The Top Ten Jew-Hating and Terror-Promoting Professors

Editor’s note:

The following report released today by the David Horowitz Freedom Center exposes and ranks ten professors who have abused their academic positions by promoting blood libels against Jews and Americans as “colonial settlers” and imperialist aggressors through university events, classroom diatribes, and academic publications. They have utilized university resources to spread terrorist propaganda, and promote the genocidal Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

The existence of these professors reflects not only on these individuals but on the institutions that support them. The presence of an Israel- and America-hating front on America’s college campuses is an ominous development and a clear threat to America’s future.

Read the full report on the Top Ten Jew-Hating and Terror-Promoting Professors below. 

 

#1: Hatem Bazian, University of California-Berkeley
#2: Rabab Abdulhadi, San Francisco State University
#3: Jasbir Puar, Rutgers University
#4: Joel Beinin, Stanford University
#5: Joseph Massad, Columbia University
#6: Yến Lê Espiritu, University of California-San Diego
#7: Saree Makdisi, University of California-Los Angeles
#8: Samer Alatout, University of Wisconsin-Madison
#9: Asad Abukhalil, California State University-Stanislaus
#10: Mohammed Abed, California State University-Los Angeles

Introduction

As the coronavirus crisis roils America, forcing closures of colleges and universities across the nation, anti-Semitism continues to take on new and disturbing dimensions. Jews and Zionists have been blamed for the spread of the virus.  In a report released in April, the Simon Wiesenthal Center noted that the COVID-19 epidemic has prompted a resurgence of “thousand-year-old prejudices demonizing Jews not just as Christ killers and Shylocks but as disease purveyors.”

The campus proponents of anti-Semitism and BDS have not suspended their anti-Semitic diatribes during this time of crisis. Unable to carry on with traditional “Israeli Apartheid Week” events on campus, National Students for Justice in Palestine—a campus hate group that receives funding from the terror group Hamas—has instead moved to a “virtual” Israeli Apartheid week. SJP is exploiting the worldwide pandemic to promote the false narrative that Israel will discriminate against Palestinian and Arab victims of coronavirus and to invoke centuries-old blood libel claims against the Jewish people. It is imperative that we do not allow these anti-Semitic lies to go unchallenged.

To combat the growing problem of campus anti-Semitism, and to respond to the “virtual” hate weeks organized by SJP, the David Horowitz Freedom Center is publishing the following report on The Top Ten Jew-Hating and Terror-Promoting Professors. The existence of these professors reflects not only on them but on the institutions that support them. The presence of an Israel and America-hating front on America’s college campuses is an ominous development and a clear threat to America’s future.

University faculty and administrators are indispensable spreaders of Jew-hatred and anti-American lies on campus. They provide the official resources of the University, both financial and academic, to promote fantastic libels against Jews and Americans as “colonial settlers” and imperialist aggressors through university events, classroom diatribes, and academic literature. They abuse their positions of authority over students in the classroom to spread terrorist propaganda, and promote the genocidal Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. They invite extremist, terrorist-supporting speakers to campus to speak at official university functions or as guest lecturers in class. One of the professors profiled in this report, Asad Abukhalil of California State University-Stanislaus, recently appropriated the coronavirus crisis to propagate a malicious conspiracy theory that Israel was planning to discriminate against Arab coronavirus victims by housing them in “mass prisons.” 

Israel and the Jews are the canaries in the mine. The real target of this hatred is America – the “Great Satan” to Israel’s “Little Satan” in the iconography of the Islamic terrorists. The following report describes the poisonous views of ten Jew-hating and terror-promoting professors who should have no place in the universities of a democracy, but unfortunately do.
 

#1: Hatem Bazian, University of California-Berkeley

UC-Berkeley Professor Hatem Bazian has an extensive history of Jew hatred, extending back to his days as a student at San Francisco State University where he served as president of the General Union of Palestinian Students, an extremist anti-Israel group that fomented a climate of anti-Semitism on campus. In 2001, while a graduate student at UC-Berkeley, Bazian co-founded the Hamas front group Students for Justice in Palestine to support the Second Palestinian Intifada. The Second Intifada introduced suicide bombing into the attacks on Israel’s citizens in September 2000.

In the nearly two decades since its founding, chapters of SJP have proliferated across the nation, and are now active on approximately 200 American college and university campuses, broadcasting Hamas propaganda and advocating the destruction of the Jewish state. Bazian also founded the Hamas front group American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) and serves as the chairman of its board. AMP funnels Hamas funds to SJP chapters on American campuses to aid the BDS movement to destroy Israel.

