Dr. Hatem Bazian is a native Palestinian who is currently asenior lecturerin the Near Eastern and Ethnic Studies Departments atUC Berkeley. During his academic career, he hastaughtcourses on such subjects as Islam, Islamic Law, Sufism, Arabic,Middle Eastern Studies,Islam in America,Islamophobia, and “TheOthering of Islam.” Bornin the West Bank city of Nablus, Bazian attended high school in Amman, Jordan. He then immigrated to the United States and earned bachelor's degrees in both International Relations and Speech & Communication atSan Francisco State University(SFSU). He subsequently received an M.A. in International Relations, also from SFSU, in the late 1980s.
During that same time period, Bazian was electedpresidentof SFSU's Associated Students and its Student Union Governing Board. He alsobecamepresidentof the General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS), which, under Bazian's leadership in late 1987—when theFirst Palestinian Intifadawas in high gear—rejected an invitation from SFSU's Jewish Student Action Committee (JSAC) to forge a local "peace treaty." As Statemaster.comexplains: "JSAC had proposed a two-state solution exchanging land for peace, similar to that which was eventually proposed under the Oslo Agreement. JSAC had hoped that the two groups working together could provide a representative example of peaceful co-existence. [The] GUPS rejection was prominently featured in the student newspaper." At the national conference of theUnited States Student Association(USSA) held at UC Berkeley in 1988, Bazian co-led a large-scale walkout that ultimately caused the organization to adopt a resolution mandating that at leasthalfof its board-of-directors' members thenceforth should be “students of color.”
In the late Eighties, Bazian waselectedas a chairman of the National People of Color Student Coalition and an executive board member of the USSA. In both of those roles, he became an outspoken advocate ofaffirmative action, the Central American Solidarity Movement (which supported communism in that region of the world), and anti-(South African)-apartheid activism on college campuses. Bazian also authoredresolutions, which the USSA national conference adopted in 1991, calling for: (a) cuts to American aid to Israel, and (b) the imposition of sanctions against the United States for selling military equipment to South Africa. Bazian continued to actively support Pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel groups at SFSU throughout the early 1990s. As his influence on campus grew, Jewish studentsreportedthat Bazian was helping to foment a palpable climate of hate which was contributing to a rising number of anti-Semitic incidents. Among other things, Bazian was openly hostile toward Hillel, the leading Jewish campus group in America. He onceblockedthe appointment of a Jewish student to SFSU's Student Judicial Council, on grounds that the individual supported the state of Israel and was therefore, by definition, a racist. And on another occasion, Bazian, angered by the fact that some Jewish students had complained about his unbridled anti-Semitism, participated in anassaulton the offices of theGolden Gaterstudent newspaper, which Bazian claimed was a haven for Jewish spies.
Beginning in April 1993, Bazian worked a brief stint aseditor-in-chiefofDiscourse Magazine, a monthly progressive publication based in San Francisco.
When a local artistin May 1994defacedthe SFSU Student Union building with a mural of the late Malcolm X's face surrounded by dollar signs, Stars of David, and skulls-and-crossbones,Bazianorganizeda press conference inside that very building to voice support for the mural. Jewish students were forcibly excluded from the event.
Terrorism expert and authorSteven Emerson, in his bookAmerican Jihad,quotesBazian sermonizing at a May 1999American Muslim Allianceconference where he advocated the creation of an Islamic State of Palestine and the slaughter of Jews. Excerpts from the quote read: “In the Hadith, the Day of Judgment will never happen until you fight the Jews. They are on the west side of the river, which is the Jordan River, and you're on the east side until the trees and stones will say, 'oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him!' And that's in the Hadith about this, this is a future battle before the Day of Judgment.”
