Editor’s note: Since the barbaric Hamas attacks against Israel on October 7th, American universities have become an undeniable locus of Jew hatred within our nation. Much attention has deservedly been paid to the radical campus groups like Students for Justice in Palestine who call for the genocide of the Jews and cheer the terrorists of Hamas. What has received less attention—but should in fact rank as the universities’ worst offense—is the Jew hatred promoted by official departments and institutes of the universities themselves. In the case of our campuses, Jew hatred is “the call coming from inside the house.”
The Freedom Center is exposing these academic institutes and programs as “The Top Ten Jew-Hating Academic Departments” in a new report. We will be publishing one school per day as a series on Frontpage. The College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University is #1 on our list.
As an official academic division of the state-funded San Francisco State University, the College of Ethnic Studies should maintain a strict academic neutrality on political issues. Instead, the college is known for blatant pro-Hamas propaganda, the promotion of anti-Semitic stereotypes and tropes, and for openly celebrating terrorist violence against the Jewish state and its citizens.
In a “Statement on Gaza” released by the College of Ethnic Studies in December 2023, the Chair of the department, Dr. Falu Bakrania, together with her staff, placed their support in the Israel/Gaza conflict clearly with Hamas. “We vehemently condemn the Israeli genocide and displacement of Palestinians in Gaza. We demand an immediate ceasefire, the provision of humanitarian aid, and a permanent end to the genocide,” began the missive, which failed to make any mention of the facts that Hamas started the conflict by murdering, mutilating, and raping over a thousand Israeli civilians, nor of the fact that Hamas continued to hold Israeli civilians as hostages in horrific conditions.
Citing Hamas-provided statistics, the statement went on to claim that “To date, over 15,000 Palestinians have been murdered, over 60 percent children,” notably using the term “murder” to describe potential civilian casualties caused by Israel’s defensive response to Hamas’s attack. The College added that it joins “the international community… in condemning the genocide of the people of Gaza and the unrelenting apartheid regime of the Israeli state.”
Attempting to disavow the obvious Jew hatred of their sentiments, the College of Ethnic Studies went on to argue against “equating the support for Palestine with antisemitism” and “the equation of criticism of the Israeli nation-state, its apartheid regime, and its expansion through military occupation as antisemitic.” The College’s obvious attempts to delegitimize and demonize Israel (forms of anti-Semitism according to the definition adopted by the U.S. State Department) and its refusal to acknowledge that Hamas’s barbaric and genocidal attack on Israeli civilians was the trigger for the current conflict, only serve to highlight its Jew hatred.
This absurd statement on Israel’s alleged “genocide” in Gaza is only the latest salvo from SFSU’s College of Ethnic Studies which has made promoting Jew hatred a key feature of its identity. The College is home to a unique academic program known as the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies Program, or AMED for short. For many years, the leader of this initiative, Professor Rabab Abdulhadi, has served as the public face of San Francisco State University’s cult of Jew hatred. She is a rabidly anti-Semitic professor of Ethnic Studies who has turned AMED into her personal vehicle to slur the state of Israel and the Jewish people under the guise of academic scholarship.
Abdulhadi has glorified anti-Israel terrorism in public talks. A letter sent by a coalition of concerned Jewish groups to then-SFSU President Leslie Wong in 2014 describes in chilling detail how an Ethnic Studies Department event organized by Abdulhadi featured “wild inaccuracies, monstrous distortions, and blatant lies — all intended to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish state and promote a boycott that would hasten its demise.”
Professor Abdulhadi’s husband, Jaime Veve, a union activist, also spoke at the event to exalt anti-Semitic terrorists and murderers. The letter to President Wong describes how Veve “insisted that Palestinians who had injured or murdered Jews were not terrorists but rather ‘heroes or heroines’ who had ‘committed political acts of defiance and resistance,’ and he justified Palestinian terrorism by calling it ‘the cry of a baby calling for the attention of the world.’”
During her tenure at SFSU, Abdulhadi has sought to build relationships with anti-Israel terrorists. While attending a university-sponsored trip to Israel in 2014, she met with anti-Israel terrorists Leila Khaled and Sheikh Raed Salah. Abdulhadi has praised Khaled, a notorious airplane hijacker, as “an icon in liberation movements and…an icon for women’s liberation.” Salah served a prison sentence in Israel for aiding the terrorist group Hamas. He has also been charged for incitement to violence for giving a public speech in which he accused Jews of using the blood of Palestinian children to bake their bread. Despite this, Abdulhadi has insisted that he does not have terrorist ties.
In September 2020, Abdulhadi and AMED held an event featuring Khaled. Abdulhadi planned to stream the event on Zoom, but the platform canceled its coverage citing Khaled’s terrorist record.
Abdulhadi also attempted to open a formal collaboration between SFSU and An-Najah National University in Nablus, Palestine. An-Najah University has been described by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as “known for its advocacy of anti-Israel violence and its recruitment of Palestinian college students into terrorist groups.”