Throughout his academic career, Bazian has promoted classic anti-Semitic tropes and fostered Jew hatred. In May 2002, Bazian participated in a Middle Eastern “cultural assembly” at George Washington High School. Under his leadership, the event the was dedicated to extreme anti-Israel rhetoric including a student-sung rap song that compared Zionists to Nazis, which was accompanied by other students parading with Palestinian flags behind the performer. The high school sent out letters of apology after the event.

At a 2004 anti-war rally in San Francisco, Bazian called for an Intifada, or violent uprising, in America:

“Well, we’ve been watching [an] Intifada in Palestine, we’ve been watching an uprising in Iraq, and the question is that what are we doing? How come we don’t have an Intifada in this country? Because it seem[s] to me, that we are comfortable in where we are, watching CNN, ABC, NBC, Fox, and all these mainstream … giving us a window to the world while the world is being managed from Washington, from New York, from every other place in here in San Francisco: Chevron, Bechtel, [Carlyle?] Group, Halliburton; every one of those lying, cheating, stealing, deceiving individuals are in our country and we’re sitting here and watching the world pass by, people being bombed, and it’s about time that we have an Intifada in this country that change[s] fundamentally the political dynamics in here. And we know … they’re gonna say some Palestinian [is] being too radical. Well, you haven’t seen radicalism yet!”

More recently, in July 2017, Bazian retweeted an anti-Semitic meme which plays on classic tropes of Jewish blood libel and also compares Jews to the Nazis. The meme was originally tweeted by infamous anti-Semite Ron Hughes, whose account Bazian follows. It featured a photo of a man presumed to be Jewish, with Hasidic style curls, with the quoted statement:  “MOM LOOK! I IS CHOSEN! I CAN NOW KILL, RAPE, SMUGGLE ORGANS & AND STEAL THE LAND OF PALESTINIANS *YAY* ASHKE-NAZI”

Bazian has promoted the idea of a world Jewish conspiracy, telling student protestors on one occasion to “look at the Jewish names on the school buildings” and adding “Take a look at the type of names on the buildings around campus — Haas, Zellerbach — and decide who controls this university.” He has also called the U.S. Congress “an Israeli-occupied territory” and has suggested that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) controls U.S. foreign policy.

Professor Bazian’s Jew hatred extends to his role as an instructor. He now serves as a lecturer in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He also founded the Center for the Study of Documentation of Islamophobia on campus in 2009. The Toronto Sun reported in 2014 that Bazian requires students enrolled in his course on “Islamophobia” to create a Twitter account and tweet weekly on Islamophobia. “I can’t help but feel this is unethical,” commented a student taking the class. “This is his agenda not mine.”

The student noted that Bazian “excludes both the Twitter account requirement AND the final project from his official syllabus”—perhaps an indication that he is trying to conceal his use of the classroom to promote Jew hatred.

The controversial professor has repeatedly defended the anti-Israel terror group Hamas, tweeting an article which disputed Hamas’s status as a terrorist organization. The article claimed that “The Europeans who fought Nazism with arms were labeled ‘terrorist’ by Hitler. Hamas is fighting against the occupation of Palestinian lands and is labeled ‘terrorist.’” Bazian also spoke at a 2018 event hosted by American Muslims for Palestine and other Hamas-linked anti-Israel groups which promoted the cause of Hamas-affiliated insurgents who participated in the so-called “Great Return March,” which in truth was an attack on Israel’s borders.

Israel does not occupy one square inch of Palestinian or Arab land. It was built on land confiscated from the Turks who are neither Arabs nor Palestinians, and given to the Jews by the United Nations in 1948. The Arabs who were given 80% of the so-called Palestine Mandate promptly attacked the new Jewish state with the goal of “pushing the Jews into the sea.”
 

#2: Rabab Abdulhadi, San Francisco State University

On a campus already known for extremists and anti-Semites, Professor Rabab Abdulhadi serves as the public face of SFSU’s Jew hatred. To say that Abdulhadi is notorious is an understatement. She is a rabidly anti-Semitic professor of Ethnic Studies who also heads SFSU’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative (AMED), an academic program which flouts its anti-Semitism by openly declaring Zionism to be racism and Israel to be the occupier of Palestine. AMED is known for sponsoring events which feature posters reading, “My Heroes Have Always Killed Colonizers,” referring to Israel’s Jews.

