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Gary Fouse

Rabab Abdulhadi gets an award (sort of)

“Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, founding director of SFSU’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies (AMED) program, was given the 2020 Georgina M. Smith Award for “a person or persons who provided exceptional leadership in a given year in improving the status of academic women or in academic collective bargaining and through that work improved the profession in general.”

Just when you thought American academia couldn’t get any lower, along comes the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) giving an award to one of the most despicable figures in academia, San Francisco State University’s anti-Semitic professor, Rabab Abdulhadi.

The award is named after somebody named Georgia M. Smith, who was a math professor at Rutgers and a feminist who supported her local teacher union. For that you get an award named after you. Looking down their roll of previous winners, the only names I recognize are Rutgers’a radical America-basher, Deepa Kumar, of whom I have previously written, and Stanford’s Christine Blasey Ford, who rose to fame after she accused Brett Kavanaugh of raping her when they were both teenagers.

But let us return to Abdulhadi, with whom I am quite familiar. The question must be asked as to why the AAUP would give this award to her of all people unless the AAUP subscribes to hatred of Israel and Jews, which has characterized her career at SFSU. Even a radical school like SFSU has to blush when confronted with the mutterings of Abdulhadi, who has done nothing but embarrass the institution.

This is the woman who mentored to the infamous General Union of Palestinian Students when they were plastering the campus with posters advocating the murder of Israeli soldiers and making videos fantasizing about cutting their throats. This is the woman who attacked her own university president when he assured Jewish students who supported Israel that were welcome on campus. This is the woman who reportedly used university funds to attend a conference in Lebanon (which never materialized) and instead used it to meet with bad hombres in the West Bank and Jordan.

Speaking of not materializing, I can’t help but remember when Abdulhadi and her Guppies were supposed to speak at UC Irvine in 2015. However, when this writer showed up with his video camera, Abdulhadi et. al. never materialized. After 30 minutes of the Muslim Student Union appealing to the university (unsuccessfully) to ban my camera, Abdulhadi and her Guppies never showed up. It was great theater-even with an empty stage. I have to believe they were nearby because the stage featured a podium, chairs, and microphone-which were never used. That’s not what I call “improving the status of academic women”.

It would have been much more fitting for AAUP to give an award to UCLA Professor Judea Pearl, father of slain journalist Daniel Pearl. Professor Pearl has shown courage over the years in standing up to the pro-Palestinian haters on campus, but I doubt he would even be considered by the politically-correct crowd at AAUP.

The fact of the matter is that the award is a joke which was handed out for political reasons. It is as meaningless as a university degree in the social sciences has become in America.

About the Author
Gary Fouse worked from 1998-2016 as adjunct teacher at University of California at Irvine Ext. teaching English as a second language. Served three years in US Army Military Police at Erlangen, Germany 1966-68. 1970-1973- Criminal Investigator with US Customs 1973-1995 Criminal investigator with Drug Enforcement Administration. Stationed in Los Angeles, Bangkok, Milan, Italy, Pittsburgh and Office of Training, FBI Academy, Quantico, Va. until retirement. Author of Erlangen-An American's History of a German Town-University Press of America 2005. The Story of Papiamentu- A Study in Slavery and Language, University Press of America, 2002. The Languages of the Former Soviet Republics-Their History and Development, University Press of America, 2000.