Showing posts with label GUPS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GUPS. Show all posts

Sunday, May 01, 2016



wong
San Francisco State University President, Leslie Wong, very much admires the General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS).

He even said that "GUPS is the very purpose of this great university."

The problem that president Wong has is that GUPS, while according to him representing the very purpose of SFSU, also incites violence against Jewish supporters of Israel, which is the great majority of the Jewish people.

Why would the president of a significant American university support a student organization that quite literally calls for the murder of Jews?

Let that question sink in for a second.

By going out of his way to compliment GUPS - an organization friendly with terrorists like plane-hijacker, Leila Khaled - Wong signals to Jewish people that inciting violent hatred toward us is acceptable to himself, and to SFSU, as a matter of "social justice."

The Context

Rates of violent anti-Semitism are dramatically rising around the United States and throughout Europe.

Jews are killed by jihadis in places like Paris or Marseilles or Malmo, while within Israel Junior-Jihadis are chasing after old ladies with knives and hand-axes.

Meanwhile, throughout the Muslim Middle East, imams and ayatollahs regularly teach their congregants that Jews are the children of orangutans and swine and screech to the heavens for our genocide.

They love to tell one another that butchering Jews is beautious within the heart of Allah.

Iran inches closer to an operable nuclear weapon that it has promised to use against Israel in order to bring about genocide and the progressive-left could hardly care less. In fact, the western-left generally blames anti-Semitic violence on the victims of that violence. Of course, such a scenario would also result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Arabs, but Tehran does not seem to particularly care and neither does its western supporters.

In Europe and the United States, the Red-Green Alliance between progressives and advocates for political Islam is flourishing. And the movement to Boycott, Divest from, and Sanction Israel (BDS) - supported by Wong if he supports GUPS - is seeking to undermine the viability of the tiny Jewish state by seeking to turn universities, corporations, governments, and NGOs against it and, therefore, against the Jewish people, more generally, in an effort to eventually bring down both the country and the well-being of the Jewish people.

Israel and the Rise of the Crybullies

Of course, it is in the universities that the crybullies (snowflakes) demand their "safe spaces" while refusing to allow Jewish students any such courtesy. They complain about "microaggressions" and "micro-rapes" - like commenting on a cute sweater - even while inciting deep hatred toward Jews in the most raw terms possible.

Anti-Semitic anti-Zionists incite hatred toward Jewish supporters of Israel, and Israeli Jews, via "the Palestinian narrative." The narrative depends upon defamation, unjust insinuations, and highly biased historical conclusions that leave the great Muslim majority in the Middle East, which represents perhaps the most successful and vicious political project in human history, as innocent victims among among the minority population that they have victimized.

This results in violence against Jews supported by western academic institutions as driven by their most hateful and racist students.

Enter the General Union Palestine Students (GUPS) and their patron saint, San Francisco State University President Leslie Wong.

As Dusty over at Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers reminds us:
The president of the organization, Mohammad Hammad posted a photo on his tumblr account, declaring "I seriously can not get over how much I love this blade. It is the sharpest thing I own and cuts through everything like butter and just holding it makes me want to stab an Israeli soldier.

San Francisco State University General Union of Palestinian students neither condemned Hammad's words, nor distanced themselves from them.

Why does SFSU continue to tolerate the intolerable?
Indeed. That is an exceedingly good question, although, as we have just learned via the video below, it is not that the SFSU tolerates the intolerable so much as it positively encourages the intolerable.

GUPS is a student organization that is calling directly for the murder of Jews and it is supported by the president of the university.

Check the video clip. Wong's relevant remarks begin around 18:20.




"I want to offer my personal congratulations to the student leadership of GUPS. They have been an inspiration for me. And they have helped me when I have to tell other community groups to mind their own business. GUPS is the very purpose of this great university."



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Sunday, October 12, 2014





Rabab AbdulhadiSan 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.


gups


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.

fistAbdulhadi 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.



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.

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Yesterday, I noted that at a pro-Palestinian Arab rally at San Francisco State University the organizers handed out stencils to people could paint placards saying "My heroes have always killed colonizers."

I have since found out that they also handed out stencils of a picture of Leila Khaled, the PFLP terrorist who was involved in two plane hijackings and several other terror attacks.

The president of SFSU, Les Wong, issued a statement that pretty much says that he won't bother to do anything about incitement to murder on his campus. You know, free speech and all that. But he is disturbed. Oh, yes, there is concern.He will hold meetings. Everything will be fine.

San Francisco State University is recognized worldwide for making social justice a strategic priority; it is an integral part of our DNA. As president, I was deeply disturbed by incendiary language that marred an annual commemoration of a cultural mural on campus.