Abdulhadi has glorified anti-Israel terrorism in public talks. A letter sent by a coalition of concerned Jewish groups to 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.

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 Zionist 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!”

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 SFSU President Leslie Wong was forced to clarify 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 is her promotion of Jew hatred limited in scope to SFSU’s campus. In a guest lecture in a UCLA anthropology class in the Spring of 2019, Abdulhadi equated Zionism with “white supremacy,” refusing to back down even when a Jewish student tearfully attempted to counter her vitriol.

Abdulhadi has also dedicated herself to encouraging the next generation of Jew haters. For several years she served as faculty advisor to SFSU’s chapter of the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS), an SJP surrogate group. During her tenure as faculty advisor, organization president Mohammad G. Hammad was exposed as having written a number of threatening social media posts describing his wish to attack students, teachers and Israeli soldiers and to ally himself with anti-Israel terrorists including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Hammad’s posts included a photo of himself holding a large knife with the caption, “I seriously cannot 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…”. Hammad was investigated for terrorism by the FBI.
 

#3. Jasbir Puar, Rutgers University

Professor Jasbir Puar serves as an Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University and also directs the University’s Graduate Program for the Women’s and Gender Studies Department. She has repeatedly used her academic position to promote the Hamas-funded Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, an anti-Semitic plot to weaken and ultimately destroy the Jewish state. She also serves as an Advisory Board member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI), which is directed at Israeli universities and cultural institutions.

Puar has defended violent acts of terrorism against Israelis, labeling them acts of “resistance” and stating that “we need BDS as part of organized resistance and armed resistance in Palestine as well.” This is just an Orwellian inversion of the truth, since the so-called “resistance” is a genocidal aggression whose goal is the destruction of the Jewish state.

The controversial professor has also promoted classic anti-Semitic tropes such as accusing Israelis of harvesting the organs of Palestinians, intentionally maiming them, and stunting the growth of Palestinians by limiting the availability of food and resources to them, a strategy that Puar describes as a “biopolitical tactic that seeks to render impotent any future resistance.”

In a speech at Vassar College in 2016, Puar claimed that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) was responsible for “more than 120 deaths by field assassinations of young Palestinian men, largely between the ages of 12 to 16,” without mentioning how those young men perpetrated terrorist violence, including stabbings, against Israelis. She also claimed that the nation of Israel had “mined for organs for scientific research” from the Palestinian population.

Puar’s recent book, Right to Maim, repeats these anti-Semitic and blatantly false accusations, accusing Israel of “creating injury and maintaining Palestinian populations as perpetually debilitated, and yet alive, in order to control them” and also claiming that children are a “prime target” of Israel, when in fact the IDF goes to extreme lengths to avoid injury to children and civilians despite Hamas’s use of civilians and particularly children as human shields.

While many anti-Israel advocates deceitfully insist that their demonization of Zionism is not anti-Semitic, Puar herself has conflated Zionists and Jews, referring to Jews as “Zios” in a Facebook exchange with another faculty member. That same term, “Zios,” is commonly used by former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke to refer to the Jews.
 

#4: Joel Beinin, Stanford University

Joel Beinin is a Professor of Middle East History at Stanford University and a founding member of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a radical anti-Israel group that attempts to provide what has been described as “a façade of Jewish legitimacy” to the genocidal Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

While president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), Beinin abused his position of authority to promote the inclusion of anti-Semitic class “exercises” in high school textbooks which portrayed a conflict between “advantaged” Jews and “disadvantaged” Palestinian Arabs.

Beinin’s “scholarship” is long on Hamas propaganda and short on facts. He claimed in an interview that “Israel has been the aggressor for most of its historical existence” and that Israel “aggressively attacked its neighbors in 1956, in 1967, in 1982” while failing to acknowledge that in each instance Israel was responding to unprovoked aggressions and attacks on its existence by the Arab dictatorships which surround it. He has also claimed absurdly that “the U.S. government has given Israel nearly one trillion dollars” in military aid since 1948, a number he appears to have pulled out of his hat.

A passionate advocate for the Hamas-funded BDS movement against Israel, Beinin supported a BDS resolution at Stanford in 2015 and is also a signatory to letters promoting the academic and cultural boycott of Israel, an extension of the anti-normalization policy promoted by Hamas. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Beinin has also served as a featured speaker for Israeli Apartheid Week at UC-Berkeley, another slander against the Jewish state which is the only society in the Middle East that is integrated.

