I have written often on this site about San Francisco State University's professor Rabab Abdulhadi. This pathetic Palestinian activist has brought shame and embarrassment to her institution, a place I thought was immune to feelings of shame and embarrassment. Not only has she acted as mentor to a campus goon squad known as the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS), who, over the years have publicly expressed wishes to murder Israeli students and have been guilty of disrupting pro-Israel events, she has consorted with supporters of terrorism in the Holy Land using university funds to finance her travel. Currently, SFSU is the subject of a lawsuit stemming from the mess that Abdulhadi has wrought at the school over the years.
Until recently, Abdulhadi enjoyed the support of SFSU president Les Wong, a jellyfish of an administrator who has allowed Jewish students on his campus to be bullied by the likes of GUPS. When he recently (in response to Abdulhadi's screeds) took the radical step of stating that students who supported Israel were actually welcome on his campus, Abdulhadi erupted with denunciations on an SFSU web server. Her intemperate language even drew the rebuke of California State University Chancellor Tim White, who promised corrective action-action which never came.
Abdulhadi has learned that if you want to be a controversial activist in the US, others are free to criticize you. She can't take that. (Maybe that's why she suspiciously failed to materialize at the last moment at a speaking event at UC Irvine in 2015 along with her GUPS pals when I showed up with my video camera.)
In response to all the criticism, this latter day Joan of Arc has launched what is called-get this- "The International Campaign to Defend Professor Rabab Abdulhadi". I am not making this up.
Check it out.
https://www.facebook.com/pg/DefendProfAbdulhadi/events/?ref=page_internal
That's right. Abdulhadi actually invokes images of Joe McCarthy and the World War 2 re-location of West Coast Japanese Americans and compares it to her own experience- not of being put in an internment camp, not being subpoenaed to testify under oath in Washington about her beliefs, but being criticized publicly. So just what is it that she is being defended from?
Criticism.
This week, Campus Watch/Middle East Forum's Winfield Myers lampooned Abdulhadi for her persecution complex.
If Rabab Abdulhadi wants to be protected from criticism in the public square of ideas, she should seriously consider returning to the West Bank, Gaza, or wherever she came from. That's not the way the game is played here.
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