For over 20 years, the San Francisco State University administration has tolerated and promoted egregious attacks against the Arab, Muslim and Palestinian communities at SFSU. Administrators have consistently opposed and thwarted the growth of, and systematically participated in dismantling the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies program and have attacked Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi, founder and director of AMED since the program’s inception in 2007. The University has been complicit with Zionist organizations to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism and to exceptionalize the Zionist Jewish community above all other communities and ethnicities, including anti-Zionist Jews and Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latinx and other People of Color (BIPOC).
Dr. Abdulhadi has been a luminary of the wider Palestine scholars and movement. She has fought to integrate Palestine into a critical ethnic studies framework as well as to ensure that community-focused pedagogy remains accessible to all and accountable to the ethics of movements for collective liberation.
At least ten self-identified Zionist groups including Campus Watch/ME Forum, Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), Hillel International, Canary Mission, StandWithUs, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and the Lawfare Project have pressured SFSU administration to reduce the reach of AMED’s influence. Recently, SFSU publicly announced its collaboration with the openly Zionist organization, American Education Network (AEN), in an effort to propagate the myth of Zionist students being unsafe on campus due to Palestinian scholarship and curriculum Through misleading charges of antisemitism, and attempting to detach Palestine from liberation contexts and histories, Zionists provide SFSU with the messaging to justify censoring and silencing Palestinian activism. They actively seek to shut down justice-centered education from any sites of critical pedagogy, including Ethnic Studies programs and especially AMED Studies.
Shutdown of Open Classrooms
Since its inception, AMED Studies has hosted open classrooms, democratizing education with presenters from both within and outside academia and breaking down university-community boundaries by opening the classroom to all interested students, faculty, staff and community members. Hundreds of internationally renowned scholars, public intellectuals, educators, revolutionaries, and community leaders have joined Dr. Abdulhadi in critical conversations connecting wide ranging social justice issues. The spirit of collaboration and openness, as well as dedication to critical pedagogical methodology has always defined AMED studies. These qualities are also reflected in the vibrant partnership between Professors Rabab Abdulhadi and Tomomi Kinukawa, faculty lecturer in the Women and Gender Studies Department at SFSU. During the spring semester of 2020, Professor Kinukawa invited Professor Abdulhadi to guest-lecture in their courses in Women and Gender Studies. When the pandemic was in full swing and all teaching had moved online, Professors Abdulhadi and Kinukawa, rather than cancelling courses, rose to the challenge of finding innovative ways to integrate the spirit of decolonial feminist pedagogy into their course structure and offerings by publicly opening their classrooms to SFSU students, colleagues, and wider communities.
The September 2020 open classroom, “Whose Narratives? Gender, Justice, & Resistance: A conversation with Leila Khaled,” featured a virtual Zoom based historic conversation by a transnational panel of luminaries. Co-organized by Professors Abdulhadi and Kinukawa and co-sponsored by AMED Studies and the Women and Gender Studies Department at SFSU, “Whose Narratives” was the latest example of the creative lengths to which both professors would go to bring their students and the community at large politically and historically significant programming and pedagogy. Sadly, it was not to be: A massive campaign by Zionist organizations, such as the Lawfare Project, Academic Engagement Network, and the Israeli government-aligned app, Act IL, along with right wing forces such as congressman Doug Lamborn and Campus Reform, pressured Zoom to cancel this for-credit college class session despite the fact that Zionist claims that Khaled’s appearance would be in violation of “material support” clauses were determined to be baseless.
Abdulhadi and Kinukawa, along with doctoral candidate Saliem Shehadeh sought to stream the panel on other platforms, but as the vicious Zionist pressure continued and indeed escalated,social media private giants immediately took off the live streaming as well as event announcements in direct view of the audience, including students in six classes who were assigned attendance of the webinar. The classroom was blocked from students and the broader audience. A spring class organized by University of California at Merced that sought to discuss the Academic Freedom implications of the shutting down of the SFSU open classroom was also shut down as a result of this mounting Zionist and right-wing pressure. Not only was the topic itself banned but now the discussion of academic freedom was itself a forbidden subject.
SFSU Administrators, including the Academic Vice-President, Provost Jennifer Summit, not only failed to condemn this violation of academic freedom, they also failed to provide an alternate platform for the class despite repeated requests by the organizers. In three public statements, SFSU President Mahoney condemned the content of the open classroom as glorification of violence against civilians, without seeking clarification, knowing anything about the content, or talking to Abdulhadi and Kinukawa, her own faculty members. Instead Mahoney maintained direct communication with Hillel that was a major campus force agitating against the open classroom. On the same day that the Palestine open classroom was censored, Mahoney participated in a rally organized by Hillel and co-sponsored by the Consulate of the State of Israel, thus lending direct legitimacy to the Israel lobby and the right wing agenda. The actions of President Mahoney and the top SFSU Administrators validated the Zionist smear campaign against Dr. Abdulhadi and sanctioned the censorship of Drs. Abdulhadi and Kinukawa’s teaching by private tech companies and contributed to the delegitimization of their intellectual work and pedagogical approach, thus undermining their academic careers and standing .