Throughout his career, the radical professor has found myriad ways of minimizing and justifying Palestinian terrorism against Israel, while condemning Israel’s legitimate defense. Beinin described the First Palestinian Intifada (1988-92) as a “strike for peace” against Israeli oppression and lauded “the first martyr of the uprising” while downplaying attacks on Israeli citizens as a “small number of violent incidents.”

In his 1990 book on the Israel/Palestinian conflict, titled, Was the Red Flag Flying There?, Beinin defended the Intifada on the grounds that it was the “Palestinians’ primary weapon of resistance” against the alleged “colonialist thrust of the Zionist project.” He also justified Palestinian terrorism, labeled euphemistically as “armed struggle,” as an “understandable error for people who felt themselves otherwise powerless.” Beinin even attempted to pin the 9/11 terror attacks on the Jewish state, claiming in an October 2001 column in the Jordan Times that “Israel’s disproportionate use of force in attempting to suppress the Palestinian uprising” was partly responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

Consistent with this tendency to minimize and whitewash anti-Israel terrorism, Beinin frequently uses the word “moderate” to allude to Islamic extremists including Hamas operative Adnan Asfur who Beinin describes as “generally considered a moderate within Hamas.”  Asfur has promoted terror attacks against Israeli civilians and has been arrested at least 16 times. Yet, Beinin considers him a “moderate.”

The Stanford professor has repeatedly characterized Jews and Israelis using historically anti-Semitic tropes, claiming that “visceral hatred” and “open bloodthirstiness” were “common” in Israeli society. Beinin was a signatory to a 2002 open letter suggesting that Israel would use the war in Iraq to engage in “ethnic cleansing” against Palestinians—an event which never happened. Beinin also falsely claimed that Israelis have conducted “pogroms” against Arabs in East Jerusalem and has also called Israeli teenagers “Nazis,” a characterization more appropriately applied to Hamas terrorists who openly proclaim the destruction of Israel and its Jews as their goal. Beinin has also labeled the Israeli government “fascist terrorists,” while defending Hamas’s use of civilian human shields, stating, “Of course Hamas hides among civilians. Gaza’s a very small, densely populated place. Where else are they going to hide?” Hamas has placed its military headquarters in hospitals, and its rocket sites in urban neighborhoods.
 

#5: Joseph Massad, Columbia University

Joseph Massad is a Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia who has imposed his anti-Semitic views on generations of Columbia students.

The forms of anti-Semitism promoted by Professor Massad are numerous. He denies the Jewish people’s historical connection to Israel, he propagates the lie that Israel is a “racist settler colony” and he has repeatedly compared Jews to Nazis. He is also a staunch advocate for the Hamas-funded Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, a genocidal campaign to weaken and ultimately destroy Israel. In a widely quoted speech given at Oxford University in 2002, Massad denied that Israel had a right to exist, claiming “The Jews are not a nation… The Jewish state is a racist state that does not have a right to exist.” This is the language of Nazism.

Massad has also issued not-so-subtle endorsements of Palestinian terror attacks on Israel, stating in a 2002 lecture that Israel is “a Jewish supremacist and racist state,” and adding that “[e]very racist state should be destroyed.” “It is only by making the costs of Jewish supremacy too high that Israeli Jews will give it up,” Massad said in another address. The professor has also stated that the “resistance of Palestinians”—“resistance” is a well-known euphemism for terrorism— must extend to Israel’s “civil institutions” and he has referred to Palestinian terrorists as “anti-colonial resisters.”

In 2004, Massad was one of several Columbia professor profiled in the film Columbia Unbecoming which was produced by the David Project. The film exposed Massad’s anti-Semitic commentary in the classroom and his intimidation of pro-Israel students. According to witnesses interviewed in the film, Massad asked a Jewish student who had formerly served in the Israeli Defense Forces “How many Palestinians have you killed?” and he ordered a female student to leave his class because she asserted the indisputable fact that – unlike Palestinian terrorists – Israel warns Palestinian civilians before launching attacks. In 2011, another Jewish student reported that she was discouraged by a Barnard Professor from enrolling in Massad’s class because it might be “uncomfortable” for her—an indication that the professor’s Jew-hatred extends to the students in his classroom.

