One professor’s twisted definition of ‘scholarship’

Like many others in the Jewish community, I first became aware of the dire situation facing Jewish students at San Francisco State University (SFSU) back in May 2002, when John Podhoretz published an op-ed in the New York Post exposing the anti-Semitic activism plaguing the campus. Podhoretz quoted from an email written by Professor Laurie Zoloth, then the chair of the SFSU’s Jewish Studies department, in which she confessed, “I cannot fully express what it feels like to have to walk across campus daily, past posters of cans of soup with labels on them of drops of blood and dead babies, labeled ‘canned Palestinian children meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites.’”

Twelve years on, not much appears to have changed at the university that revived the ancient and despicable “blood libel” against the Jewish people. This time, SFSU is engulfed by a scandal involving allegations that one of its professors “misused” $7,000 worth of taxpayer funds for a January research trip to the Middle East that included meetings with representatives of terrorists and Islamist organizations.

Notably, one of the individuals with whom the professor, Rabab Abdulhadi, met was Sheikh Raed Salah, the leader of the Islamic Movement in Israel, who has himself voiced the blood libel. “You should ask,” Salah told an audience in eastern Jerusalem in 2007, “what used to happen to some of the children of Europe, whose blood would be mixed in the dough of the holy bread.” Salah in this quote references the matzah, or unleavened bread, eaten by Jews during the Passover holiday, which medieval Jew-haters claimed was prepared with the blood of Christian children.