During his years with MSA, Bazian grew tobelievethat the organization's open identification as a Muslim entity hampered its efforts to inspire widespread student interest and involvement. Thus in 2001 he co-founded the broaderStudents for Justice in Palestine(SJP), which addressed not only what were perceived to be Muslim concerns, but also a pressing human-rights issue that purportedly merited the attention of all socially conscious young people. SJP presented itself as a secular social-justice group whose agenda just happened, coincidentally, to mirror that of the Muslim Brotherhood. In the aftermath of 9/11, Bazianco-hostedIslam Today, a weekly California radio program devoted to Muslim issues around the world.
Bazianreceived hisPh.D.in Philosophy and Islamic Studies from UC Berkeley in 2002, and then beganlecturingthere almost immediately.
On April 9, 2002, seventy-nine SJP members were arrestedfor having forcibly occupied (for five hours) the UC Berkeley campus'sWheeler Hallbuilding. Their action coincidedwith a Holocaust Day of Remembrance that is observed annually according to the Hebrew calendar. At a subsequent demonstration to protest their arrests, Bazianalludedto what he perceived to be the existence of a behind-the-scenes Jewish power play: “Take a look at the type of names on the buildings around campus—Haas, Zellerbach—and decide who controls this university.”
In May 2002 Bazian was the solespeaker at a two-day Middle Eastern “cultural assembly” at San Francisco’s George Washington High School—an event whose rhetoric was so inflammatory that it generated formal letters of apology from the school administration to the public. The proceedings featured, for instance, a student singing a rap song that compared Zionists to Nazis while other students paraded with Palestinian flags in the background.
In October 2002 at theUniversity of Michigan’s annualPalestine Solidarity Movementconference, Bazian shared thestagewith revisionist historianIlan Pappéand then-Florida Atlantic UniversityprofessorSami Al-Arian, who would later be incarcerated for his fundraising activities on behalf of the terrorist groupPalestinian Islamic Jihad. At an April 10, 2004 anti-warrally in San Francisco, Bazianissuedwhat appeared to be acallfor violence against the United States. In a loud exchange with his raucous audience, three times he shouted, “Are you angry?!” And three times the attendees replied, “Yeah!” Then Bazian said:
“Well, we've been watching [an]Intifadain Palestine, we've been watching an uprising in Iraq, and the question is that what arewedoing? How come we don'thave an Intifada inthiscountry? 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!”
At the same event, a Catholic priestaddressingthe crowd issued pronouncements “in the name of Allah.” Signs were sold proclaiming, “Support Armed Resistence [sic] in Iraq and Everywhere,” next totomes of Marx, Trotsky, andChe Guevara. One student marchercarrieda sign saying “Long Live Fallujah” (the hub of intense and deadly Iraqi violence against U.S. troops), while another held aloft an effigy of President George W. Bush hanging from a noose.
In the immediate post-Saddam Husseinera, Bazianattendednumerous MSAeventsdenouncing the Iraq War and blaming Israel for American foreign-policy decisions. In February 2004 at McGill University in Montreal, Bazian gave an MSA-sponsored lecturetitled, “The New American Empire and its Adventures in the Middle East.” In this address, he cited neo-conservative think tanks, “Israel-centric” public officials in the Bush Administration, the Christian Right, and the oil industry as the four major forces that were driving American policy overseas.“The NewYork conservatives wanted to make the Middle East a safe neighborhood, but not for Arabs,”saidBazian. “They wanted to make it a safe neighborhood for Israel.” In 2005 Bazianco-founded the organization American Muslims for Palestine, which has repeatedly accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing,” “apartheid,” and “war crimes.”
Prior to 2006 Bazian was a fundraisingspeakerforKindHearts, aHamasfront group that the U.S. government shut down in February 2006 due to the organization's ties to Islamic terrorism.
