A Tale of Two Professors in the Age of Obama (Part One) (Mike Lumish)

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Professor Andew Pessin is a Professor of Philosophy at Connecticut College.  He studied at Yale and earned a PhD at Columbia University.  He is the author of five books, including most recently Uncommon Sense: The Strangest Ideas From The Smartest Philosophers.  He is also friendly to the Jewish State of Israel and in opposition to political Islam for reasons having to do with social justice and human rights.

Professor Rabab Abdulhadi is an Associate Professor of Race and Resistance Studies at the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University.  She studied at Yale and earned a PhD from that university.  She is the author of many papers and a contributor and co-editor to the recent Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging (Gender, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East).  She is also unfriendly to the Jewish State of Israel and highly critical of Zionism for reasons having to do with social justice and human rights.

Both of these professors are sometimes thought of as controversial for reasons concerning the Arab-Israel conflict - although one is more the political activist than the other - and both were recently involved in difficulties within their respective universities over that conflict.

The difference is that while SFSU stood behind Professor Abdulhadi, Connecticut College was far less supportive of Professor Pessin.

The question is "why?"

Understanding the answer to that question depends upon not only understanding the specific differences between the two controversies, but also the ideological atmosphere within American academia concerning the Arab-Israel conflict.

The short answer is that Abdulhadi is highly critical of Israel during a period of rising anti-Semitic anti-Zionism in the West and, therefore - given this political moment - receives financial and moral backing in the academe.

Pessin, on the other hand, is highly critical of Hamas, an organization that calls specifically for the genocide of the Jewish people and he is, therefore, reviled as a "racist."

Let's dig into the specifics.

Professor Andrew Pessin

On August 11, 2014, during the midst of the Israeli military push-back, Operation Protective Edge, Pessin posted the following on his Facebook page as part of a larger discussion concerning Hamas and the other genocidally-inclined rocketeers in Gaza who had been giving little Israeli kids post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) over the course of the preceding years.

Pessin compared Hamas to a "rabid pit bull chained in a cage."

For this he was excoriated as a racist not only by hard-left students in organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine, but also by faculty.

The fact of the matter is that Pessin was referring to Hamas and other such violent Islamist organizations operating within Gaza.

The ironic thing is that it is not he who is conflating all Gazans with terrorists, but his allegedly "anti-racist" detractors who are doing so.

Pessin's Facebook page, above, needs to be understood within the larger conversation.

He was not referring to Palestinian-Arabs, nor Gazans, in general.  He was speaking quite specifically about the kinds of Islamists who call directly for the genocide of the Jews, as Hamas does in its charter, a document that is not quoted nearly enough, but reads in part:

Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious. It needs all sincere efforts. It is a step that inevitably should be followed by other steps. The Movement is but one squadron that should be supported by more and more squadrons from this vast Arab and Islamic world, until the enemy is vanquished and Allah's victory is realised.

 As David Bernstein writes in the Washington Post:

I have seen his previous Facebook posts on the Gaza war last Summer, and they are full of criticism of Hamas, and don’t say anything nasty about Palestinians more generally, suggesting that he was, in fact, referring to Hamas.

I have seen those Facebook posts, as well, and concur.

Professor Rabab Abdulhadi

Professor Abdulhadi's circumstances are a tad different and I have previously written about her and my disappointment with San Francisco State University.

Abdulhadi was the faculty adviser to the General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS) at a time when the SFSU president of that organization, Mohammed G. Hammad, took to social media in order to threaten violence against Jews.

As he held aloft blade in a "selfie," this is what he wrote:

I'm sitting here looking through pictures of that f—ing scum (name removed to protect the soldier) … Anyone who thinks there can be peace with animals like this is absolutely delusional, and the only ‘peace’ I’m interested in is the head of this f—ing scum on a plate, as well as the heads of all others like her, and all others who support the IDF. The Liberation of Palestine can only come through the destruction and decimation of this Israeli plague and it can’t possibly come soon enough.

