Cinnamon Stillwell - the West Coast Representative for Campus Watch, a graduate of San Francisco State University, and a contributor for numerous outlets, including The San Francisco Chronicle, and those as diverse from one another as Front Page Magazine is from National Public Radio (NPR) - in a recent piece entitled SFSU's Defeaning Silence on Partnership with Palestinian University, reminds us that San Francisco State University is among the most racist universities on the planet.
She writes:
Late last year, during the ongoing frenzy of violence directed at Israelis known as the “stabbing intifada,” 20-year-old Maram Hassoneh was killed in her second attempted knife attack on IDF soldiers manning a checkpoint. Hassoneh, a devout Muslim, was a top English student at An-Najah University in the West Bank city of Nablus. Described by Hamas as “greenhouse for martyrs,” An-Najah may very well be San Francisco State University (SFSU)’s first academic partner in the Arab and Muslim world.I wrote about this in a piece from April of last year entitled, San Francisco State Partners with Violently Anti-Jewish Arab University. An-Najah is perhaps the most viciously racist college campus in the world and this is who SFSU chooses to partner with?
Under the leadership of Rabab Abdulhadi, director of SFSU’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative (AMED) and a founding member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, SFSU reportedly established a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with An-Najah in 2014. Though there is no official corroboration of the relationship other than a recommendation in the All-University Committee on International Programs annual report (which Abdulhadi touted on Facebook), An-Najah claimed in a statement at its website last year that the MOU was signed on September 10, 2014, while a 2015 Xpress Magazine interview with Abdulhadi presented it as a fait accompli.
It is a disgrace and an insult to every Jew on that campus and any Jewish person, or friend of Jewish people, who ever gave a dime in donations to that school.
Here is a little tid-bit that Stillwell was kind enough to SFSU to leave out of her piece. The grotesque shrine "celebrating" the Sbarro massacre at An-Najah University.
This 2001 video is only about a minute and a half long, but if you watch it you will see where people entering the exhibit wiped their feet on the Israeli and American flags. There is also an image of Ariel Sharon with blood dripping from his mouth. Whatever else this video might demonstrate it is certainly not a memorial for the innocent dead.
It is the glorification of the spilling of Jewish blood and the destruction of Jewish lives.
One question to ask yourself is, how is it that of the colleges throughout the Arab-Muslim world this is the one that SFSU chooses to partner with? It might be that professors like Rabab Abdulhadi - "the director of SFSU’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative (AMED) and a founding member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel" - believe that SFSU could be a moderating influence upon an institution that verges on the violently psychopathic. It might be that SFSU is simply trying to do good in a highly naive Obama sort-of way.
Or, maybe not.
It could also be that the SFSU administration concurs with An-Najah University's anti-Zionism.
SFSU put up a mural of the famous anti-Semitic anti-Zionist Edward Said just around the corner from Malcolm X Plaza on that campus. Given this glorification of the deceased anti-Zionist professor out of Columbia University the only conclusion that one can come to is that the SFSU administration looks in favor upon Said's work and is, therefore, highly sympathetic with the movement to strip Jewish people of the means for self-determination and self-defense... as a matter of "social justice," of course.
In either case, SFSU is very definitely not friendly territory for Jewish people, however much the Jewish Studies Department might strenuously suggest otherwise.
From a personal perspective, as an alumnus with a Master's Degree in American History from that university, it seems to me that SFSU is trying to have things both ways. They want to remain true to their radical roots, but at the same time they want inclusivity and multiculturalism to define their academic culture. The problem is that the radical Left today, and there are few more radically-left universities in the United States than SFSU, is exceedingly hostile toward Israel and, thus, necessarily, hostile toward Jews, in general.
This does not create inclusivity. On the contrary, it socially constructs hatred.
They will insist otherwise, but the slop-over is inevitable, toxic, and violent toward the Jewish people as it undermines the well-being of both the Jewish people and the Jewish state, as well as, via BDS, the economic well-being of Israeli-Arabs, particularly in Judea and Samaria.