In 2006 Bazianpublishedthe bookJerusalem in Islamic Consciousness. In the spring of 2009, Bazianfoundedand became director of the Center for the Study and Documentation ofIslamophobia(CSDI), a program of UC Berkeley's Center for Race and Gender. Bazian himselfheadsamajor CSDIinitiative, the “Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project,” which is rooted in the premise that “Muslims in the U.S., parts of Europe, and around the world have been transformed into a demonized and feared global 'other,' subjected to legal, social, and political discrimination.” Bazian is anendorserof the Israel Divestment Campaign and asignatoryto theU.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. Moreover, heisactivein the “Israel Apartheid Week” (IAW) movement, whichdescribesitself as “an international series ofevents that seeks to raise awareness about Israel’s apartheid policies towards the Palestinians and to build support for the growingBoycott, Divestment, and Sanctions(BDS) campaign.” In March 2010,Bazian spoke at a UC IrvineIAWgatheringco-sponsored by theMuslim Student Unionand the Middle East Studies Student Initiative.
On October 26, 2010 at UC Berkeley, Bazian delivered the introduction for a BDS eventtitled“What Can American Academia Do to Realize Justice for Palestinians?”—sponsoredby the campuschapter ofSJP. In the course of his remarks, Bazian made reference to Israel as a practitioner of “apartheid” similar to that which had once existed in South Africa.
In early 2011, Bazian established and set into motion anationalspeaking tour titled “Never Again for Anyone.” Itspurposewas to liken the Holocaust of the 1930s and '40s to the Arab-Israeli conflict of today—with Israelis cast as modern-day Nazis, and “Never Again” transformed into a Palestinian mantra. This speaking tour made its way around the United States from January 25 through February 19, 2011.
Shortly after the Islamicterrorists Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev detonated a deadly bomb near the finish-line of the Boston Marathon in April 2013, Bazian wrotethat while the perpetratorshad certainly “committed horrific crimes,” equally offensive was the fact that “the Islamophobic machine” had subsequently “committed crimes against our collective consciousness by exploiting the [resultant] suffering and pain of our fellow citizens” and “inflam[ing] the minds of an already panicked people.” “What we are facing at present,” Bazian continued, “is ... [an] Islamophobic media campaign” designed “to ensure an environment where no one is safe so long as a Muslim is walking amongst us; where a mosque is simply headquarters radical violence; [and] where Muslim families are breeding grounds for new terrorists.”
In a December 2013articlepublished byAlJazeera.com, Bazian accused Israel of having poisoned the late PLO leaderYasser Arafatto death. “The execution warrant can betraced to [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon, Israel, and the host of players in the new Arab order that have too much invested to worry about the life of one old man or Palestine for that matter,” wrote Bazian.
In March 2014, Bazianparticipatedin a “Voices forJustice & Peace in the Holy Land” conferencesponsoredby the Friends ofSabeel– North America. Specifically, he led a workshop titled “American Muslims and the Palestinian Struggle for Liberation,” which focused on the alleged connection between “Islamophobia,” counterterrorism, and the pro-Israel movement. Bazian also outlined the specific efforts that his organizationAmerican Muslims for Palestinewas planning in order to “put Palestine back on the agenda”—i.e., anti-Israel adcampaigns, “Nakba” commemorations,[1]and “coalition building” with such anti-Israel groups asJewish Voice for PeaceandStudents for Justice in Palestine. Moreover, Bazian noted that “we aredesigninga curriculum for use in 475 Muslim schools to address Palestinian issues.”
At the same March 2014 event, Bazian:
claimedthat the American culture had been infected by a coordinated effort to “demonize Muslims and create a reflexive hate, and [to] keep them out of civil society”;
accused “pro-Israeli groups” of being among the “major Islamophobic producers” in the United States;
charged that their prime objective was to shut down all “debate” on “the Palestinian issue”; and
singled out Investigative Project on Terrorism founder Steven Emerson and Middle East Forum president Daniel Pipes as leading figures in the “Islamophobia industry.”
