Editor’s note: The David Horowitz Freedom Center is naming the “Top Ten Worst Schools that Support Terrorists.” Among the schools named to this list is San Francisco State University which joins the University of California-Berkeley, the University of California-Irvine, the University of Chicago, DePaul University, Brandeis University, Brooklyn College, and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Coinciding with the naming of SFSU to this list, the Freedom Center placed posters on the San Francisco State campus exposing the links between Students for Justice in Palestine and the terrorist organization Hamas, whose stated goal is the destruction of the Jewish state.
As
revealed in recent congressional testimony, Students for Justice in Palestine is a campus front for Hamas terrorists. SJP’s propaganda activities are orchestrated and funded by a Hamas front group, American Muslims for Palestine, whose chairman is Hatem Bazian and whose principals are former officers of the Holy Land Foundation and other Islamic “charities” previously convicted of funneling money to Hamas. The report and posters are part of a larger Freedom Center campaign titled
Stop University Support for Terrorists. Images of the posters that appeared at SFSU and other campuses may be viewed at
www.stopuniversitysupportforterrorists.org.
San Francisco State University
San Francisco State University (SFSU) has the distinction of being singled out by Jewish students and community members with a lawsuit in U.S. district court charging that “it has systematically supported these departments and student groups as they have doggedly organized their efforts to target, threaten, and intimidate Jewish students on campus and deprive them of their civil rights and their ability to feel safe and secure as they pursue their education.” This claim is borne out by SFSU’s record of enabling the anti-Semitism and threatening behavior of the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS), an SJP surrogate group which has repeatedly terrorized pro-Israel speakers and students—including Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat—by shouting exhortations to terrorist violence and succeeded in curtailing his address. At Barkat’s speech, demonstrators shouted “Intifada,” a call for terrorism against Israel, and chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” a call for the obliteration of the Jewish state. The former president of GUPS wrote dozens of social media posts threatening violence to pro-Israel students, Israelis, the IDF and others. He also praised Hamas and the violent Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). While he was eventually kicked off campus, GUPS continues to propagandize for Hamas and harass Jewish students at SFSU.
Supporting Evidence:
In June 2017, Jewish students at SFSU together with members of the local community
filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court against SFSU and the trustees of California State University charging that SFSU has fostered a hostile environment for Jewish students on campus who are “often afraid to wear Stars of David or yarmulkes on campus, and regularly text their friends to describe potential safety issues.” The lawsuit was prompted in part by an incident in April 2016 when a speech by the mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, was disrupted by anti-Israel protestors who chanted “Intifada” (a call for violence and terrorism against Israel) and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” (a statement urging the genocide of Israel’s Jews). During this incident, university administrators told campus police to “stand down” and allowed the protest to continue.
The suit filed against the University claims, “SFSU has not merely fostered and embraced anti-Jewish hostility — it has systematically supported these departments and student groups as they have doggedly organized their efforts to target, threaten, and intimidate Jewish students on campus and deprive them of their civil rights and their ability to feel safe and secure as they pursue their education.” The suit also specifically names
SFSU professor Rabab Abdulhadi, the director of SFSU’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora Initiative (AMED) and the faculty advisor for SFSU’s Hamas-supporting GUPS chapter, who has a long history of supporting terrorists and their allies.
In April 2017, GUPS held a
commemoration of the “Nakba,” a term used by Hamas and its allies to describe the creation of Israel as a “catastrophe.” Signs and advertisements for the event stated “Never Forget, Never Forgive,” and called for the Palestinian’s “Right of Return” which would mean the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state, one of Hamas’s chief aims.
In March 2017, GUPS again brought the anti-Israel hatefest
“Israeli Apartheid Week” to campus. This year’s festivities featured a mock checkpoint and a “political discussion and film screening” at which a large
banner was featured stating the Hamas libel that “Zionism is racism.”
