SFSU and the Abdulhadi Embarrasment # 1

Michael L.

Rabab Abdulhadi is an associate professor of "race and resistance studies" at San Francisco State University.

The woman is significant to the extent that she helps whip up hatred toward the Jews of the Middle East on American college campuses and abroad.

She served as the first director of the Center for Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan, Dearborn.  And she is a co-editor of, Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence and Belonging, published by Syracuse University Press in 2012.

According to her page on the Jadaliyya website:

Her scholarship, pedagogy and public activism focuses on Palestine, Arab and Muslim communities and their diasporas, race and resistance studies, transnational feminisms, and gender and sexuality studies.

Her scholarship and activism, therefore, center on "Palestine" and the rest of the Arab world, but not Israel.

I must wonder then just who, in terms of real people, she is "resisting" against?   I understand that she is "resisting" imperialism and colonialism and racism and sexism and apartheid and materialism and misogyny and Zionism and, probably, ageism, as well, but I must wonder just who, specifically, as individuals and groups, Abdhulhadi and her like-minded colleagues consider to be the enemy, if not Israel and the Jews?

Now, it could be that Professor Abdulhadi is simply not interested in the allegedly miserable fate of Arabs within the Jewish State or it could be that she considers all of Israel to be "Palestine."

I just want to know which.

I am only beginning to look into this person, but I find myself optimistic that she will live up to expectations. This is, of course, not some oversight on the professor's part, you can be sure.  Her elimination of Israel from her "scholarship, pedagogy and public activism" is simply one small way for an anti-Jewish college professor of Arab descent to eliminate the Jewish State to her impressionable students who love an allegedly righteous cause.

Recently there was something of a kerfuffle surrounding SFSU professor Abdulhadi because she acted as the formal university adviser to the General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS) and GUPS held up signs calling for the murder of Jews as "colonizers" during an event honoring former Columbia Professor of Literary Studies, Edward Said.

Abdulhadi, as an anti-Semitic anti-Zionist activist, then took a university-funded trip to Israel for, among other purposes, meeting with hijacker and terrorist, Leila Khaled.  Abdulhadi, it must be noted, is not merely a scholar with a Yale pedigree, but also someone who combines her scholarship with political activism in opposition to the well-being of the Jewish people.  In Abdulhadi's case, political activism involves doing what little she can do to delegitimize Israel for the eventual purpose of eliminating Jewish sovereignty and self-defense on the land that Jewish people come from and promoting as much hatred toward the Jews of the Middle East as she possibly can.

Tammi Benjamin, of the AMCHA Institute, who seeks to place a spot-light on university promoted hatred toward the Jewish minority in the Middle East, recently admonished Abdulhadi for allegedly misrepresenting the nature of that trip to the SFSU administration, in order to make a case for deception and a misallocation of funds.

I honestly do not care.

My concern about Abdulhadi has nothing whatsoever to do with any charges of corruption or deception.

My only concern is that Abdulhadi - along with everyone else who supports BDS - is calling for the end of Jewish sovereignty within living memory of the Holocaust.

My concern is that my alma mater finances hatred toward Jews and thus helps to bring that hatred to public prominence in the United States and that Fred Astren, the current SFSU Chair of the Department of Jewish Studies, is weak in opposition.