On November 7, 2013 members of the campus community gathered to celebrate the sixth anniversary of the installation of a mural honoring Edward Said. Nearby, several student organizations were staffing tables to raise awareness of their groups' activities. One table was set up to allow passers-by to create their own placards with a pre-made stencil, which read, “My heroes have always killed colonizers.”

I am dismayed by the glorification of violence that this message conveys. There is no place at SF State for celebrating violence or promoting intolerance, bigotry, anti-Semitism or any other form of hate-mongering. We are a university community committed to furthering civil dialogue. Each of us must remain vigilant in working to achieve this goal.

The university is a place where dialogue, debate and the marketplace of ideas are cherished. We must also maintain a safe environment. Engaging in expressions that threaten and intimidate are counter to these goals. In addition to conveying my firm commitment to a safe and civil campus environment directly to any students involved, I will be meeting with members of the campus community to express my concerns, and to learn more about their perceptions of our current campus climate. University leadership will continue to gather information about this occurrence and address it appropriately. We prize our role as a forum for open discourse and we will continue to work toward a campus culture that cherishes civility.
You see the concrete steps he is taking? He'll talk to people and express concern! With luck, in a few months people will forget the whole sorry business.

Meanwhile, the groups that sponsored the disgusting display are going ballistic that anyone could dare criticize them: (UPDATE: They took down the FB page. Others have made copies, as did I, screen shot to the right.)

Zionists: Hands off our San Francisco State University Students!

Support AMED and GUPS against a Zionist smear campaign/charges of Anti-Semitism

Dear Friends of AMED and GUPS:

This is an urgent message to make you aware of and call upon you to support the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative (AMED) and the General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS) at San Francisco State University. We have been subjected to a smear campaign by Tammi Benjamin and AMCHA Initiative.

...Aiming at invoking xenophobia and enlisting the “war on terror” in order to portray Palestinian campus activism as dangerous, illegal and outside the bounds of acceptable discourse, Benjamin refers to Leila Khaled as “a member of the U.S. State Department-designated terrorist organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)…. responsible for several plane hijackings, suicide bombings that killed several Jews, and the assassination of a Jewish member of the Israeli Knesset.” Had she done a quick search as academics usually do, Benjamin would have found that Leila Khaled’s image is a popular icon frequently used by Palestinians and non-Palestinians alike to symbolize Palestinian women’s roles in anti-colonial resistance and to counter Orientalist and racist portrayals of Arab (and Muslim) women as docile, oppressed and unable to speak for themselves.
See? They aren't celebrating a terrorist, they are celebrating a symbol of female empowerment through terrorism! How dare anyone criticize their feminism!
As for the second stencil MY HEROES HAVE ALWAYS KILLED COLONIZERS, contrary to Benjamin’s claim, Palestinian students were not calling for the murder of Jews or Israelis. In fact, the implication of Benjamin’s argument --that all Jews have the same political stands vis-à-vis Israel or that all Jews are colonizing Palestinian lands, lends itself to anti-Semitism. And notwithstanding her simplistic linkage of Said’s anti-colonial intellectual work, the Palestinian Mural anniversary, Palestinian students, and AMED, the stencil was not originally created to specifically target Israel. It was more inclusive of the plight of Indigenous people and their historical resistance everywhere.
How dare anyone criticize a call to murder that was meant to be inclusive! It was originally meant against all white people - how can anyone object to that!

Sure, in this case, it was being pushed by the Palestinian Arabs and its only possible interpretation is to murder Israeli Jews. But don't call them antisemitic! Calling them antisemitic only increases antisemitism!

This response is an almost comedic example of what Richard Landes calls "demopathy," the usurping of the language of human rights and democracy when it suits one's political purposes, no matter how much those purposes are against human rights. I recently proved that BDS advocates do this quite consciously.

The GUPS invoking feminism and inclusiveness to justify calls to terror and murder is worthy of a master satirist.

And their demopathy don't stop there. Check out their petition to President Wong, insisting that he condemns those who condemn terrorism:

We are concerned over our own safety and the safety of our friends, allies, and all those standing in solidarity with our movement, especially when their photos and names have been posted online as if to make them a moving target for violence.

This belligerent smear campaign meant to slander the Palestinian movement on campus has directly created a hostile environment that makes it impossible for us to express our views and exercise our academic freedom.

We call upon you, President Wong, to:

Condemn this smear campaign

Uphold our academic freedom as a core value of SFSU

Ensure our safety and the safety of all

It is very interesting that they object to the publicizing of the photo above, when they are the ones who  originally posted  it on IndyMedia!

(h/t Pro Israel Bay Bloggers, Bob Knot)

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