The Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at George Washington University hosted terrorist-sympathizer Rabab Abdulhadi on Tuesday.
Abdulhadi, an ethnic studies professor at San Francisco State University — which was accused in a lawsuit earlier this year of being a hotbed of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel sentiment (the case was dismissed last week) — is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign against Israel.
She began her lecture by stating she was on “indigenous-toiled people’s land” and asking if anyone is an "[agent] of the government or security agency,” or if there were any people representing the Lawfare Project, which filed the lawsuit against SFSU.
She continued, “AMCHA, Zionist Organization of America, Brandeis Center [for Human Rights Under Law], the David Project, David Horowitz Freedom Center ... CampusWatch.” All organizations which Abdulhadi and her followers despise.
On the Facebook event for the speech, Students for Justice in Palestine chapter of George Washington University posted, “They seek to smear Dr. Abdulhadi’s reputation and damage her standing as a scholar, teacher, and public intellectual and destroy the AMED Studies program in the process.”
During her lecture, which was typically inconsistent — switching between the founding of what became Israel and today’s left-wing issues in the United States, such as police brutality — Abdulhadi compared Zionists to followers of McCarthyism, labeling them as “oppressors” and “settlers” in “Palestine.”
A founding member of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, Abdulhadi is the founder of SFSU’s partnership with An-Najah National University in the Palestinian territories. The school has been described by the U.S.-designated terrorist group Hamas as a “greenhouse for martyrs.”
In 2014, Abdulhadi associated with individuals affiliated with State Department-designated terrorist organizations as part of an “Academic and Labor Delegation to Palestine,” meeting with An-Najah representatives. She was accused of improper use of university funds for the trip.
Matthew Levitt, the director of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at the think tank Washington Institute for Near East Policy, stated that An-Najah, which honored “martyred” terrorists last year, is a “terrorist recruitment, indoctrination, and radicalization of students.” The professor has also worked with the Hamas-dominated Birzeit University.
Abdulhadi’s profile page on Academia.edu features a graphic calling for a “Third Palestinian Intifada” and has downloadable papers which call for Palestinian “solidarity” and say that Zionism is “racism.”
“This support for terrorism and BDS is vile and shows a lack of any character and should inspire outrage,” GW sophomore Shep Gerszberg told the Washington Examiner. “The fact that this speaker is being brought to GW should disgust any just and rational person but obviously SJP is neither just nor rational.”
Gerszberg added, “I call on every student and every student organization that stands against terrorism, that stands for anything considered ‘good’ to denounce this speaker and denounce SJP for inviting her. This cannot happen on our campus.”
Abdulhadi’s remarks are amid anti-Israel sentiment on campuses nationwide, including the D.C., Maryland, and Virginia area. On Wednesday, the student government at the nearby University of Maryland, College Park will vote on a BDS resolution.