SFSU GUPS held a March 2017
event on “Israeli Policies in Relation to the Trump Era” at which they attempted to smear both the Trump administration and the Jewish state. The event description
claimed “Since the settler colonial project of Israel was established as a state in 1948, the Israel government has used ‘security’ as a pretext to further oppressive and racist policies and practices against the Palestinians. This include[s]… building an Apartheid Wall…a racist ID system… and torture, resulting in the policing, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.”Israel’s “apartheid wall” is actually a security fence that has saved thousands of Jewish lives by preventing Palestinian terrorists from entering.
GUPS deliberately and maliciously
excluded SFSU Hillel from a February 2017 campus fair on the topic of human rights which they helped to organize by changing the registration dates after they had been announced to the public and then claiming the fair was at capacity when in reality many empty tables remained.
In September 2016, GUPS held a
campus event to commemorate “one of the hundreds of massacres committed on the Palestinian people: Sabra and Shatila.” A Facebook post about the event claimed that “we hold the United States and Israel for the continue repressions among our communities from police killing black and brown men and women to the Assad regime slaughtering Syrians. If we were to commemorate every massacre in Palestinian history, having an event every single day of the year would still not be enough.” Large
signs displayed at the event falsely accused Israel of “settler colonialism” and “ethnic cleansing.” The Sabra and Shatila massacres were carried out by the Lebanese Christian Phalange party as a retaliation for the murder of the president of Lebanon, Bashir Gemayel, by Palestinian terrorists.
In April 2016, SFSU
hosted a tour created by National SJP called “Right 2 Education,” featuring two speakers from Birzeit University in Palestine. Birzeit is well known for hosting Hamas rallies and Hamas recently beat out rival party Fatah in student elections there. During the
event, the student speakers
defended terrorism claiming that acts such as knife attacks on unarmed civilians were merely efforts to “bring attention” to the alleged plight of Palestinians. The speakers praised the genocidal BDS campaign against Israel, and attempted to delegitimize the Israeli state by falsely claiming that Jews “fabricate our history to make it look like they have a right to exist in our country” and that “Israel was built to be a racist state.”
The SFSU General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS)
disrupted an April 2016 speech by the Mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, by shouting exhortations to terrorist violence and succeeded in curtailing his address. SFSU students involved in the protest entered the auditorium carrying Palestinian flags and wearing checkered kaffiyehs which are associated with anti-Israel terrorism. The demonstrators then proceeded to shout “Intifada,” and chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” a slogan falsely claiming that Israel is Palestine (Israel is bounded by the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea) and should be destroyed.
When SFSU President Wong called for an investigation into the protestors who shut down Barkat’s speech, GUPS
responded by calling Wong’s request an “attack on pro-Palestine protestors” that “criminalize[s] anti-racist speech on campus.”
In Februry 2016, GUPS at SFSU held a
rally in solidarity with Mohammed Al-Qeeq, a Palestinian journalist who was arrested and detained by Israel. According to the
Associated Press, “Israel’s Shin Bet security service says al-Qeeq is involved in terrorism activities linked to the militant Hamas movement.”
In October 2015, GUPS at SFSU promoted a
community protest on its Facebook page supporting terrorism and the Hamas goal of destroying Israel. GUPS’s endorsement stated in part: “The General Union of Palestine Students – GUPS-SFSU supports the uprisings in Palestine! We Stand with our Brothers and Sisters in the streets, and we will find victory! … End to the Zionist State! End to the killings of our Men, Women and Children in cold blood! End to the colonist empire! We will not be silenced!”
In September 2015, GUPS at SFSU held a
protest and die-in called “From Sabra to Syria: My Homeland is not a Suitcase.” One student lay on the ground holding a mock Israeli flag with “Stop Settler Colonialism” scrawled across it, an echo of the Hamas claim that the Jews have “colonized” Palestine, a blatant historical falsehood, since the land on which Israel was created belonged to the Turks (who are neither Arabs nor Palestinians) for 400 years previously.