The notorious professor has not hesitated to use her privileged position as a professor at SFSU to promote her anti-Israel agenda. Abdulhadi is a founding member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI), and also supports the wider Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel, an anti-Semitic, Hamas-funded campaign to isolate and weaken the Jewish state. She frequently promotes BDS at university-sponsored events and forums.
In March 2019, she shared a live video and statement on the official Facebook page for the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative (AMED). The statement demonized Israel and invoked anti-Semitic conspiracy tropes by accusing the SFSU administration of “collaborat[ing] with the Zionist designs to silence us… staff, faculty and community who view Israel (as I do) as a colonial, racist and occupying power…” and labeled the administration’s conduct as “the weaponizing of free speech in the service of Nazis, Zionists and other white supremacists…” In July 2019, she shared an image of a large banner exhorting “Zionism = Racism, Silence = Death, Palestine is a Queer Issue – Boycott! Divest! Sanction!”
Abdulhadi has repeatedly propagated anti-Semitic tropes accusing Jews of conspiring to orchestrate world affairs and of possessing dual loyalties—a slur implying that Jews have more loyalty to Israel than to America or other nations. In September 2020, the professor said on Facebook: “I think we need to go to [then U.S. vice presidential candidate] Kamala Harris and say to her: ‘…It’s not okay that some of our representatives actually have dual Israeli-U.S. passport. That’s not okay! That’s not okay!…”
While Abdulhadi uses the public resources of San Francisco State to promote her Jew hatred, she is notably less tolerant toward pro-Israel views. When former SFSU President Leslie Wong stated under public pressure that he welcomes Zionists at the University, Abdulhadi responded by equating Zionists with the KKK: “I’m waiting for him to say, white supremacists is welcome, KKK is welcome, David Horowitz is welcome, Richard Spenser is welcome, Neo-Nazis are welcome, homophobes are welcome, misogynists are welcome, why stop only at Zionists? Welcome them all. I mean bring the…whole club. Bring everybody who is right wing and racist, bring them to campus, why only stop at Zionists.”
Nor has any of this Jew hatred abated in recent years. On October 4th, just three days before Hamas barbarically killed and mutilated over a thousand Israeli civilians in an unprovoked attack, AMED posted a quote by SFSU Professor Tomomi Kinukawa on its official Facebook page calling on SFSU to “immediately sever its ties with the apartheid state of Israel, Zionist and white supremacist organizations, and private donors” and claiming that this step is necessary to “Restoring our academic freedom and ending violence and the hostile environments on our campus.” This statement demonizes and delegitimizes the world’s only Jewish state and also promotes the genocidal Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel that seeks to isolate it from the world community and ultimately to destroy it. The equivocation of Zionism with “white supremacy” is a common feature of Jew hatred, and also highly flawed as the majority of Jewish citizens of Israel are of Middle Eastern or North African descent.
In the months after Hamas’s barbaric October 7th attack, AMED intensified its efforts to support the terrorist group while demonizing Israel and the Jewish people. An October 12th post on the official AMED Facebook page highlights a local protest, exhorting “STAND WITH PALESTINE. STAND ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY. NO US AID FOR GENOCIDE!” The post continued by demonizing Israel for defending itself from the most deadly and brutal attack in its history: “In the past few days, the Zionist occupation has been relentlessly bombing Gaza and more than 1000 Palestinians, hundreds of them children, have been killed. This is a blatant attempt to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people. We demand an END to the genocide on Gaza!”
Later that month, AMED posted a statement from the group Feminists for Justice in Palestine accompanied by a note stating, “In the midst of the extreme violence against the people of Gaza, we are urging everyone to read and share [this statement].” The statement itself reads: “As the Israeli settler colonial genocidal onslaught against Gaza and the rest of Palestine continues, we reaffirm our unwavering solidarity with, and radical anticolonial support for, the Palestinian people and their ongoing resistance.” A clearer statement in support of Hamas would be harder to find.
During an online panel held by AMED in November on “Gaza: Genocide and Resistance,” AMED director Rabab Abdulhadi, one of the featured speakers, proclaimed: “This has been the worst massacre that is ongoing in order to exterminate and eliminate the Palestinian people, a task that Israel is not going to be able to succeed, but not without the cost, the human toll, of over 11,000 now, martyrs, half of them are children… Israel refusing to allow fuel, refusing to allow food, refusing to allow medical supplies, refusing to allow water, cutting off electricity and the internet, so even the suffering and the disasters that are going on in Gaza cannot reach the world.”
Abdulhadi continued, “All in all, this is a project of attempt to eliminate, and it is the Palestinian people, that the Zionist project has been trying [to eliminate] for over 100 years and Israel has been trying for over 75 years.” Given that charter of Hamas, which was elected to rule Gaza in 2006, literally calls for the destruction of Israel and the extermination of all its Jews, it is laughable that Abdulhadi imputes the same genocidal motive to Israel and the Zionist project which have only ever responded with force when their security has been threatened.
The blatant Jew hatred espoused by Professor Abdulhadi and her colleagues in the College of Ethnic Studies at SFSU earns them the top spot on the list of America’s worst Jew-hating academic departments.