On May 14, UCLA anthropology professor Kyeyoung Park invited the notorious San Francisco State University professor Rabab Abdulhadi to speak to her (Park’s) class. By all accounts, it was a disaster.
I note with amusement UCLA’s claim of being a friendly campus for Jewish students. Under Chancellor Gene Block and his politically-correct Inclusion hack, Jerry Kang, the Westwood campus has suffered a number of anti-Semitic incidents in the past several years including in 2015 when a Jewish co-ed, Rachel Beyda, suffered the indignity of being questioned about her Jewish identity and whether it made her fit to have a place in student government. This is also the institution that houses the Center for Near East Studies, a hotbed of pan-Arab, anti-Israel, anti-West discourse masquerading as scholarship.
Abdulhadi is hardly a person for any other professor to hold up to his/her class as a role model. At SFSU, she has been mentor to the despicable General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) who made news a few years back when their members publicly expressed the desire to kill Israeli soldiers.
This is the anti-Semitic climate that the pro-Palestinian movement has brought to American college campuses. To be accurate, it is not just Palestinians like Abdulhadi and her UC Berkeley counterpart Hatem Bazian. There are hundreds of American professors infesting our campuses, some even Jewish, who have joined with the Abdulhadis and Bazians to make our universities very uncomfortable places for Jewish students. It is also administrators like Block who deny the problem exists and allow it to fester because they are terrified of their pro-Palestinian student activists and the organizations like CAIR who back them up. So they tolerate anti-Semitism in the very name of tolerance.
The day after her UCLA appearance, Abdulhadi was scheduled to speak at UC Irvine before Students for Justice in Palestine, Bazian’s brown shirt organization, at the UCI Cross Cultural Center. Whether she actually showed up or not I have no idea. She was a no-show the last time she was supposed to speak at UCI.
I commend Stand With Us for holding UCLA’s feet to the fire. It’s a shame other Jewish organizations like the Jewish Federation and Anti-Defamation League don’t do likewise instead of providing cover for anti-Semitic universities.
