social justice."

Administrators like Astren put up with this horrendous nonsense presumably due to an ethos of collegiality - or perhaps just due to desensitization over the years - but it is unclear to me why that should inhibit the rest of us from strenuously objecting.

In distinction, Abdulhadi is not the least bit interested in compromise.

There is, after all, no compromise with a bloody fist.

That image is a Palestinian-Arab flag and what it clearly represents, much like a Nazi swastika, is violence against Jews.  Ideologues can dress it up in the language of human rights all that they want, but we understand what it means.  It means hatred.  It is a bloody fist and until quite recently it held a prominent place on a web page associated with Abdulhadi, but she seems to have deleted it.  You cannot really blame the woman for removing that image - if she, in fact, did so - because she was also the faculty advisor to GUPS when the student president of that organization, Muhammad Hammad, made a "selfie" with a switch-blade calling for violence against the IDF.

She was also the faculty advisor to GUPS when they held aloft signs in front of SFSU's Malcolm X Plaza reading, "My heroes have always killed colonizers," by whom they meant Jewish people on historically Jewish land.  They may have meant that killing white people is joyous, also, but they certainly meant that killing Jews is so.

Subsequently, Tammi Benjamin's AMCHA Initiative, out of UC Santa Cruz, accused Abdulhadi of misuse of university funds during a recent trip to visit a number of terrorists in Gaza and the disputed territories, including the plane hijacker Leila Khaled, on the university's dime.  Abdulhadi sold this trip as a scholarly endeavor, but there is no question but that the lines between scholarship and political activism are exceedingly porous for this SFSU professor.  She is at least as much an activist as a scholar and, thus, the university essentially purchased the anti-Semitic anti-Zionism that Abdulhadi peddles.

San Francisco State backs Abdulhadi against Benjamin's charges of misuse of funding, having found those charges unwarranted.  What the university seems not to understand, however, is that for most of us the problem here is not one of faculty corruption - the problem is not that Abdulhadi is a crook - but of the spreading of hatred and violence toward Jews under guises of academic freedom and "universal human rights."

It is about the perversion of western liberal values in the service of totalitarian regimes and in opposition to the democratic State of Israel.

That is the point and that is the reason why so many of us object to the kind of malice that we saw last year on the SFSU campus.  You cannot pay student organizations to spit hatred at Jews and then contemptuously dismiss Jewish people who stand up for themselves.

Or I suppose that you can and certainly SFSU Dean of Ethnic Studies, Kenneth P. Monteiro did in an effort to deflect from the bigger picture.  In a rather ugly public letter concerning the AMCHA Initiative's interest in Abdulhadi, Monteiro writes:
The AMCHA Initiative has over many years expressed its support for the policies of the state of Israel and their disagreement with those who do not support those policies. Indeed, I firmly support their right to express their views.
This is false.  AMCHA is not about supporting Israeli policies.  AMCHA is about keeping an eye on the rise of anti-Semitic anti-Zionism in the academe and making people aware of its corrosive, if not violent, tendencies.  (Gil Troy, by the way, has some some words on the matter over at the Jerusalem Post.)

Monteiro writes:
AMCHA has publicly singled out one of our faculty, Professor Rabab Abdulhadi, for uniquely malicious bullying. Therefore I am compelled to repudiate their claims publicly. Make no mistake, Professor Abdulhadi has been and remains a valued colleague, scholar and teacher. She is a locally, nationally and internationally recognized and respected scholar/activist, who is the recipient of awards for the quality of her work. The claims made by AMCHA against her were investigated, as are all claims no matter the source, and those claims have been found false.
So, am I to understand that Monteiro disagrees that Abdulhadi was the advisor to GUPS when both its president and its regular student members called publicly for murder?  Because I am pretty sure that this is easily verifiable.

Is he claiming that Abdulhadi did not publish a bloody fist, indicating violence against Jews, on a website associated with her name?

Is he claiming that Abdulhadi did not recently visit with terrorists, including a plane hijacker that is considered a hero to many of Abdulhadi's students?

Is he claiming that Abdulhadi does not support BDS?

Is he claiming that she does not, in fact, spread malice toward Jews through spreading malice toward the Jewish State?

Is all of that false, professor Monteiro?