In November, an outrageous and insulting decision by President Lynn Mahoney of SFSU dismissed the unanimous decision of the Faculty Hearing Panel that recommended redress to Dr. Abdulhadi for the University’s violations of her and her colleague Professor Tomomi Kinukawa’s academic freedom in the shutdown of the open classroom. Calls for the resignation of President Mahoney from the academic, labor, and activist communities have been growing.
A second grievance hearing on February 4 (10am-4pm PST) will establish SFSU attacks for 14 years against Professor Abdulhadi and the AMED program. These institutional abuses have violated her contract and reduced this unique program to a one-person token operation. These abuses includes contract violations that have sabotaged the efficacy of the program by (1) reneging on the written promise of two more AMED faculty positions for the program, (2) repeatedly changing and cancelling classes, and (3) subjecting Professor Abdulhadi to personal and professional smears and threats and character assassination.
Critical Race Theory and Ethnic Studies
Zionists’ attacks against AMED and Professor Abdulhadi have their roots in white-supremacist attacks on Critical Race Theory and Ethnic Studies. The State of California has a specific history of censoring and silencing Arab American and Palestinian voices. In 2019, following Governor Newsom’s 2016 legislation directing the California Department of Education (CDE) to create an Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum for high schools, a right-wing campaign led by the pro-Israel lobby industry demanded the CDE remove from the original draft of the ESMC,the Arab American curriculum and any mention of Palestine as well as the anti-colonial, anti-racist framings of ethnic studies.
Zionists’ attacks against AMED and Professor Abdulhadi have their roots in white-supremacist attacks on Critical Race Theory and Ethnic Studies.
Gov. Newsom and the CDE complied with these Zionist demands, collaborating with pro-Israel lobbyists to remove the Arab American curriculum as a whole, remove any mention of Palestine, and water down the ethnic studies curriculum by removing its original anti-colonial, anti-racist, liberatory framings. Following uproar and activism by many, a revised Arab American studies was reinstated to the ESMC but it was relegated to the appendix rather than the main body of the document. In March 2021, the ESMC was revised to remove appendices. Adopted by the State Board of Education, the ESMC now includes Arab American lessons in an “inter-ethnic bridge building” section of the main document. The Zionist campaign succeeded in reducing Arab and Muslim Studies to a negligible section that could easily be overlooked instead of its rightful place as a necessary, relevant and essential part of the curriculum.
SFSU is seeking to replicate the statewide collusion against Arab, Muslim and Palestine Studies by caving in to and collaborating with Zionist pressure to eradicate AMED and push out Professor Abdulhadi. Censoring and silencing Palestinian and Arab voices is nothing new to SFSU or California. Critical pedagogy, whether it is CRT or ethnic studies in K-12 and higher education, is being attacked, censored, and silenced by right wing, white-supremacist and their Zionist allies now more than ever. In this climate, defending Professor Abdulhadi and AMED is more critical and urgent now than ever.
Critical pedagogy
As Dr. Abdulhadi argues, AMED builds on the Spirit of ’68, the legacy of SFSU student strike of 1968-69, led by the Black Student Union (BSU) and Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), that led to the creation of the College of Ethnic Studies. AMED critical pedagogy reflects the ‘68 strike’s demand for “the decolonization of the curriculum and the creation of educational programs that reflect, legitimize and validate the lived experiences of marginalized communities.”
AMED’s critical pedagogy, founded on the principles of critical pedagogy that defines teaching as an inherently emancipatory act – rejecting the neutrality of knowledge and insisting that freedom, justice, dignity and peace are not separate from teaching, learning and justice for all. Dr. Abdulhadi calls this the “indivisibility of justice.”
The AMED curriculum is open to all communities and aims to establish a respectful and reciprocal relationship between the university and the community. Through Open Classrooms, AMED brings together anti-colonial, anti-racist, feminist, and queer justice struggles and movements to challenge colonial, white supremacist, capitalist, and patriarchal systems of oppression.
For once, the Zionists are correct! Critical pedagogy is a threat to the Zionist and right wing agenda!
Support Dr. Abdulhadi and the AMED Studies Program
Dr. Abdulhadi and the AMED Studies Program need your support.