It is not Abdulhadi's fault, of course, that some of her students want to kill Jews for political reasons.

She just happened to be standing nearby.

She was also the adviser to GUPS during the celebration of a mural to the late anti-Semitic professor, Edward Said, on that campus, wherein members of GUPS, and other student organizations, held aloft signs reading, "My heroes have always killed colonizers." 

Just who these "colonizers" in need of killing are is speculative, but I feel reasonably certain that when students associated with the General Union of Palestine Students hold up little signs calling for the murder of "colonizers" that they are not referring to the Amish.

How Connecticut College Responded to Pessin:

Pessin, as a consequence of opposing Hamas, was subject to a campaign of defamation that became international.  He was initially condemned as a "racist" or "Islamophobe" by a former student, Lamiya Khandaker who previously founded a branch of Students for Justice in Palestine at Brooklyn Technical High School and is quoted as saying:

I truly believe that if more American citizens gain more knowledge on this conflict, then we can pressure our government to do something, and if necessary, break our bond with Israel.

Break our bond with Israel.

Other students, following Khandaker's lead, wrote into the school newspaper that “Professor Pessin directly condoned the extermination of a people. A member of our community has called for the systematic abuse, killing, and hate of another people.”  As David Bernstein notes, writing in the Washington Post, such a charge is probably libelous.  If that is the case, it would also be actionable.

Pessin, however, probably just hoping that the non-controversy would go away so that he could do his actual work in peace, made the mistake of apologizing.

Bernstein tells us:

The result was an international controversy that included threats against Pessin and his family, knee-jerk reactions from academic departments throughout Connecticut College denouncing their colleague’s purported racism, denunciation without investigation by the usual suspects in the world of academic philosophy, and a school-sponsored “community conversation on free speech, equity and inclusion” that was so “inclusive” that the two Jewish students who spoke who criticized the Pessin witchhunt were, depending on the account, either booed or at least “met with derision.”

The Connecticut College history department, not wishing to be outdone by its own students, put out this note as a rebuke to Pessin, which reads in part:

To the Campus Community,

The history department would like to clearly state that we condemn speech filled with bigotry and hate particularly when that speech uses dehumanizing language and incites or celebrates violence and brutality. In response to the many events that transpired on campus prior to and during spring break regarding a Facebook post by a member of our faculty, we join the CCSRE in condemning hate speech.

How SFSU Responded to Abdulhadi:

While many people in the local Jewish community in California, most notably Tammi Benjamin of the AMCHA Initiative and "Dusty" at Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers, objected to this outrageous behavior of students under Abdulhadi's authority or tutelage, the university was largely indifferent to such concerns. Even Professor Fred Astren, the head of the Jewish Studies Department, could not rouse himself to condemn much of this in a public manner, although one presumes that he spoke up behind the scenes.

SFSU, nonetheless, funded a trip for Abdulhadi and a few select students to travel to the "Occupied Palestinian Territories" in order to meet with terrorist plane hijacker, Leila Khaled.  This visit was not merely an academic exercise for purposes of research.  It was a political trip among student activists with a professor who has a serious bone to pick with the Jewish people in the Middle East and who is not the least bit shy about buddying-up with violently inclined racists like Khaled.

In fact, SFSU even went so far as to reward Abdulhadi by agreeing to partner with An-Najah National University in Nablus which is probably the most anti-Israel / anti-Jewish university on the entire planet.  It was students at An-Najah who put together a "grotesque shrine" in celebration of the Sbarro pizza parlor massacre and which the Anti-Defamation League has referred to as a "greenhouse for martyrs." 

Abdulhadi, in gratitude to the university, wrote this:

Today San Francisco State University's All University Committee on International Programs unanimously voted to recommend that SF State formally collaborate with An-Najah National University in Nablus, Palestine. This is the first time that SFSU will collaborate with any university in a Palestinian, Arab or Muslim community.