The Bigger Picture:

I feel reasonably certain that those of us who care about Jewish well-being have not made the mistake to think that SFSU would repudiate Abdulhadi.  We do not, you can be sure, expect San Francisco State University to in any way protect its Jewish students from the kinds of scenes of hatred that I was witness to when I was a student there.  We understand very well Abdulhadi's ideology and how it relates to the university and we also understand that it is not a matter of this one particular hate-filled academic.

It is, rather, about the rise of the BDS movement and its corrosive influence not only on Arab-Israel discourse, or Muslim-Jewish relations, but on the well-being of Israeli society and the Jewish people, as a whole.  Ultimately those who favor the international campaign to single out the Jews in the Middle East for boycott, divestment, and sanction, as Abdulhadi does, are championing a racist movement in direct contradiction to their own alleged values.

Abdulhadi, in a recent "End the Occupation" panel discussion even went so far as to suggest that the Gazan terror tunnels represented a humanitarian effort by Hamas on behalf of their people.  She referred to those tunnels into Israel as a "lifeline" for the Gazans.  The fact of the matter is, and she knows this, those tunnels were decked out with weaponry and supplies for the purposes of kidnapping and murder, yet Abdulhadi would have people believe that their purposes were bunny-like and benign.

They were not.

It was this bit of public stupidity which, in fact, inclined me to write this piece.   Abdulhadi believes that those terror tunnels were essentially good things.  She might find it regrettable that they are necessary, but in her unfortunate world-view, necessary they are.

I think that she should tell it to Dana Bar-on who used to live in kibbutz Nir Am in-between S'derot and the Gaza Strip before Abdulhadi's friends came to drag her and her family away.

She was there the night that Hamas fighters leaped out of the ground with rifles, yards from her home and she discusses it toward the end of the video below.  The IDF dispatched the Islamist thugs in short order, but if they had not been there who knows what would have happened to those people?

Here is what Dana has to say and I promise you that you cannot understand what is happening in that part of Israel without listening to her all the way through:



The bottom line is that San Francisco State University, much like other schools - throughout Europe - has made a vehicle of itself for a noxious political movement whose ultimate goal is the dissolution of Israel as the national home for the Jewish people.  If people like Abdulhadi were to get their way the Jews of the Middle East would, yet again, find themselves an abused minority living as dhimmis under Sharia law just as Jews did for thirteen long centuries.

That was when we were forced to ride donkeys, if we were to ride, and were not allowed to repair synagogues.

But I have a message for professor Abdulhadi.

It is this:
The Day of the Dhimmi is Done.

And for that, at least, we can be very grateful.

Please, by the way, support the AMCHA Initiative.  Tammi Benjamin is fighting a lonely fight against hard odds and just as Yale, Abdulhadi's alma mater, killed professor Charles Small's Interdisciplinary Initiative for the Study of anti-Semitism (YIISA), so many in the University of California and California State University systems would love to shut Tammi up.



Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.

Sunday, August 24, 2014



abdulhadiI am sorry, but that is the simplest, bluntest, and most honest way that I can put it.

San Francisco State University funds hatred toward Jews.

Between December 24 of last year and June 26 of this I published ten pieces concerning racism toward Jews at San Francisco State University.  These pieces concerned themselves with facts such as:

1) SFSU funds student organizations, such as the General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS), that calls for the murder of Jews, whom they call "colonizers."

2) In the last academic year, Muhammad Hammad, the former president of GUPS held up a blade, took a "selfie," and then published it on a social media site and talked about his desire to kill Jews.

fist3) The adviser to GUPS, professor Rabab Abdulhadi, a malicious anti-Israel anti-Jewish activist who specializes in some semi-academic discipline called "race and resistance studies," took a university funded trip to the Middle East for the purpose of meeting with various terrorists and their supporters including plane hijacker, Leila Khaled, whom they exalt as a "freedom fighter."

Of course, anti-Jewish malice is nothing new at San Francisco State University up to, and including, mob violence.  When I was there at the end of the 1990s Jewish students often faced Arab student organizations, in coordination with the pan-African student group, that regularly demonized Jews on the SFSU campus for their support of Israel.

I will never forget walking past Malcolm X Plaza, in front of the Cesar Chavez Student Center, and seeing Arab students and Black students holding aloft an American flag with fifty little Stars of David in it.  I guarantee you that almost every member of the tiny Jewish minority on that campus, who walked by that display, understood very well in a visceral way what they were being told.  It was this:

You better watch your ass.

