It’s ironic that Rabab Abdulhadi, the infamous San Francisco State University professor known for her anti-Israel-infused curriculum has recently accused her administration of being paid off by Zionist organizations to discriminate against her. This from the professor who has enjoyed little pushback in recent years from her colleagues or administration while attempting to officially host a convicted Palestinian terrorist; who claimed that accepting pro-Israel Jewish students on campus was a “declaration of war against Arabs and Muslims;” and who has repeatedly defamed Jewish students as white supremacists.
Riding high on a 2018 legal win that found her not guilty of fostering a hostile environment against Jews—a questionable decision considering her leadership in the antisemitic student group, the General Union of Palestine Students–and faculty union support regarding her failed attempt to bring the terrorist, Leila Khalid, to campus in 2020; Abdulhadi has doubled down on her campaign to vilify all Jews but a token few by alleging that her work to promote the Palestinian cause has been unfairly stifled by powerful Zionist groups and credulous administrators. It’s important to note that in 2019, the University settled a lawsuit acknowledging a systemic anti-Jewish bias on their campus and agreed to actively respond.
The unavoidable correlation between her incendiary lectures and events against pro-Israel students and the influx of antisemitic expressions on campus including Nazi and anti-Israel graffiti couldn’t be ignored forever by SFSU, though even this was a lackluster response that amounted to a slap on the wrist and a invitation to continue abusing her department’s official capacities.
Her current lawsuit includes the nefarious claim that powerful shadowy Zionist organizations are using their money to harm her career. This unsurprisingly fits in with her history of anti-Zionist activism and reeks of the 19th-century Russian antisemitism which she has publicly endorsed.
Recently in a conversation, her department hosted on Facebook entitled, “Who Owns Jewishness,” she briefly shared her adoration for Karl Marx’s On the Jewish Question, an antisemitic text that promotes the belief that Jewish people are obsessed with money, secretly control the world, and whose identity needs to be erased to free the world from tyranny.
Her evidence of such discriminatory practices comprises of two separate accounts of a local Jewish Community Relations Council influencing SFSU presidents into “retaliating” against her for trying to bring the co-founder of the antisemitic BDS movement to campus and reneging on initial support for her program by denying financial compensation for personal and future departmental trips to the Palestinian Territories that included meetings with US-designated Palestinian terrorist groups.
Abdulhadi conveniently ignores the 2020 student government’s overwhelmingly popular vote in favor of a pro-BDS resolution, the nigh constant pro-Palestinian expressions made with impunity by her and her cohorts, and the nine major anti-Israel events sponsored by the school in the past year alone. Lest we forget that it was Zoom and YouTube who denied Abdulhadi from platforming Leila Khalid while the SFSU administration supported her.
Her other allegation pertains to broken promises regarding incentives offered in her hiring agreement. It turns out that she was duped by the hiring dean under the pretense that she would be granted the funds and administrative support to grow her Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies program.
Not only did that administrator not have the authority to mandate such a deal, but he also didn’t even include the university’s president on the official documentation. Apparently, Abdulhadi didn’t read the fine print on her official contract agreement with the school which superseded all informal deals, including the one in question.
Abduhladi’s dishonesty and unprofessionalism have helped degrade SFSU into the antisemitic cesspool it has become. Subjecting her administration to a disgraceful lawsuit that forced a tepid acknowledgment of their failure to protect Jewish students and then targets them with a frivolous lawsuit of her own shows how hubris and a hateful ideology are toxic to more than just proud Jews.