Opponents of the the Middle East Forum/Campus Watch campaign to end San Francisco State University’s Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Hamas-dominated An-Najah University in the West Bank have reacted with a level of hysteria reserved for critics of academe. CW West Coast representative Cinnamon Stillwell takes on the baseless accusations of “McCarthyism,” “slander,” “harassment,” and “hatemongering” at the Independent Journal Review:
Predictably, SFSU’s General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) rushed to defend MOU architect and faculty adviser Rabab Abdulhadi (who is also director of SFSU’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative) with a cliché-ridden statement accusing Campus Watch and other “Zionist organizations” of “racism,” “Islamophobia,” and, most absurdly, “anti-Semitism.”
. . . The U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI), of which Abdulhadi is a founding member, accused MOU opponents of engaging in “McCarthy-like tactics.”
Abdulhadi herself resorted to the same tiresome banalities, describing Campus Watch’s effort to end the MOU as a “McCarthyist attack” and “a witch hunt campaign.” She maintained that the campaign “seeks to whip up hysteria, Islamophobia, racism, and xenophobia to divert attention from Israeli criminality.”