After I graduated things apparently got worse at SFSU.

Todd Gitlin, sociologist, political scientist, and former student radical, writing in Mother Jones Magazine on June 17, 2002, quotes former director of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University, Laurie Zoloth:
"I cannot fully express what it feels like to have to walk across campus daily, past maps of the Middle East that do not include Israel, past posters of cans of soup with labels on them of drops of blood and dead babies, labeled 'canned Palestinian children meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license,' past poster after poster calling out Zionism=racism, and Jews=Nazis."
Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle on Tuesday, December 14, 2004, Cinnamon Stillwell tells us this:
How did such a threatening environment become associated with a campus located in one of the most liberal and tolerant cities in the nation? The truth is that SFSU has a reputation for intolerance that goes back at least 10 years. In this case, Republican students, clearly a minority at SFSU, were the targets. But in the past, such animosity was directed mostly at Jewish students or those seen as supporting Israel. Jews at SFSU have been spat on, called names and physically attacked, as well as censured by the administration for defending themselves, even as their attackers went unpunished.

The case of Tatiana Menaker, a Russian Jewish emigré and former SFSU student, is an example of the latter indignity. After committing the "crime" of responding verbally to another student's anti-Semitic epithets during a 2002 rally, she found herself persecuted by the administration.

Pulled into a kangaroo court, threatened with expulsion and ordered by the university to perform 40 hours of community service (but specifically not for a Jewish organization), Menaker was later exonerated after seeking legal assistance from the Students for Academic Freedom and the local Jewish Community Relations Council. But the damage was done.

During my time as a student at SFSU (Class of 1996), I was given a preview of things to come. In 1994, the Student Union Governing Board commissioned a mural to honor the late Black Muslim revolutionary Malcolm X. Designed by members of the Pan Afrikan Student Union and painted by artist Senay Dennis (known also as Refa-1), the finished product was problematic, to say the least. Along with an image of Malcolm X, the not-so-subtle symbols of Stars of David juxtaposed with dollar signs, skulls and crossbones, and the words "African blood," had been painted. Despite the obvious allusion to anti-Semitic blood libels of old, Pan Afrikan Student Union members claimed the symbols represented Malcolm X's alleged opposition to Israel, not to Jews, as if that was some comfort.
But even as far back as the early-middle 1960s certain anti-Jewish ideologues were already establishing hatred toward Jews as part of the university atmosphere.

I recently did a little digging into the SFSU special collections archives on, what is for me, a defunct project, but came across this interesting tid-bit:


vandals

The above is an article from the SFSC Daily Gator dated March 23, 1966.  The Gator reports that for three years running people painted Swastikas over an Israeli flag which San Francisco State College's chapter of the American-Israeli Cultural Organization displayed for various functions.

The writer and editors, needless to say, assume that the vandals were either random "vandalists" or Nazis.

San Francisco State College, between 1964 and 1966, did not have a whole lot of Nazis among the student population, nor was the campus conveniently accessible from the rest of the city.  There were heart-felt, politically-innocent folk singers there, to be sure.  There were proto-hippies beginning to experiment with psychedelics as a potential means toward an "expanded consciousness."  There were young, goateed political radicals gearing up for the fight against the Vietnam War and what Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex."  And there were young "negro" students such as future movie star, Danny Glover, beginning to rethink their relationship with the college and American society, as a whole.

But, Nazis?  Not so much.

The bottom line is that San Francisco State University has a long history of hostility toward the Jewish people that is expressed both in student body activity, which sometimes takes the form of a violent mob, and almost always takes the form of administrative dithering and indifference.

The only real question I have is whether or not the university intends to continue funding anti-Jewish hatred going forward?

But it is not really much of a question.

I know that they will.

Just ask professor Fred Astren, the current SFSU Chair of the Department of Jewish Studies.  He'll tell you, maybe.

And if he will not, I bet Tammi Benjamin of the AMCHA Initiative and the University of California, Santa Cruz, might have something to say on the matter.


Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

  • Wednesday, November 27, 2013
  • Elder of Ziyon
  • ,
From the San Francisco State University General Union of Palestinian Students Facebook page, on sale for $20:


War is peace, black is white, and a person hijacking and blowing up a a plane is not a terrorist.

Here is my quick response.


It is a little sad that such an obvious truth isn't so obvious for so many people.

