San Francisco State Fills Jewish Coordinator Position

Better late than never, but San Francisco State University has finally filled a Jewish coordinator position due to a legal settlement between the university and two Jewish students who were singled out for anti-Semitic treatment by the pro-Palestinian forces on campus. The Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) has the details here.  

One might ask why any university would need a Jewish Life Coordinator position, but if any "marginalized group" needs it, that would be Jewish students. I cannot think of a more marginalized group of university students. The sad fact is that thanks to the pro-Palestinian forces, so well organized on so many campuses, anti-Semitism has become the rule more than the exception.

For at least a couple of decades now, SFSU has been one of the worst examples of an anti-Semitic campus. This is where UC Berkeley professor and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) co-founder, Hatem Bazian, got his start as an exchange student from the West Bank. As a student, Bazian drew many complaints of targeting Jewish students and groups that support Israel. SJP is nothing more than an organization of little brown shirts on over 150 campuses that use disruption and intimidation as their preferred tactic in advancing the Palestinian cause. Naturally, their targets are Jewish students and groups who support Israel.

At SFSU, the counterpart to SJP is the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS), a group that has for years shamed SFSU with their expressions supporting deadly violence against Israeli soldiers. These incidents have been well-documented over the last several years.

The chief advisor and mentor to GUPS is SFSU professor Rabab Abdulhadi, also from the West Bank. Note that in the above-linked article, Abdulhadi is erroneously referred to as "he". That is interesting since she is such a notorious figure when it comes to anti-Semitic agitation and has been for a long time. How characteristic is it of her to refer to a Jewish student excluded from an event for "marginalized students" that Abdulhadi helped organize as "a member of a privileged white group whose members feel entitled to be represented everywhere and anywhere”?

Over the years, Abdulhadi has been protected and enabled by past and current SFSU presidents, Les Wong and Lynn Mahoney respectively. Wong eventually saw the light and had an ugly and public falling out with Abdulhadi when he asserted the right of Zionist students to feel welcome on campus. That greatly offended Abdulhadi, and she lashed back at Wong. Yet, Abdulhadi is still there bringing discredit to the institution.

Kudos to the Jewish students who brought the complaint, and kudos also to the Lawfare Project, an aptly-named organization, in my view, because lawfare is precisely what is needed to fight back against campus anti-Semitism if the universities fail to act-and they are failing to act. The troublemakers and their supporters do not hesitate to use lawfare to get what they want, and our side should too.