Also in March 2014, Bazianparticipated in a UC Berkeley panel discussion titled "Shooting Rampage in Paris: Free Speech, Anti-Semitism, Freedom of Religion, Islamophobia." The event wasintended to "start a dialog" on the root causes of two January terrorist attacks that had killed a combined 16 Parisians in a kosher supermarket and the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine. In the course of his remarks, Bazian: (a) devoted the majority of his attention not to Islamic terrorism, but to the alleged scourge of "Islamophobia"; (b) asserted that the "broader Muslim community in Europe feels like it's under siege," in part because "their inclusion and integration is predicated on their accepting to be insulted to be part of civil society"; (c) claimed that there had been a wave of "unreported" acts of "violence across the continent directed at Muslims"; (d) charged that job and police discrimination against European Muslims was akin to the "unequal treatment" that "African-Americans in this country [the United States] face"; and (e) said that "Muslims have been used as the patsies to deport two and a half million Latinos under [Presidents] Bush and Obama," in their purported quest to "protect an imagined America that no longer exists." Suggesting also that Islamic extremism was a response to objectionable U.S. foreign policies, Baziansaid: "Why is it we have such radicalization in Europe? Is it because Muslims woke up and a DNA was activated within them, a radicalization DNA? Or is it a long history of instrumentalizing Muslims for a particular distorted global warfare?" On July 20, 2014—a time when Israel was engaged in a large-scale military operation designed to degrade the weapons stockpile and infrastructure of the Gaza-based terror groupHamas—Bazianaddresseda crowd of pro-Palestinian demonstrators at the San Francisco Civic Center. He condemned Israel's “aggression” but said nothing about the fact that the conflict had been sparked by Hamas's decision to launch large numbers of potentially deadly rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel. Bazian went on to suggest that more than 2 million African Americans (a gross exaggeration) were incarcerated in U.S. prisons for no reason other than their dark skin, and he condemned the United States for heartlessly deporting too many illegal aliens. The crowd then began chanting, “Allahu Akhbar” (“God Is Great”).
On a separate occasion, Baziansaid: "We need to make a link between what is taking place today in Palestine and the whole transnational, anti-colonial, anti-slavery, and anti-oppression struggle.... You need to understand the link of Israel to what's taking place in Latin America.... Israel was helping the death squads and training them." In August 2014 Bazian announcedthat an “International Day of Action” (IDA) calling for a complete academic and cultural boycott of Israel, would be held on the UC Berkeley campus on September 23—theEve before the Jewish New Year.Under the slogan “Free Palestine and End the Siege on Gaza,” this IDA event was slated to feature the use of teach-ins, rallies, sit-ins, civil disobedience, and “support for BDS activities” as means of drawing public attention to the Israeli transgressions of “apartheid” and “occupation.”
In his October 2015column in the Daily Sabah, Bazian maintained that Jews should not be permitted to pray at Judaism's holiest site, theTemple Mount, which is also the location of Islam's sacred Al-Aksa Mosque. Accusing Jews of secretly wishing to desecrate or destroy the site, Bazianwrote: “Zionist settlers and those wanting to build the third temple are asking to share in what they are hoping to destroy. A bully stealing lunch money in the schoolyard can hardly qualify as an act of sharing, despite the fact that children will often let go of their valuables when threatened. Weekly, and sometimes daily, racist settlers enter the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound fully protected by the Israeli military demanding in a grotesque manner to share the area. Bullying Palestinians to surrender their religious site, Al-Aqsa Mosque, under the rubric of sharing is an insult to generosity and its people.”
In theaftermath of a series of coordinatedIslamic State terrorist attacks that killed at least 129 civilians in Paris in November 2015, Bazianaccused American politicians of inserting “a heavy dose of Islamophobia and ‘clash of civilizations’ venom” into “public opinion” following the carnage. Moreover, he asserted that “terrorism is a tactic that has no religious identity.” Today, Hatem Bazian:
sitson thesteering committeeof UC Berkeley's Religion, Politics and Globalization Program, whose professed mission is “to create an intellectual space where scholars from the humanities and social sciences can come together to share and deepen their understanding of the role of religion in world affairs”;
isdirectorof the Berkeley-based Al-Qalam Institute of Islamic Sciences, which seeks to establish a systematic method for the study of Islam and to encourage action consistent with the mandates of the faith; and
Apart from his work at UC Berkeley, Bazian has also taught at Berkeley Graduate Theological Union,San Francisco State University, Diablo Valley College,Saint Mary's College of California, and UC Davis.