(h/t Anarcho-Zionist)

Monday, November 25, 2013

  • Monday, November 25, 2013
  • Elder of Ziyon
The San Francisco Examiner wrote about the display of signs saying "MY HEROES HAVE ALWAYS KILLED COLONIZERS" at a San Francisco State University event earlier this month:

Uproar over what some are calling an anti-Semitic stencil that showed up at a Nov. 7 San Francisco State University campus event has prompted the school’s president to issue a stern statement against advocating violence and hate.

Tables had been set up close to the event by an array of organizations. One allowed people to make their own placards using a stencil that read, “My heroes have always killed colonizers,” noted the president’s statement.

The term “colonizers” may have been referring to Jews who came to Palestine in large numbers after World War II and subsequently founded the state of Israel in 1948 after fighting a successful war that caused the displacement of many Palestinians.

the General Union of Palestinian Students SFSU called the whole affair a smear campaign against their group.

“We are appalled at this blatant attack against the integrity and principled position that GUPS has maintained throughout its history. We are horrified by the baseless attack and allegations of anti-Semitism that have been leveled against GUPS and the Cesar Chavez Student Center, the organizers of the 6th annual anniversary of the Palestinian Cultural Mural honoring the late professor Edward Said,” wrote Mohammad Hammad, president of GUPS, on the group’s Facebook page.
Commenter and researcher Bob Knot looked a little more at the writings of Mohammad Hammad.

Hammad has three Tumblr accounts, which have all recently become password protected: palestinianliberator, canttouchthisnuhnuhnuh, and astrangerdanger. Between the time that the disgusting signs were publicized and the time that the GUPS realized that they have a public relations problem, Hammad described to his friends on Tumblr exactly who the target of the signs are - and his opinion does not refer only to to Jews who lived in Israel in the 1940s:

You know what?

Israelis ARE colonizers, there is literally no way around it

And you know what else?

My heroes HAVE always killed colonizers

I literally see nothing wrong with this

and my only regret is that not all colonizers were killed


HMM

Now re-read Hammad's defense the GUPS actions in the article quoted above. It sure looks like he says one thing in public and another thing to his friends on Tumblr, doesn't it?

More fun stuff from Hammad:

A photo he uploaded of (presumably) him flipping the bird to a US Marines office (with a "Palestine" banner):

Here is an essay Hammad wrote last April (again, from his recently taken down Tumblr account) where he explicitly calls for the destruction of Israel, with violence if necessary:

I will no longer support the two-state solution, and will vie for the liberation of Palestine through the reclamation of the lands that are rightfully ours through any means necessary. If the Israelis want to live in peace with us, so be it, but this peace will NOT be on their terms. It may be Palestinian freedom fighters who pull the triggers, but whatever lives are lost in the battle for liberation rest squarely on the shoulders of Israel.

Until return, and until liberation, one-state for Palestinians through any means necessary.
The president of GUPS has made it crystal clear, in his own words, that he interprets the "MY HEROES HAVE ALWAYS KILLED COLONIZERS" sign as a call to kill Israeli Jews (he is not calling to kill Israeli Arabs!)

Let's see GUPS try to spin this. I predict they will go on a wild attack, because misdirection is the last refuge for people caught with their pants down.

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Yesterday, I noted that at a pro-Palestinian Arab rally at San Francisco State University the organizers handed out stencils to people could paint placards saying "My heroes have always killed colonizers."

I have since found out that they also handed out stencils of a picture of Leila Khaled, the PFLP terrorist who was involved in two plane hijackings and several other terror attacks.

The president of SFSU, Les Wong, issued a statement that pretty much says that he won't bother to do anything about incitement to murder on his campus. You know, free speech and all that. But he is disturbed. Oh, yes, there is concern.He will hold meetings. Everything will be fine.

San Francisco State University is recognized worldwide for making social justice a strategic priority; it is an integral part of our DNA. As president, I was deeply disturbed by incendiary language that marred an annual commemoration of a cultural mural on campus.

On November 7, 2013 members of the campus community gathered to celebrate the sixth anniversary of the installation of a mural honoring Edward Said. Nearby, several student organizations were staffing tables to raise awareness of their groups' activities. One table was set up to allow passers-by to create their own placards with a pre-made stencil, which read, “My heroes have always killed colonizers.”