I am proud, excited and grateful to my colleagues @ An-Najah. It is my honor to be working with you. Thank you Mira Nabulsi for your amazing help in writing and producing the proposal. Thank you Dean Kenneth Monteiro and the College of Ethnic Studies for your consistent and unwavering support.

At The End of the Day

The essential point is that San Francisco State University is standing behind a professor that normalizes terrorism and, ultimately, hatred toward Jews.  Connecticut College, on the other hand, both students and faculty, harassed a Jewish professor who opposes anti-Semitism and the spreading of political Islam.

The reason for this is not because of anything peculiar about either institution.

The real problem is not San Francisco State University, nor Connecticut College.  The problem is a rising atmosphere of hatred toward the Jewish State of Israel and, thus inevitably, toward the Jewish people, themselves, not only in Europe, but increasingly within the United States.

What we are witnessing, and what these two cases illustrate, is not merely a new phase of Jewish and Israeli relations to western academia and to western culture and civilization.  It is, in fact, a new phase in what it means to be "liberal" in the West today.

The western-left is passing down the toilet the very values of social justice and universal human rights that it claims to ground itself within.

The sympathies of western academia will go wherever the combined sensibilities of the professors and the students take it, but when it favors Hamas over the Jews in that part of the world it has forfeited any right to be considered "liberal."

By accepting political Islam it has also betrayed women in the Middle East, Gay people in the Middle East, and Christians in that part of the world.  It even has betrayed Muslims in the Middle East to the extent that Muslims are the primary victims of political Islam.

This little story of two professors in the Age of Obama is a story bigger than San Francisco State University and Connecticut College.

It encapsulates a moment of shifting political sands in which the very notion of universal human rights and social justice are being thrown aside in favor of a failing multicultural ideal.

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Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.

Sorry, I posted this on the wrong day...

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San Francisco State University and the Strange Case of Doctor Rabab Abdulhadi (Mike Lumish)

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San Francisco State University is probably not the most Israel-friendly university in the United States.

In truth, I feel quite confident in suggesting that the opposite is true.  Among SFSU faculty most hostile to Israel, however, is professor Rabab Abdulhadi of the ethnic studies department.

Back in the 1960s, the University of California in Berkeley had the reputation for being the most radical school on the west coast of the United States.  SFSU, however, was always more hard-core.  That is part of what I liked about the place when I was there in the late 90s.

A Warning to Parents:

The truth of the matter, unfortunately, is that any Jewish family would be well advised to keep their kids away from San Francisco State; that is unless they wish to expose them to malice, and potential violence, grounded in anti-Semitic anti-Zionism of the type promoted on campus by professor Abdulhadi.

Unless Jewish parents want their kids to be physically confronted over Israel, as were Jewish students when I was there, I very much recommend sending them to universities elsewhere... either that or make sure that they know how to fight.  Get them enrolled in Krav Maga classes, perhaps.  And make damn sure that they know something about the history of the Jews in the Middle East, and just why a Jewish State is necessary, before trundling them off to campus as idealistic freshmen.

This is the only reasonable conclusion that I can come to given the fact that SFSU funds student organizations, such as Abdulhadi's General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS), that calls for violence against us.  The reason that SFSU funds violent hatred toward Jews - which it clearly does when it funds GUPS - is because they believe that Israel may, in fact, be as awful as Abdulhadi claims that it is.

And lest anyone doubt that GUPS does, in fact, call for violence against Jews, this is the image currently at the very top of their Facebook page.

Although the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre was a massacre of Arab Muslims by Lebanese Christians, anti-Semitic anti-Zionists at SFSU always blame the Jews.

The image obviously shows a masked man with a rifle being greeted as something of a hero by a poor Arab woman somewhere either in Gaza or in the disputed territories.  The message is clear.  GUPS favors organizations devoted to driving out Jewish sovereignty on historically Jewish land.

From my perspective this would be something akin to funding a student Klan organization because maybe the white majority in the nineteenth-century American south had a point.  This is a criticism, by the way, coming from GUPS left, not its right.  Jewish national liberation is as much a progressive value, or should be, as is Tibetan national liberation or Kurdish national liberation.