Massad’s extensive catalogue of written work provides ample evidence of his Jew hatred and his sympathy for Islamic terrorism directed against the Jewish state. In a May 2013 editorial for Al Jazeera titled “The Last of the Semites,” Massad falsely declared that Jewish claims to Israel as their homeland originated only during the Protestant Reformation and argued that Zionism itself is anti-Semitic and a policy promoted by the Nazis.

The Nazis “not only killed 90 percent of European Jews, but in the process also killed the majority of Jewish enemies of Zionism who died precisely because they refused to heed the Zionist call of abandoning their countries and homes,” Massad claims in the piece. Of course, Jews who heeded the Zionist call to return to the Jewish homeland would have survived the Holocaust. Massad also advances the absurd notion that “the only remaining ‘Semites’ who are fighting against Zionism and its anti-Semitism today are the Palestinian people.” Palestinians, of course, have waged a 70-year war to destroy the Jewish state and push its Jews into the sea – which is what the struggle against the self-determination of the Jews – Zionism – is actually about. There are 57 Islamic states, but one Jewish state is one too many for Nazi professors like Mossad.

These anti-Semitic tropes are a common theme running throughout Massad’s writings. In a 2003 essay he wrote that “the ultimate achievement of Israel” is “the transformation of the Jew into the anti-Semite, and the Palestinian into the Jew” and in 2004 he claimed preposterously that “the real victims of Western anti-Semitism are Arabs and Muslims… and no longer Jews.” The Arabs and Muslims oppressed in the Middle East are oppressed by Arab and Muslim dictatorships like those which rule the West Bank and Gaza.
 

#6: Yến Lê Espiritu, University of California-San Diego

Yến Lê Espiritu is a Hamas-loving “Distinguished Professor of Ethnic Studies” at the University of California-San Diego, and was formerly chair of the University’s Ethnic Studies Department. And unlike some of her Jew-hating colleagues, she makes no secret of her sympathies for terrorists. A recent profile in the American Spectator notes that “Espiritu’s office door is adorned with posters glorifying Hamas and accusing Israel of engaging in apartheid” – a Hitlerian lie about a country whose Palestinian citizens have more rights and privileges than the inhabitants of any of the Islamic dictatorships in the Middle East, including those which rule the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Unsurprisingly, Professor Espiritu also has a reputation for biased and one-sided instruction in the classroom and a blatant intolerance for students with pro-Israel views. A student who took her course, “Circulations of Difference: Introduction to Ethnic Studies,” described it as a course designed to delegitimize the existence of Israel and also the United States.

“Espiritu believes that Israel and the United States are colonialist nations. She is adamant – despite thousands of years of recorded evidence – that Jews have no connection to the land of Israel,” the student reported to the Haym Salomon Center.

“She is so adamant about her own views that students fear voicing a different opinion,” added the student, who chose to remain anonymous. “If you support Israel or show patriotism for the United States, expect to be lambasted by her. These are perspectives she would never tolerate.”

In case her own brand of Jew-hatred is not enough to sway her students, Espiritu is fond of bringing in equally anti-Semitic guest speakers to support her bigoted views. In March 2018, Espiritu brought in UCSD doctoral candidate Leslie Quintanilla to address her class. Quintanilla serves as a leader in the Palestinian Youth Movement and is also an assistant professor in the Chicano Studies Department at San Diego City Colleges.

Quintanilla used her presentation time in Espiritu’s class to launch a diatribe against America and Israel, slandering both countries as being founded on “settler colonial violence” – a favorite anathema of the collegiate left – and “a similar strategy of genocide and indigenous removal from indigenous lands.” Of course Jews are the actual indigenous people of the land around the Jordan. When a student referred to a map showing Israel by its correct name, she exclaimed “No! You are breaking my heart.”

Espiritu also signed a letter to the regents of the University of California, objecting to their characterization of “anti-Zionism” as a form of “intolerance” – a more accurate description would be a form of Nazism.
 

#7: Saree Makdisi, University of California-Los Angeles

Saree Makdisi is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA and an outspoken advocate for the Hamas-funded Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, a genocidal plot to weaken and destroy the world’s only Jewish state. Makdisi supports a one-state solution and promotes the Palestinian “right of return” which would eliminate Israel as a Jewish nation. “What’s wrong with Jews being a minority” in Israel, he has asked. Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority of course has declared that there will be “no Jews” in a liberated Palestine.