I am dismayed by the glorification of violence that this message conveys. There is no place at SF State for celebrating violence or promoting intolerance, bigotry, anti-Semitism or any other form of hate-mongering. We are a university community committed to furthering civil dialogue. Each of us must remain vigilant in working to achieve this goal.

The university is a place where dialogue, debate and the marketplace of ideas are cherished. We must also maintain a safe environment. Engaging in expressions that threaten and intimidate are counter to these goals. In addition to conveying my firm commitment to a safe and civil campus environment directly to any students involved, I will be meeting with members of the campus community to express my concerns, and to learn more about their perceptions of our current campus climate. University leadership will continue to gather information about this occurrence and address it appropriately. We prize our role as a forum for open discourse and we will continue to work toward a campus culture that cherishes civility.
You see the concrete steps he is taking? He'll talk to people and express concern! With luck, in a few months people will forget the whole sorry business.

Meanwhile, the groups that sponsored the disgusting display are going ballistic that anyone could dare criticize them: (UPDATE: They took down the FB page. Others have made copies, as did I, screen shot to the right.)

Zionists: Hands off our San Francisco State University Students!

Support AMED and GUPS against a Zionist smear campaign/charges of Anti-Semitism

Dear Friends of AMED and GUPS:

This is an urgent message to make you aware of and call upon you to support the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative (AMED) and the General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS) at San Francisco State University. We have been subjected to a smear campaign by Tammi Benjamin and AMCHA Initiative.

...Aiming at invoking xenophobia and enlisting the “war on terror” in order to portray Palestinian campus activism as dangerous, illegal and outside the bounds of acceptable discourse, Benjamin refers to Leila Khaled as “a member of the U.S. State Department-designated terrorist organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)…. responsible for several plane hijackings, suicide bombings that killed several Jews, and the assassination of a Jewish member of the Israeli Knesset.” Had she done a quick search as academics usually do, Benjamin would have found that Leila Khaled’s image is a popular icon frequently used by Palestinians and non-Palestinians alike to symbolize Palestinian women’s roles in anti-colonial resistance and to counter Orientalist and racist portrayals of Arab (and Muslim) women as docile, oppressed and unable to speak for themselves.
See? They aren't celebrating a terrorist, they are celebrating a symbol of female empowerment through terrorism! How dare anyone criticize their feminism!
As for the second stencil MY HEROES HAVE ALWAYS KILLED COLONIZERS, contrary to Benjamin’s claim, Palestinian students were not calling for the murder of Jews or Israelis. In fact, the implication of Benjamin’s argument --that all Jews have the same political stands vis-à-vis Israel or that all Jews are colonizing Palestinian lands, lends itself to anti-Semitism. And notwithstanding her simplistic linkage of Said’s anti-colonial intellectual work, the Palestinian Mural anniversary, Palestinian students, and AMED, the stencil was not originally created to specifically target Israel. It was more inclusive of the plight of Indigenous people and their historical resistance everywhere.
How dare anyone criticize a call to murder that was meant to be inclusive! It was originally meant against all white people - how can anyone object to that!

Sure, in this case, it was being pushed by the Palestinian Arabs and its only possible interpretation is to murder Israeli Jews. But don't call them antisemitic! Calling them antisemitic only increases antisemitism!

This response is an almost comedic example of what Richard Landes calls "demopathy," the usurping of the language of human rights and democracy when it suits one's political purposes, no matter how much those purposes are against human rights. I recently proved that BDS advocates do this quite consciously.

The GUPS invoking feminism and inclusiveness to justify calls to terror and murder is worthy of a master satirist.

And their demopathy don't stop there. Check out their petition to President Wong, insisting that he condemns those who condemn terrorism:

We are concerned over our own safety and the safety of our friends, allies, and all those standing in solidarity with our movement, especially when their photos and names have been posted online as if to make them a moving target for violence.

This belligerent smear campaign meant to slander the Palestinian movement on campus has directly created a hostile environment that makes it impossible for us to express our views and exercise our academic freedom.

We call upon you, President Wong, to:

Condemn this smear campaign

Uphold our academic freedom as a core value of SFSU

Ensure our safety and the safety of all

It is very interesting that they object to the publicizing of the photo above, when they are the ones who  originally posted  it on IndyMedia!

(h/t Pro Israel Bay Bloggers, Bob Knot)

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