Today, at San Francisco State University, the General Union Of Palestinian Students (GUPS) organized 'art projects" with shocking messages of violence. The administration was silent.

The General union of palestinian Students (GUPS) encouraged San Francisco State University students and community members to create art projects glorifying violence and murder

SFSU had a reputation of being one of the most anti-Semitic schools in California a decade or so, back. Irvine might take the lead, now.

Anti-Semitic riot at San Francisco State University

After being surrounded by a mob of students shouting, "Hitler didn't finish the job," and "Get out or we'll kill you," pro-Israel students at San Francisco State University are finally finding an ally against hate.

The university president is so fed-up with the hate-filled atmosphere on the Bay Area campus that he has asked the local district attorney's office to help bring pro-Palestinian hate-mongers to justice.

The May 7 incident received widespread press attention after an e-mail was circulated by Prof. Laurie Zoloth, director of the Jewish studies program at SFSU, describing the virulence of the anti- Semitic rhetoric and the campus's seeming inability to halt such occurrences.

More than 100 anti-Semitic incidents, including graffiti, vandalism, hate speech, and violence have occurred on US campuses since January, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

Zoloth, who attended the campus Hillel's Peace in the Middle East Rally along with several hundred students, faculty, and members of the community, described how Palestinian supporters descended on a group of 50 students who stayed behind to clean up and conduct a prayer service, after singing Hebrew songs and hearing speeches in support of Israel.

"They screamed at us to 'go back to Russia' and they screamed that they would kill us all, and other terrible things," she wrote in the May 8 e-mail.

"As the counter-demonstrators poured into the plaza, screaming at the Jews to 'Get out or we'll kill you' and 'Hitler didn't finish the job,' I turned to the police and to every administrator I could find and asked them to remove the counter-demonstrators from the plaza, to maintain the separation of 100 feet that we had been promised. The police told me that they had been told not to arrest anyone, and that if they did, 'it would start a riot.' I told them that it already was a riot."

After approaching Dean of Students Penny Saffold, who called the San Francisco Police, pro-Israel demonstrators were marched to the campus Hillel House under police protection and a guard was posted at the door.

Zoloth also described what life is like for Jewish students and faculty at SFSU, noting her despair at the emergence of posters around campus equating Zionism with racism and Jews with Nazis, and pictures of cans of soup labeled "Canned Palestinian Children Meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license."

"This is not civic discourse, this is not free speech, and this is the Weimar Republic with brown shirts it cannot control," she wrote.

After staying silent for nearly a week, university president Robert Corrigan posted a statement condemning the incident on SFSU's Web site on Monday. But in a move that Jeffrey Ross, ADL director of campus/higher education affairs, praised as a positive departure from many campuses' public silence on anti-Semitic incidents, Corrigan noted a request to the office of District Attorney Terence Hallinan to assign a member of its hate crimes unit to work with SFSU and consider bringing legal action against certain students.

"Despite the claims of some, this is not an anti-Semitic campus. But as history shows us, silence and passivity can at times of crisis be very little different from complicity," Corrigan said in the statement.

In the Bay area, where anti-Israel protests have been the norm on campus for decades, Ross credited the University of California, Berkeley, as being the first school in the area to take legal action against pro-Palestinian demonstrators. Last month, 79 protesters were arrested after taking over a building on campus, and Students for Justice in Palestine was suspended from operating on campus for a month.

"In both cases, you've got administrators who are trying to do the right thing in very difficult circumstances. We're pleased that they're working beyond the rhetorical to law enforcement, when law-enforcement is appropriate," Ross said. But it remains unclear whether those who have been terrorized will be placated by Corrigan's vow to crack down on anti-Semitic demonstrators after nearly two years of virulent anti-Israel demonstrations. As Zoloth noted in her e-mail, the anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and anti-American atmosphere that has pervaded campus extends far beyond the scope of one protest that spun out of control.

"After nearly seven years as director of Jewish studies, and after nearly two decades of life here as a student, faculty member, and wife of the Hillel rabbi, after years of patient work and difficult civic discourse, I am saddened to see SFSU return to its notoriety as a place that teaches anti-Semitism, hatred for America, and hatred, above all else, for the Jewish State of Israel, a state that I cherish," she wrote.

Hate Speech At San Francisco State University
By Richard L. Cravatts

The fragile ceasefire between Hamas and Israel in the recent Gaza incursion may have brought a tentative peace to that region, but on campuses in California -- the veritable ground zero of anti-Israel sentiment in the academy -- the debate over the 60-year conflict has gained a new, and more insidious, momentum as student demonstrations, protests, and denunciations of racist Zionism, a "brutal occupation," and "genocide" of Arabs were heard on campuses worldwide.