Moreover, Bazianhas been avisiting scholarat the Berkeley-based Zaytuna Institute/College,thefirst accredited, four-year Islamic college ever to be established in the United States. Bazian himself co-foundedthe school along withZaid ShakirandHamza Yusuf. ACampusWatch.orgprofile of Bazian notes that “in his academic work,” the professor “declares himself to be an 'organicintellectual,' a term he feels will directly connect his research to the people, rather than looking down from the ivory tower.” The term “organic,” in this sense, derives from the work of the famed Italian MarxistAntonio Gramsci, who emphasized the need for intellectuals to speak aboutsocial life not merely in the sterile vernacular of scientific rules and formulas, but rather, in terms that give voice to the feelings and experiences which the masses are unable to express for themselves.
Denying charges that he is an anti-Semite, Baziansays: “[The charge of] anti-Semitism is used as a means of neutralizing the opposition so the mainstream American public will distance itself from the ‘extremists.’”
One of Bazian's more noteworthy colleagues on the UC Berkeley campus is ProfessorHamid Algar.
NOTE:
[1]“Nakba” is the Arabic word for “Catastrophe,” which is how the enemies of Israel characterize the 1948 founding of the Jewish state.
POSTERS TARGET NEO-NAZIS AT BOSTON AND CHICAGO CAMPUSES
“How many Jews died in the Holocaust? Not enough.”
[To learn more about the Freedom Center's campaign, Stop University Support for Terrorists, click here.]
Students at several Chicago and Boston-area universities awoke this week to find their campuses papered with posters exposing members of Students for Justice in Palestine as neo-Nazis and supporters of anti-Israel terrorism. The posters were designed by the David Horowitz Freedom and were placed in the early morning hours on the campuses of Harvard University, Brandeis University and Tufts University in the Boston area and at the University of Chicago and DePaul University in Chicago.
The posters reveal comments that student activists affiliated with SJP have made on social media praising Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and calling for the extermination of the Jews.
These statements include:
“How many Jews died in the Holocaust? Not enough”
“Wow White Jews are so entitled LMFAOOO Please die.”
“Had to write about a leader for DCL class. Wrote about Hitler. Cuz he’s a boss.”
A second poster exposed Berkeley Professor Hatem Bazian, a co-founder of SJP, as an anti-Semite and supporter of the anti-Israel terror group Hamas. Bazian recently came under fire for an anti-Semitic tweet which featured a caricature of an Orthodox Jew with the caption “MOM LOOK! I IS CHOSEN! I CAN NOW KILL, RAPE, SMUGGLE ORGANS & AND STEAL THE LAND OF PALESTINIANS *YAY* ASHKE-NAZI.” He has also openly called for an intifada, or violent uprising, in America.
A third poster depicts the organization Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) as a puppet of Hamas terrorists. As has been 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 otherIslamic “charities” previously convicted of funneling money to Hamas. Hamas is a State Department-designated terrorist organization whose explicit goals, as stated in its charter, are the destruction of the Jewish state, and the extermination of its Jews.
Aided by this funding and institutional support from Hamas, SJP has become the leading collegiate organization in the Hamas terror network and the campus propaganda campaign to smear Israel as an “apartheid” state. SJP uses Hamas funds to promote the genocidal and anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, a form of economic terrorism which seeks to weaken, delegitimize, and ultimately destroy the Jewish state. Under SJP’s leadership, over 100 college and university student governments have considered adopting pro-BDS resolutions and over 50 have passed them.
As a companion piece to the posters, the Freedom Center will soon be releasing a groundbreaking new pamphlet titled “SJP: Neo-Nazis on Campus,” which reveals the depth and breadth of the neo-Nazi hate epidemic among SJP and MSA activists on American campuses. The pamphlet contains profiles of student activists who have used social media to advocate for violence against the Jews, to spread anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and to exalt Nazi leader Hitler’s “final solution.”
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