GUPS at SFSU held an event in May 2015 to
commemorate the “Nakba,” an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe” that Hamas and its supporters use to describe the creation of Israel. A poster for the event stated “67 years later al-nakba continues. Join GUPS in honoring Palestinian resilience.”
In April 2015, GUPS at SFSU held
“Israeli Apartheid Week” on campus. The poster for the event stated, “Together we rise against colonialism,” repeating Hamas’s propaganda lie that the (non-existent) Arab nation of “Palestine” was colonized by Jews. The event included the
display of a mock “apartheid wall” painted with anti-Israel propaganda.
In the Fall of 2014, SFSU Professor Rabab Abdulhadi, faculty advisor to GUPS, who had previously taken a university-sponsored trip to the Middle East where she met with terrorists Leila Khaled and Sheikh Raed Salah,
posted on her Facebook page, “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.” The Anti-Defamation League (ADL)
has written of An-Najah University, “Today the student council of An-Najah is known for its advocacy of anti-Israel violence and its recruitment of Palestinian college students into terrorist groups. The council, almost completely controlled by factions loyal to Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah, glorifies suicide bombings and propagandizes for jihad against Israel. Hamas has described An-Najah as a ‘greenhouse for martyrs.’”
In November 2014, GUPS at SFSU
held the 7
th Annual Edward Said
Mural Celebration. Among the event’s speakers was UC Berkeley professor and Hamas agent,
Hatem Bazian, former leader of GUPS, ag and co-founder of Students for Justice in Palestine. Bazian, during speech at an anti-war rally in San Francisco in 2004, called for an “Intifada” in America: “Well, we’ve been watching [an]
Intifada in Palestine, we've been watching an uprising in Iraq [against the United States], and the question is 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 changes 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!”
In February 2014, SFSU General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) 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 include: 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…” “I think about killing a lot. And some of you are usually the targets of my daydreams J.” “You know what? Israelis ARE colonizers, there is literally no way around it. And you know what else? My heroes have always killed colonizers. I literally see nothing wrong with this. And my only regret is that not all colonizers were killed.”
In response to a poster that asked “how can I help actively support Palestine,” Hammad responded “Buy a keffieyh. Learn to tie it around your head…get in touch with some PFLP militants or arms dealers in the West Bank. Learn IDF patrol routes…BOOM.” “Let’s play a game. Objective: Kill U.S. Soldiers. Goal: world peace.” “The number of times I have legitimately considered flying back to the Middle East and joining the armed wing of the PFLP or something is surprisingly high.” “I think about the time I tried to be - moderate - and advocate for non-violence and honestly I just want to go back in time and slit my own throat/and then the throats of all my enemies before they grow up into the shits they are today.” “Oh/And tomorrow is [hopefully] the day that I find out if I will be the President of the General Union of Palestine at my school/...Hopefully I'll be able to radicalize half of our population and bring them back with me as fighters.”
After Jewish groups and the media
exposed his postings, Hammad eventually left campus and was placed under investigation by the Joint Terrorism Task Force and the FBI.
During a December 2013
“emergency rally” held by GUPS at SFSU, the phrase “My Heroes Have Always Killed Colonizers” was written with chalk on the concrete stage at Malcolm X Plaza. The same phrase, referring to the Hamas assertion that Jews have colonized Arab Palestine and must be exterminated, was also written on a sign at a display table during the “Edward Said Mural Celebration.”
Said was a Columbia professor who was a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s Palestinian National Council until 1991 when he resigned because he thought the terrorist Yasser Arafat’s policies were too moderate towards Israel.
Posts
“My heroes have always killed colonizers.”
In October 2015, GUPS at SFSU promoted a community protest on its Facebook page supporting terrorism and the Hamas goal of destroying Israel. GUPS’s endorsement stated in part: “The General Union of Palestine Students – GUPS-SFSU supports the uprisings in Palestine! We Stand with our Brothers and Sisters in the streets, and we will find victory! … End to the Zionist State! End to the killings of our Men, Women and Children in cold blood! End to the colonist empire! We will not be silenced!”