Administrators at Yeshiva University canceled a student-planned program that would have featured an anti-Israel speaker who supported terrorists.
The program, which was scheduled for March 1 at the Benjamin Cardozo Law School in Manhattan, a division of the YU system, was to have included Rabab Abdulhadi, director of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies Program at San Francisco State University, who has expressed her support for Palestinian terrorists, including Leila Khaled, a leader in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
According to the anti-Semitism watchdog group Canary Mission, Abdulhadi “has cultivated times with Hamas-dominated universities, glorified terrorists and promoted hatred of Zionists.” She has also “expressed support for anti-Israel agitators and spread hatred of Israel during the coronavirus pandemic” and is a “member of a group that aims for academic boycotting of Israel.”
In a letter, Rabbi Dr. Avi Berman, the school’s president, wrote: “As the flagship Jewish university, Yeshiva University proudly supports Israel and its right to exist as central to our core values. In that spirit, we made a recent decision to cancel a student-scheduled guest speaker at Cardozo Law School.”
“While I know that our students were well-intentioned, all people of good conscience must stand against hate. Spirited debate about government policy and sanctions cannot descend into advocacy of violence,” he wrote. “The current anti-Semitic vitriol on college campuses today that so often uses anti-Israel rhetoric will find no home or harbor at this university.”
The students who were planning the event—Sydney Artson and Heidi Sandomir—issued a press release on Wednesday demanding that the program be reinstated, claiming that Abdulhadi has been “falsely accused of anti-Semitism, a known tactic to silence individuals criticizing the Israeli government.”