SFSU Faculty:

While Professor Fred Astren, the head of the Department of Jewish Studies, is responsible for simply watching too much of this go on during his tenure - although it is unclear to me what he can do to stop it - the main culprit at SFSU is his colleague, professor Abdulhadi of the Department of Ethnic Studies / Race and Resistance Studies and the Senior Scholar of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative, at the College of Ethnic Studies, San Francisco State University.

I kid you not.

Abdulhadi is a "post-colonial" Arab left-feminist academic from Yale who believes that Muslims in the Middle East have every right to murder Jews as a matter of "resistance" and, thus, as a matter of "social justice."

Administrators like Astren put up with this horrendous nonsense presumably due to an ethos of collegiality - or perhaps just due to desensitization over the years - but it is unclear to me why that should inhibit the rest of us from strenuously objecting.

In distinction, Abdulhadi is not the least bit interested in compromise.

There is, after all, no compromise with a bloody fist.

That image is a Palestinian-Arab flag and what it clearly represents, much like a Nazi swastika, is violence against Jews.  Ideologues can dress it up in the language of human rights all that they want, but we understand what it means.  It means hatred.  It is a bloody fist and until quite recently it held a prominent place on a web page associated with Abdulhadi, but she seems to have deleted it.  You cannot really blame the woman for removing that image - if she, in fact, did so - because she was also the faculty advisor to GUPS when the student president of that organization, Muhammad Hammad, made a "selfie" with a switch-blade calling for violence against the IDF.

She was also the faculty advisor to GUPS when they held aloft signs in front of SFSU's Malcolm X Plaza reading, "My heroes have always killed colonizers," by whom they meant Jewish people on historically Jewish land.  They may have meant that killing white people is joyous, also, but they certainly meant that killing Jews is so.

Subsequently, Tammi Benjamin's AMCHA Initiative, out of UC Santa Cruz, accused Abdulhadi of misuse of university funds during a recent trip to visit a number of terrorists in Gaza and the disputed territories, including the plane hijacker Leila Khaled, on the university's dime.  Abdulhadi sold this trip as a scholarly endeavor, but there is no question but that the lines between scholarship and political activism are exceedingly porous for this SFSU professor.  She is at least as much an activist as a scholar and, thus, the university essentially purchased the anti-Semitic anti-Zionism that Abdulhadi peddles.

San Francisco State backs Abdulhadi against Benjamin's charges of misuse of funding, having found those charges unwarranted.  What the university seems not to understand, however, is that for most of us the problem here is not one of faculty corruption - the problem is not that Abdulhadi is a crook - but of the spreading of hatred and violence toward Jews under guises of academic freedom and "universal human rights."

It is about the perversion of western liberal values in the service of totalitarian regimes and in opposition to the democratic State of Israel.

That is the point and that is the reason why so many of us object to the kind of malice that we saw last year on the SFSU campus.  You cannot pay student organizations to spit hatred at Jews and then contemptuously dismiss Jewish people who stand up for themselves.

Or I suppose that you can and certainly SFSU Dean of Ethnic Studies, Kenneth P. Monteiro did in an effort to deflect from the bigger picture.  In a rather ugly public letter concerning the AMCHA Initiative's interest in Abdulhadi, Monteiro writes:

The AMCHA Initiative has over many years expressed its support for the policies of the state of Israel and their disagreement with those who do not support those policies. Indeed, I firmly support their right to express their views.

This is false.  AMCHA is not about supporting Israeli policies.  AMCHA is about keeping an eye on the rise of anti-Semitic anti-Zionism in the academe and making people aware of its corrosive, if not violent, tendencies.  (Gil Troy, by the way, has some some words on the matter over at the Jerusalem Post.)

