San Francisco State University Professor Rabab Abdulhadi. Photo: Canary Mission on Twitter; 2017. |
Golden Gate Xpress is reporting breathlessly that San Francisco State University (SFSU) professor and rabid anti-Israel activist Rabab Abdulhadi has received one piece of anti-Muslim hate mail. While hate mail of any sort, let alone of the bigoted, threatening variety alleged in this case, is lamentable, as anyone who is in the public eye---and on social media---knows, it tends to come with the territory. The more surprising news is that this particular hate mail consisted of an actual letter that was addressed to Abdulhadi’s mailbox, and not an email or a tweet.
But Abdulhadi never misses an opportunity to portray herself as a victim in order to push her anti-Israel, anti-American political agenda. In 2017, she famously claimed she was being menaced on campus by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers, while this time, she took the occasion to compare the letter’s language to “Islamophobic and racist tweets by President Donald Trump against U.S. Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.” In fact, the explicit language in the letter bears no resemblance to Trump’s tweets about Reps. Tlaib and Omar, on which, incidentally, there was no consensus about the presence of racism.
Meanwhile, the Xpress reporter equates the hate mail with valid, well-documented criticism of Abdulhadi’s radical and anti-Semitic goings-on by organizations, such as the AMCHA Initiative, the Lawfare Project, and Canary Mission. All of it, by this skewed telling, amounts to Abdulhadi being “targeted . . . as a pro-Palestine advocate.”
If Abdulhadi and her campus allies---which include the belligerent General Union of Palestinian Students, for whom she serves as faculty advisor---truly are concerned about the atmosphere at SFSU and for the “safety of students,” they should place as much emphasis on their own behavior as they do one piece of hate mail.