The virulence of anti-Israelism and antisemitism at The University of California, Irvine campus, for instance, has been so flagrant and endemic in recent years that it actually prompted an investigation by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, the findings of which were issued in a damning 2007 report. But San Francisco State University is not far behind in the ignoble way it has enabled its Muslim students' organizations to create a veritable reign of terror on campus against Jewish and pro-Israel students, while simultaneously attempting to silence voices of opposition, a situation made evident this January when SFSU's College Republicans were once again pushed into the limelight for their outspoken challenges to the school's ubiquitous Palestinianism.

Playing off the recent indignity suffered by former president Bush when an insolent reporter hurled a shoe at the President's head during a press conference, the College Republicans had set up a booth to let students who so wished to sign an anti-Hamas, anti-terror petition and throw a shoe at a Hamas flag. Deeply "offended" by the Republicans for daring to condemn terrorists, rather than the Israeli state in defending its civilians from genocidal attack, members of SFSU's General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) and socialist club overturned the table, seized the Hamas flag, and were physically aggressive enough in their assault of the Republican students to result in two of their members, Muhammad Abdullah and Jeremy Stern, being put under arrest.

The outcome of this event, one would think, would be fairly straightforward, since the pro-Hamas protestors clearly violated SFSU's own rules for student behavior, which clearly prohibit "conduct that threatens or endangers the health or safety of any person within or related to the university community, including physical abuse, threats, intimidation, [or] harassment," all of which the Republican group experienced.

But in the morally-inverted world of academia, the Republican group, for the third time, find themselves the target of punishment and censure, not their attackers, and the "offended parties -- the GUPS and the socialist club -- have made some breathtakingly audacious demands to the SFSU administration: the College Republicans must be punished or sanctioned for throwing shoes at the Hamas flag; pending charges should be dropped against the two protestors who assaulted the College Republicans and seized the Hamas flag; and, most ominously for defenders of free expression on campus, a forum should be created to "educate" students about what forms of speech the "offended" students deem acceptable or unacceptable, including what the Left regularly tries to proscribe as "hate speech."

The idea that one group of college students believe they can and should decide what acceptable speech is at any given moment is a particularly chilling concept, particularly when those same students have defined their political beliefs with an unwavering support for the jihadist aggression of groups that threaten not only Israel, but the West, as well.

Two years ago, the College Republicans held a similar anti-terrorism rally at which SFSU students were invited to stomp on the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah, and with similar punitive results: the complaining students accused the Republican group members of "acts of incivility" and "intimidation," suggesting that they created a "hostile environment" by publicly walking over the terrorist flags, which, unbeknownst to the Republican students, happen bear the name of Allah in Arabic script.

While college demonstrators here and abroad regularly burn, deface, and desecrate the flags of Israel and the United States, something that the courts have repeatedly upheld as Constitutionally-protected speech, only on a campus controlled by Left-leaning faculty and radicalized students could the protest against the flags of genocidal terrorist thugs be considered, as it was here, an attempt to "incite violence," "hateful religious intolerance" and an act by those who "pre-meditated the stomping of the flags knowing it would offend some people and possibly incite violence." Thanks to the intervention of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a group that defends campus free speech, the Republican club was exonerated, but only after they had been dragged through proceedings by University officials who had to be reminded by FIRE that "speech does not constitute incitement if a speaker's words result in violence because people despise what the speaker said and wish to silence him or her."

Were only the College Republicans acting out in a provocative way on an otherwise peaceful SFSU campus, they might well be rebuked for being crude and demonstrating impolite and impolitic behavior. But not only has the campus gained notoriety for the outrageousness of some of its morally-defective protests, but the same "offended" parties who sought punishments for the College Republicans, the General Union of Palestinian Students, have continually been at the center of a succession of riots, protests, and anti-Israel, anti-American hate-fests and counter-protests at which radical speakers regularly, and with unbridled invective, denounce and demonize Jews, Zionists, Israel, Republicans, and America.

Most notorious, for example, was the Muslim student-sponsored, pro-Palestinian April 2002 demonstration that included odious flyers and posters depicting a dead Palestinian baby on a soup-can label imprinted with the words "Palestinian Children Meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license," echoing the centuries-old blood libel of European antisemitism that accused Jews of murdering Gentile children and using their blood to bake matzos -- a slander that has, not surprisingly, currently gained credence in the Arab world. Even if the perpetrators of this cruel protest consider this type of expression merely "academic free speech" and legitimate debate about Zionism, and also disingenuously claim that that there is no underlying Jew-hatred here, only debate about Israeli policies, and even if they are to be believed, might not such flyers possibly offend Jewish students on campus? Could accusing an ethnic group of infanticide possibly be construed as "intimidation" or fostering "incivility" on campus?