A nephew of the notorious Israel-hating professor Edward Said, Makdisi has repeatedly and enthusiastically promoted anti-Israel Hamas propaganda in numerous articles published on websites such as Mondoweiss, Salon, Electronic Intifada, and the Los Angeles Times. In a 2014 op-ed, he defended the labeling of Israel as an “apartheid state” although Palestinian Israelis sit in the Knesset and on Israel’s Supreme Court. He further claimed that Israel maintains “a systematic, vigilantly policed separation of the two populations and utter contempt for the principle of equality” – accusations that are transparently false.

A prolific user of social media, Makdisi is known for defaming Zionists as “Ziotrolls” and mocking claims about the Jewish people’s thousand year ties to Israel. Makdisi has no respect for the truth. According to the Canary Mission, “Makdisi often lies, in articles and on social media, that Israel is an ‘apartheid’ state… In a January 2016 Los Angeles Times article, where he advocated for an academic boycott of Israel, Makdisi showcased the use of debunked statistics that he uses to bolster his claims.”

Makdisi has frequently promoted anti-Semitic tropes and libels in his public writings and addresses. Speaking at a 2009 UCLA event on “Human Rights and Gaza,” Makdisi claimed that Israel attempts to starve, kill and stunt the growth of Palestinian children in Gaza as a matter of “deliberate premeditated, totally thought through [Israeli] state policy.” Such blood libels are a classic form of anti-Semitism. He also claimed falsely that Israel uses white phosphorus and uranium to target the people of Gaza.

The UCLA professor has also demonized Israel (another classic form of anti-Semitism), condemning Israel for responding to rocket attacks from Hamas and characterizing this defense as “the slaughter of innocents in Gaza.” In addition to promoting the wider BDS movement, Makdisi has also endorsed the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI). Perhaps most ominously for a professor who ought to defend free speech on campus, Makdisi testified in court in defense of the “Irvine 11,” a group of anti-Israel members of the Muslim Student Union who were arrested for repeatedly and maliciously disrupting a campus address by former Israeli ambassador Michael Oren at UC-Irvine.
 

#8: Samer Alatout, University of Wisconsin-Madison

As an associate professor of Community and Environmental Sociology at UW-Madison, Samer Alatout uses his academic position and credentials to promote Jew hatred and the Hamas-funded Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

Alatout has spoken in support of BDS at events organized by the anti-Israel hate group Students for Justice in Palestine and has repeatedly demonized the Jewish state on social media by describing Israel as an “apartheid” nation and falsely claiming that Israel is conducting “ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”

The professor is a signatory to multiple letters supporting various forms of the BDS movement against Israel including an Open Letter on Gaza and BDS from the Middle East Caucus of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies which characterizes Gaza as “the largest ‘open air prison’ in the world” and accuses the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) of using “indiscriminate and disproportionate violence” against the civilian population of Gaza during “Operation Protective Edge.” In truth, this operation was a defensive action on the part of the IDF to protect Israel from Hamas’s constant missile, mortar, and rocket attacks on its civilian population centers. These attacks were the Palestinians’ response to Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 as a unilateral gesture of peace.

Professor Alatout has also endorsed the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI), a particularly insidious branch of the genocidal BDS movement that aims to isolate Israel academically and culturally. He also signed a petition to support the American Studies Association’s (ASA) highly controversial resolution resolution calling for an academic boycott of Israel. And he signed his name to the “Campaign to Boycott the Oral History Conference at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.” That document asserted that “while all Israeli universities are deeply complicit in the occupation, settler-colonialism, and apartheid, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is particularly noteworthy.” Such lies demonizing the world’s only Jewish state, are expressions of classic Jew-hatred which should have been buried with the Nazi regime but unfortunately were not.

Alatout also signed a petition to defend disgraced former University of Illinois Professor Steven Salaita. That university withdrew an offer of employment that had been made to Salaita because of vehemently anti-Semitic tweets made by the professor. One of these statements, posted in the wake of Hamas’s kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens, read, “You may be too refined to say it, but I’m not: I wish all the f**king West Bank settlers would go missing.”
 

#9: Asad Abukhalil, California State University-Stanislaus

Asad Abukhalil is a rabid anti-Semite and professor of political science at California State University-Stanislaus. Although he has long possessed a reputation as a Jew-hating academic, the professor recently achieved a new level of notoriety by taking advantage of the coronavirus crisis to propagate a malicious conspiracy theory that Israel was planning to discriminate against Arab coronavirus victims by housing them in “mass prisons.” 