- Attend the February 4 grievance hearing 10 AM to 4 PM PT here: https://sfsu.zoom.us/j/81679941951?pwd=U0w2bVQ5UmJqQmJMK1luT290L0hyUT09
- Amplify the National Students For Justice in Palestine social media campaign here: https://www.nationalsjp.org/
- Sign the US Campaign for the Cultural and Academic Boycott of Israel (USACBI) petition calling for the resignation of SFSU President Lynn Mahoney here: https://usacbi.org/2021/11/sign-on-protect-sfsu-faculty-members-academic-freedom-demand-sfsu-president-lynn-mahoney-resign/
- Support Teaching Palestine: Pedagogical Praxis and the Indivisibility of Justice here: https://donorbox.org/teaching-palestine
Part 1:
I’ve been critical of CRT because it mis-identifies the “oppressor class.” Antonio Gramsci was correct that the “oppressor class,” by utilizing media that it controls, enjoys “cultural hegemony,” but in his time, the “oppressor class” was understood to be the wealthy, upper classes in power who oppressed all subgroups of workers and the poor. Critical theorists have corrupted that concept by identifying all “whites” or by implication all “Jews” as the oppressor class enjoying “cultural hegemony,” rather than uniting with the powerless of all identities. As a result, critical theorists blame all whites or all Jews for promoting ideas detrimental to the exploited identity of their focus. Thus, all whites are “privileged” and responsible for “white supremacy.” This provokes a defensive reaction among groups “othered” as members of the oppressor class such as working class whites, Asians or Hispanics, and has caused divisions within the poor, working and lower middle classes. The true oppressor class, the corporate capitalists and their allies within the political establishment were quick to recognize the divisions created by such “identity politics” and harness it to keep the oppressed classes divided and controllable. That’s why identity based movements such as the civil rights movement, Nation of Islam, la Raza, feminism and LGBTQ+ groups have been encouraged or at least tolerated by mass corporate media over which the true oppressor class has “cultural hegemony.” It’s why right-wing nationalist governments abroad, including in Israel, are tolerated no matter how brutal to their citizens while socialist government are overthrown. Thus, unthinking adherents to critical theory end up serving the interests of the true oppressor class.
Malcolm X was tolerated as long as he thought of all whites as “white devils.” After going on Haj and being transformed into a uniter, he became the enemy of the power elite and was killed. Martin Luther King, Jr, was tolerated as long as he focused on the opression of blacks. When he started organizing the Poor People’s March and spoke out against the Vietnam War, he became dangerous and was eliminated. It’s why Fred Hampton “needed killin’.”
Part 2:
This article does well to recognize the division within the Jewish community between the powerful, imperial allied, wealthy “Zionist Jewish community” of “court Jews” controlling the levers of “Jewish power” and the relatively powerless anti-Zionist Jews who work through Jewish Voice for Peace, USCPR, IJAN, RiteousJews, Not in Our Name and various Orthodox organizations to name a few. But please, do not compare the Palestinian movement to CRT. CRT and its off-shoots of anti-white bigotry and “white fragility” assume that all whites are racists. If a white protests that he is not racist, this is taken as “proof” of his racism.
White “allies” of CRT are nihilists who want to destroy all American society and traditions, the good as well as the bad. That’s why the statue of Hans Christian Heg, an abolitionist who died at Chicamauga, was thrown in a lake in Madison. It’s why those who fought to realize the ideals of the Revolution, like William Lloyd Garrison, and the ideals of the Revolution itself embodied in the Declaration and Constitution are ignored in favor of a narrative that the US was founded only on slavery and the concept of white supremacy. It’s why we ban books like Huckleberry Finn instead of seeking to understand the humanity with which Mark Twain endowed Jim and other southern Blacks.
The censorship endured by AMED is “cancel culture” turned back against itself. Freedom of speech and academic freedom must be supported for all or it will be tolerated only for those who conform to the narratives of powerful elites, to their “cultural hegemony.” Calls for Mahoney to resign are not “cancel culture,” as they in no way obstruct Mahoney’s right to speech or right to employment outside SFSU. They are a reaction to Mahoney’s censorial actions, not to her speech or beliefs.
Resistance to Critical Race Theory is not rooted in white supremacy or other attacks on Ethnic Studies programs that don’t demonize all whites. Resistance to CRT is not protesting “Black history month,” trying to cover up the injustice of slavery or protesting the accurate discussion of chattel slavery or its role in being the underlying cause of the Civil War. Zionist restrictions on the speech of Arab and Palestinian groups must be fought as violations of our Constitution, not linked to parents’ legitimate objections to teaching children they are “opressors” simply based on the color of their skin.