Editor’s Note: The following press release was issued on November 4, 2021 by the International Campaign to Defend Professor Rabab Abdulhadi. The press release comes as San Francisco State President Lynn Mahoney overturned the decision of a campus panel that ruled the school failed to protect Professors Rabab Abdulhadi and Tomomi Kinukawa from censorship when Zoom, Facebook, and YouTube denied their services for an event featuring Leila Khaled. For more on this story see here. Mondoweiss occasionally publishes press releases and statements from organizations in an effort to draw attention to overlooked issues.
PRESS RELEASE: November 4, 2021
SFSU President Lynn Mahoney overrules her own faculty panel & supports Big Tech intrusion on academic freedom and the silencing of Palestinian narratives
In an outrageous and insulting decision, President Lynn Mahoney of SFSU has disregarded the legitimate reprimand of a faculty panel that recommended redress to Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi, founding director of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies (AMED) program, for the University’s failure regarding violations of Professor Abdulhadi’s and her colleague Professor Tomomi Kinukawa’s academic freedom.
President Mahoney’s decision upholds the University’s corporatized acceptance of Big Tech’s increasing control over academic discussion and its complicity with Zionist organizations that stifles all discourse on issues of human rights and dignity for the Palestinian people.
The President’s decision follows a ruling by the faculty member panel based on a six hour hearing following the arbitrary cancellation by Zoom and other social media outlets of Drs. Abdulhadi and Kinukawa’s online open classroom, “Whose Narratives? Gender, Justice and Resistance: A Conversation with Leila Khaled.” The University is bound by contract, law and AAUP policy to protect academic freedom rather than subcontracting the responsibility to private companies. Further, universities must maintain structural independence from the whims and demands of partisan lobbying organizations, including Zionist groups like the Academic Engagement Network (AEN) and the Lawfare Project.
In its ruling, now vetoed by President Mahoney, the faculty panel affirmed that: “San Francisco State University has inflicted harm upon Dr. Abdulhadi (and co-instructor, Dr. Kinukawa) and that her academic freedom was, in fact, violated. We characterize this harm in two ways: 1) that the university did not provide adequate support to Dr. Abdulhadi against the actions of the corporate entity, Zoom, and, more importantly against the outside organization, Lawfare Project.” Furthermore, the panel ordered the university to provide remedy in the form of a public apology to Dr. Abdulhadi and to provide “a site for rescheduling the event with Leila Khaled on an alternate platform, without interference”.
Clearly, with this decision, SFSU is continuing its policy of harassment of Dr. Abdulhadi, intensifying its efforts to dismantle the AMED program, and confirming its complicity with Zionist organizations that seek to silence Palestinian voices on campuses across the country as Israel has pursued against Palestinian human rights organizations. SFSU’s lip service to academic freedom flies in the face of limiting Palestinian speech in favor of an overriding concern for its corporate bottom line.
As with this week’s criminalization of 6 legitimate Palestinian human rights organizations by the Israeli government, SFSU chose to follow the Zionist playbook of demonizing all actions in support of Palestinian liberation and teaching about Palestine as “terrorism” and “anti-Semitic”.
President Mahoney’s decision was written by Ingrid Williams, Vice President of Human Resources. According to University by-law, the President’s veto will trigger an automatic and independent arbitration hearing for a final decision on Dr. Abdulhadi’s grievance.
“As with this week’s criminalization of 6 legitimate Palestinian human rights organizations by the Israeli government, SFSU chose to follow the Zionist playbook of demonizing all actions in support of Palestinian liberation and teaching about Palestine as “terrorism” and “anti-Semitic”. ”
Same topic – the New York Times is running this editorial today:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/05/opinion/israel-moves-to-silence-the-stalwarts-of-palestinian-civil-society.html
Israel Moves to Silence the Stalwarts of Palestinian Civil Society…These tactics are seemingly part of a wider, continuing movement to delegitimize, defund and permanently gut Palestinian NGOs. The shrinking space of Palestinian civil society has been well documented. It’s part of a campaign, spearheaded by the Israeli government, with support from groups like NGO Monitor and UK Lawyers for Israel, to disseminate disinformation and pursue these groups in court, targeting civil society organizations that monitor and resist Israeli human rights violations, including the continuing expansion of illegal settlements.
It appears that SFSU President Lynn Mahoney is betraying the most fundamental mission of a university – to investigate and promote the truth. The only explanation I can see for such an obviously egregious action is some sort of corruption. That would not be unusual in cases involving covering up Israel’s crimes. She should definitely be investigated and probably removed from office.
There’s always an upside. We now know president Lynn Mahoney is a racist piece of trash unfit to be in any public position. That’s progress.
Hey Lynn. Did you have a price or did you sell out in advance?
OT but interesting. From the New York Times:
“Rabbis questioning Israel
An extraordinary open letter appeared in a public Google Doc this spring. It was signed by 93 students at Jewish seminaries — representing nearly one-fifth of all students at the U.S. schools where they were studying — and it was harshly critical of Israel.
The back story of that letter and the movement behind it is the subject of a Times Magazine article by Marc Tracy. The movement’s members are young, progressive Jews who are rethinking their support for Israel and who ground their arguments in Jewish texts.
They still represent a minority of American Jews; most support a Jewish state, even if they have criticisms of Israeli policy. But Marc’s exploration of these young rabbis — complete with a visit to a part-kibbutz, part-summer camp in Connecticut — gets at a larger tension in the country today: In one area after another, a new generation of progressives believes that their predecessors were too accepting of injustice.”
Zionists and other flavors of totalitarianism have been infiltrating power positions disguised as “liberal” or “woke” for decades. Totalitarianism is a subset of authoritarianism that condones and even encourages private citizens and corporations to help authoritarians in government to enforce their edicts. You see it today in corporate censorship and the large minority of citizens who approve of discrimination against the unvaxxed or the “privileged” whites who work in coal mines or drive trucks.
Thank goodness for those who are pushing back like the people of Virginia.