“Israel will — I am sure — have different medical procedures for Jews and non-Jews. Non-Jews will be put in mass prisons,” Abukhalil tweeted. This was an especially offensive lie since Israel is legendary for providing medical help to its worst enemies, including the Hamas leader in the Gaza strip.

After numerous responses from both Jews and non-Jews disputing these false allegations, Abukhalil claimed that he had only been “mocking Israeli racism” and that “Zionist hoodlums” had unfairly reported his post to twitter alleging anti-Semitism.  He also claimed—contrary to historical fact—that Israel was “founded atop the Palestinian nation.” The “Palestinian nation” is a concept invented in 1963, fifteen years after Israel’s creation on land that had belonged to the Turks who are not Arabs, let alone Palestinians, for four hundred years previously. “Palestinian nation” is an invention of Arab imperialists to make their aggressions against the Jews seem like acts of “resistance” by innocent victims. It is the Big Lie of the Arab cause.

Abukhalil’s many tweets showcase his rampant anti-Semitism. He has compared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to various Nazi leaders, writing in a 2015 tweet, “Trump and Netanyahu are different in the same way that Hitler was different from Goebbels” – a sentence that makes no sense except as an expression of hatred towards the individuals in question and their peoples.

Abukhalil is an ardent supporter of the genocidal terrorist-orchestrated Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. Unlike many of his Jew-hating colleagues, Abukhalil doesn’t attempt to disguise the true aim of BDS which is to destroy Israel. In a February 17, 2012 article, Abukhalil wrote: “the real aim of BDS is to bring down the state of Israel.” He also noted his agreement with disgraced professor and Holocaust denier Norman Finkelstein that the destruction of Israel “should be stated as an unambiguous goal.”

The CSU professor has repeatedly condoned Palestinian violence and terrorism, claiming that Palestinian Arab massacres of Jews before the founding of Israel were merely “violent resistance” and that such actions when taken by the Islamic terror organization Hezbollah had proven a better and more effective strategy than peace negotiations with Israel. He has also declared that terrorist George Habash, founder of the terror organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and known as “the godfather of Middle East terrorism,” is one of his greatest inspirations.
 

#10: Mohammed Abed, California State University-Los Angeles

Mohammed Abed is a tenure-track Professor of Philosophy at CSU-LA and a longtime activist and speaker for the Hamas-funded campus hate group Students for Justice in Palestine. He has used his academic credentials to lend credence to false and genocidal attacks on Israel.

Professor Abed is a member of the Palestinian Right to Return Coalition Al-Awda which seeks the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state and also endorses the Hamas slogan “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea” — a genocidal call for Israel’s destruction since the river and the sea are Israel’s eastern and western boundaries. Abed was a workshop leader at the pro-terrorist Palestine Solidarity Movement’s national conferences in 2003 and 2004. During the 2004 event, Abed helped organize a seminar with Al-Awda co-founder Mazin Qumsiyeh, who told the assembled audience that “Zionism is a disease” and that “Nazi-Zionist collaboration” helped to bring about the Holocaust.

In 2010 Abed spoke at the University of Southern California’s Israeli Apartheid Week at which students were urged to “Buy a USC Intifada shirt.” An intifada is a violent uprising perpetrated by the Palestinians against Israel’s Jews; many Israeli civilians, including women and children were targeted and killed during the previous two intifadas.

While a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Abed wrote his PhD. dissertation on the “study of suicide bombing and ethics of self-sacrifice” and questioned whether suicide bombing might “have some feature that could be considered morally laudable.”

Professor Abed has endorsed the United States Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI), an anti-Semitic campaign to isolate Israel academically and culturally, and at one time was a member of its Organizing Collective. He has frequently promoted the larger Hamas-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel in his public speeches and writings.

The Cal State Professor has also resorted to demonizing Israel through transparent lies on multiple occasions, in itself a form of anti-Semitism. He has accused Israel of “genocide,” “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” and committing “state terrorism against Palestinian civilians.” At the same time, Abed is more than ready to rationalize Palestinian violence against Israel. He defended the 2010 “Gaza Freedom Flotilla” which was found by a United Nations commission to be an attempt to initiate an organized, violent confrontation with the Israeli military. Abed however wrote that “the Israelis had no right to attack [the flotilla]. Doing so was a naked act of aggression…only the activists on board the flotilla can legitimately claim self-defense as their cause and as a means of explaining their actions.” He concluded that the “activists on board the Gaza flotilla …should be praised.”