Enshrined Anti-Zionism at San Francisco State University and Many US Campuses

Recently, as reported by The Algemeiner, dozens of organizations petitioned the chancellor of the California State University system in response to San Francisco State University (SFSU) professor Rabab Abdulhadi’s use of the university’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora Studies (AMED) Facebook page to spread antisemitic propaganda.

This concern is more than justified. As the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) correctly notes, “One look at the Facebook page of San Francisco State University’s [AMED] Studies department reveals that it is more dedicated to antisemitic political activism than honest academic inquiry.”

Abdulhadi’s use of a supposedly “academic” Facebook page to propagate obsessive and vitriolic calumnies against the Jewish state is not only morally objectionable, but likely illegal as well: Section 89005.5 of the California Education Code explicitly prohibits the use of state university names to, among other things, endorse political boycotts, demonstrations, assemblies, or propaganda.

One does not need a law degree to see that the page’s promotion of, for example, the “NYC Queers Against Israeli Apartheid March” almost certainly violates this legislation. Hopefully, the work of the petition’s signatories will result in a more welcoming campus environment for the Jewish and Zionist students at SFSU, who are too often subjected to discrimination, demonization, and social ostracism.

The fact that such action against Abdulhadi is needed in the first place is indicative of a much more widespread problem: many university departments around the world have morphed into outposts of post-colonial and anti-Zionist activism, as opposed to institutions of objective historical, theological, and political analysis. These people justify their Jew hatred under the false pretense that Zionism is not an integral part of mainstream Jewish identity, but a 19th and 20th century colonial movement that wrongfully usurped and exploited Muslim land. Therefore, the antisemitic violence regularly committed by terrorist organizations is regarded as “understandable,” if not justified, “resistance.”