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San Francisco State University has established formal ties with university known for celebrating terrorism and serving as a recruitment center, according to the Middle East Forum. The MEF and its Campus Watch arm are urging San Francisco State to cut those ties with An-Najah University in the West Bank. The links were established by Rabab Abdulhadi and other activist Palestinian faculty at San Francisco State. Faced with calls to cut ties, Abdulhadi responded with vitriol:
Abdulhadi wrote me [Prof. Nadia Elia] that the current campaign against her “seeks to whip up hysteria, Islamophobia, racism and xenophobia to divert attention from Israeli criminality against Palestinian education and cover up the complicity of the Israeli academy in furthering violations of Palestinian rights.”
An-Najah University is a known center for Islamic radicalization and terrorist recruitment, according to the director of the Washington Institute of Near East Policy. In 2013, the entire graduating class was named in honor of the mastermind of countless terrorist attacks. In 2016, the university held events to honor “martyred” terrorists. This is the university with which San Francisco State University has now established ties.
Comment: After learning about An-Najah University’s long record of association with terrorist attacks and low academic standing, it is simply unfathomable why any US university would want to associate with it. That SFSU is a public university, supported by California taxpayers, raises still more troubling questions. Along the same lines, does any sentient being think that Abdulhadi’s department, named “Ethnic Studies, Race and Resistance Studies,” is a serious academic department? Although the topics themselves are serious and could be studied seriously (as many students of civil wars do), does anybody really think that’s what SFSU departments does? Ha. (Lipson comment)
The full MEF article ishere.
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