Monteiro writes:

AMCHA has publicly singled out one of our faculty, Professor Rabab Abdulhadi, for uniquely malicious bullying. Therefore I am compelled to repudiate their claims publicly. Make no mistake, Professor Abdulhadi has been and remains a valued colleague, scholar and teacher. She is a locally, nationally and internationally recognized and respected scholar/activist, who is the recipient of awards for the quality of her work. The claims made by AMCHA against her were investigated, as are all claims no matter the source, and those claims have been found false.

So, am I to understand that Monteiro disagrees that Abdulhadi was the advisor to GUPS when both its president and its regular student members called publicly for murder?  Because I am pretty sure that this is easily verifiable.

Is he claiming that Abdulhadi did not publish a bloody fist, indicating violence against Jews, on a website associated with her name?

Is he claiming that Abdulhadi did not recently visit with terrorists, including a plane hijacker that is considered a hero to many of Abdulhadi's students?

Is he claiming that Abdulhadi does not support BDS?

Is he claiming that she does not, in fact, spread malice toward Jews through spreading malice toward the Jewish State?

Is all of that false, professor Monteiro?


The Bigger Picture:

I feel reasonably certain that those of us who care about Jewish well-being have not made the mistake to think that SFSU would repudiate Abdulhadi.  We do not, you can be sure, expect San Francisco State University to in any way protect its Jewish students from the kinds of scenes of hatred that I was witness to when I was a student there.  We understand very well Abdulhadi's ideology and how it relates to the university and we also understand that it is not a matter of this one particular hate-filled academic.

It is, rather, about the rise of the BDS movement and its corrosive influence not only on Arab-Israel discourse, or Muslim-Jewish relations, but on the well-being of Israeli society and the Jewish people, as a whole.  Ultimately those who favor the international campaign to single out the Jews in the Middle East for boycott, divestment, and sanction, as Abdulhadi does, are championing a racist movement in direct contradiction to their own alleged values.

Abdulhadi, in a recent "End the Occupation" panel discussion even went so far as to suggest that the Gazan terror tunnels represented a humanitarian effort by Hamas on behalf of their people.  She referred to those tunnels into Israel as a "lifeline" for the Gazans.  The fact of the matter is, and she knows this, those tunnels were decked out with weaponry and supplies for the purposes of kidnapping and murder, yet Abdulhadi would have people believe that their purposes were bunny-like and benign.

They were not.

It was this bit of public stupidity which, in fact, inclined me to write this piece.   Abdulhadi believes that those terror tunnels were essentially good things.  She might find it regrettable that they are necessary, but in her unfortunate world-view, necessary they are.

I think that she should tell it to Dana Bar-on who used to live in kibbutz Nir Am in-between S'derot and the Gaza Strip before Abdulhadi's friends came to drag her and her family away.

She was there the night that Hamas fighters leaped out of the ground with rifles, yards from her home and she discusses it toward the end of the video below.  The IDF dispatched the Islamist thugs in short order, but if they had not been there who knows what would have happened to those people?

Here is what Dana has to say and I promise you that you cannot understand what is happening in that part of Israel without listening to her all the way through:



The bottom line is that San Francisco State University, much like other schools - throughout Europe - has made a vehicle of itself for a noxious political movement whose ultimate goal is the dissolution of Israel as the national home for the Jewish people.  If people like Abdulhadi were to get their way the Jews of the Middle East would, yet again, find themselves an abused minority living as dhimmis under Sharia law just as Jews did for thirteen long centuries.

That was when we were forced to ride donkeys, if we were to ride, and were not allowed to repair synagogues.

But I have a message for professor Abdulhadi.

It is this:

The Day of the Dhimmi is Done.

And for that, at least, we can be very grateful.

Please, by the way, support the AMCHA Initiative.  Tammi Benjamin is fighting a lonely fight against hard odds and just as Yale, Abdulhadi's alma mater, killed professor Charles Small's Interdisciplinary Initiative for the Study of anti-Semitism (YIISA), so many in the University of California and California State University systems would love to shut Tammi up.

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Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.

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