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San Francisco State University sponsors a program that has included Palestinian terrorists as guest speakers, The Post has learned.
The university’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies (AMED) course also organized a student trip to Jordan to meet with a convicted Hamas financier and the first woman to hijack an airplane – in the name of Palestinian liberation – according to sources.
The controversial guests and other incidents have led to lawsuits being filed by Jewish students and the university being dubbed “the most antisemitic college campus in the country” in 2018 according to a study by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI).
The study comes amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on universities, threatening to cease billions federal funding from schools that do not comply with efforts to protect Jewish students.
Rabab Abdulhadi, a professor and the director of the AMED program, has close ties to pro-Hamas groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the People’s Forum, the report obtained by The Post says.
People’s Forum, which is financed partly by the Chinese Communist Party, organized many of the New York demonstrations in support of Hamas immediately following the Oct. 7, 2023 terror attack on Israel that left 1,200 Israelis dead.
Three days after the Hamas terror attacks, AMED posted on its official Facebook page honoring “all resistance fighters from Geronimo to #Gaza, Huwarra and Al Aqsa.” Geronimo refers to a 19th century Native American resistance fighter; Huwarra is the name of a Palestinian town located in the West Bank and Al Aqsa is a network of Palestinian militias, named for the holiest site in Jerusalem.
In June, 2024, Abdulhadi — who has been on the faculty of the school since 2007 — attended the People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit and expressed full support for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which was designated a foreign terrorist group in 2021 by the State Department, according to NCRI.
Among the speakers at the conference were Wisam Rafeedie, a PFLP member and Sana Daqa’a, the wife of PFLP terrorist Walid Daqu’a, who was convicted of commanding an operation that kidnapped and killed an Israeli soldier in 1984.
A month after the Detroit conference in July 2024, AMED sponsored a webinar honoring Ghassan Kanafani, a leader of the PFLP who was assassinated by Mossad in 1972. Among the speakers was Marwan Abdel Al, a member of the PFLP based in London.
“If taxpayer-funded universities repeatedly host operatives from US-designated terrorist organizations, at what point does academic freedom cross into material support for terror?” said an analyst at NCRI.
In 2014, AMED sponsored a delegation to Palestine led by Abdulhadi in which students met with Sheikh Raed Salah, who has previously been jailed for raising funds for Hamas. In January, Israeli authorities shut down his Afsha’a Al-Islam committee, citing its alleged ties to the outlawed Northern Faction of the Islamic Movement, which is linked to the terrorist group.
On that trip, students also met with Leila Khaled, a member of the PFLP who hijacked an El Al flight from Amsterdam to New York City in 1970, becoming the first woman to do so.
In 2020, Khaled was scheduled to speak at a webinar organized by Abdulhadi, but the Zoom event was cancelled following protests from Jewish students and outrage from lawmakers. Zoom Video Communications as well as Facebook and YouTube prevented the organizers from using their software and platforms, citing antiterrorism legislation, according to reports.
Two years later, in Sept. 2022, Abdulhadi traveled to Beirut to moderate a panel that included Salah Salah, a co-founder of the PFLP as well as Khaled.
SFSU and Abdulhadi did not respond to requests for comment from The Post. The University was sued by Jewish students in 2017 for inciting antisemitism and discrimination against Jews after the disruption of a speech by the mayor of Jerusalem at the school a year earlier.
In settlement negotiations, the school agreed to hire a Jewish student life coordinator. The lawsuit was sponsored by the Lawfare Project, a New York-based non-profit that provides pro-bono legal services to protect Jewish rights around the world.
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