The latest spasm of outrage emerged concerning San Francisco State University and the fact that some of its sponsored student organizations are calling for murder. This is not hyperbole. In fact, it is the opposite of hyperbole. SFSU students, including students from the General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS), held up signs that read, "My heroes have always killed colonizers."
Shortly thereafter it became clear that the president of GUPS, Muhammad Hammad, called quite specifically for murder, if not genocide, on a number of occasions in a very public manner.
This is simply a fact.
Among the various violent rantings of Mr. Hammad, this is perhaps the most intriguing:
There are children shouting outside and I want to set them on fire.It is entirely unacceptable for obvious reasons and the calling for blood is not a matter of free speech. Calling for the genocide and murder is not a matter of open-minded conversation on a university campus, but the spread of hatred, if not fascism, on that campus. There is no question but that when Arab students hold up signs calling for the murder of "colonizers" that they mean Jews.
This much is obvious.
They mean the Jews of the Middle East, Israeli Jews. They mean the very people who have been subject to thirteen-hundred years of second and third class non-citizenship under Arab-Muslim imperial rule.
There are two recent developments in this story. Tammi Rossman-Benjamin and the AMCHA Initiative uncovered an additional series of Tumblr posts by Muhammad Hammad screaming for Jewish blood and Ellen Griffin of SFSU has acknowledged that the genocidal maniac is not presently a student at that university and, thus, not currently the president of the General Union of Palestine Students.
This is the email that I received from Ms. Griffin and it is entirely consistent with what others, including Lori Lowenthal Marcus of the Jewish Press, received from that office:
Mr. Lumish—
I’m following up from your questions of last week.
Mohammad Hammad is not enrolled at San Francisco State University this semester. Consistent with that, he is no longer the President of the General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS).
GUPS remains a recognized student organization at San Francisco State University, and as such qualifies to make funding requests and receive funding from Associated Students,Inc. ASI is an auxiliary of the university, which is funded by student fees, not the State of California general fund. You may contact ASI’s offices directly to inquire about funds allocated to specific recognized student organizations: http://asi.sfsu.edu/asi/contact/index.html I am copying ASI Executive Directer Peter Koo on this email.That, in a nutshell, is the latest on the SFSU story.
Hammad is even worse than we thought, but we are told he is not, at this moment, among the student population.
What we don't know is just what the university did concerning the fact that a Jihadi, who screamed for bloody murder against Americans and Jews, and who was the president of a Palestinian-Arab student organization, did about this matter.
It might be that the university was vigorous in addressing this issue or it might be that the university did little or nothing.
We know that both the San Francisco Police Department and the FBI took an interest in Hammad's potential extra-curricular activities - his articulated love of knives and stabbing of Jews - but we do not know that the university did much of anything in response.
That is the relevant question.