Not content to mount their own vile protests against Zionism, Jews, and Israel, the pro-Palestinian student groups took it upon themselves the following month to disrupt a vigil for Holocaust Remembrance Day where some 30 Jewish students who were reciting the Mourners' Kaddish -- the Jewish prayer for the dead -- were shouted down by protesters who countered with grisly prayers in memory of Palestinian suicide bombers. The pro-Palestinian counter-demonstrators, armed with whistles and bull horns, physically assaulted the Jewish students, spat on them, and screamed such charming epithets as "Too bad Hitler didn't finish the job," "Get out or we will kill you," "F**k the Jews," "Die racist pigs," and "Go back to Russia, Jews." The violence escalated to the extent that San Francisco police officers finally had to usher the Jewish students to safety off campus. "This is not civic discourse, this is not free speech," lamented Laurie Zoloth, SFSU's Director of the Program in Jewish Studies at the time of the incident, "this is the Weimar Republic with brown shirts it cannot control."

Is this merely academic debate about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, or is something more insidious finding expression in the minds of these hate-filled students blinded by their obsession with the plight of the Left's favorite third-world victims, the Palestinians? Claims by pusillanimous college administrators that hate-filled protests against Jews and Israel are merely conversations about politics are more than disingenuous; while universities see no difficulty is making moral judgments about "hate speech" when it is aimed at groups who have achieved status as victims in a world bereft of social justice -- blacks, gays, Palestinians, illegal aliens, among them -- that same moral recognition is oddly absent when vitriolic charges of racism, imperialism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, occupation, and genocide are carelessly lodged at Israel and its supporters in the U.S. and the West. Victim status also insulates members of those groups from criticism; only the acts and behavior of the "other," the oppressors, are subject to critique, a convenient way for SFSU's jihad-supporting student groups to justify their ideological onslaught against the Zionism and Jews.

How has this corruption of what should be legitimate academic debate come about? Irwin Cotler, a Canadian MP and former minister of justice and attorney-general, believes that this pernicious ideology has manifested itself so "that Israel is delegitimized, if not demonized, by the ascription to it of the two most scurrilous indictments of 20th-century racism -- Nazism and apartheid -- the embodiment of all evil. These very labels of Zionism and Israel as ‘racist, apartheid and Nazi' supply the criminal indictment. No further debate is required."

Given this false sense of moral superiority by the libelous framing of Israel as the singularly most evil nation on earth, its campus enemies at SFSU and elsewhere feel free to speak against it in the most destructive and hurtful way possible. At the same time, pro-Israel, anti-terrorism voices are marginalized, disregarded, shouted down, or, as in the case of the College Republicans most recently, denounced as hate speech, unworthy of being part of an ongoing, vigorous debate, and deserving only of being punished and silenced by those who want only one side of the debate to be heard in what should be a vigorous, thoughtful debate in the ‘marketplace of ideas.'

Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., director of Boston University's Program in Publishing at the Center for Professional Education, is currently writing a book about higher education, Genocidal Liberalism: The University's Jihad Against Israel.

If Zionist crusaders really do have a birthright of murderous theft of ANY Palestinian lands, even 1 single gain of sand, then YOU tell US what that alleged right is. Otherwise, YOUR whining about how Palestinians fighting against the MURDEROUS THIEVING Zionist invaders of Palestinian lands is a mute point.


Ohhhh the murderous thieving Zionist invaders are upset by the violence that the murderous thieving Zionist crusaders chosen murderous theft of Palestinian lands created.

What, you don't think the NAZIs were upset that their chosen war of conquest faced the expected hostilities that ANY blood soak war of conquest would be expected to create.

Whine whine whine. Do you have anything else to offer???


Tell us first how Zionists have a right to steal Palestinian lands and a right to murder Palestinians who dare to resist the Zionist's alleged right to be murderous thieves of Palestinian lands.

And then maybe, MAYBE, we will consider it less of an offense for Zionists to steal Palestinian lands and to MURDER Palestinians wo DARE to resist the Zionist's alleged right to be murderous thieves of ANYONE's homeland.

And MAYBE we will consider it less of a blood soaked offense for Democrats and Republicans to be supporting the Zionist's chosen war of conquest of Palestinian lands.

Until that day comes, you are nothing but a sick evil enabler of murderous thieving Zionist invaders of Palestinian lands.

I believe we’ve identified the repugnant individual, courtesy of tSan francisco State University -The lil terror supporter is Hamdi Bazian , a Kinesiology major and a member of of the General Union of Palestinian Students. (GUPS)

Since all SFSU students are colonial usurpers on native land, is that a threat directed to the entire university? Just wondering