USACBI denounces racist poster campaign targeting professors and students
The US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel condemns in the strongest terms the posters of the David Horowitz so-called “Freedom Center” that have been plastered on campuses including San Francisco State University, the University of California – Berkeley and the University of Chicago. Including caricatures of individual professors and well-known advocates of Palestinian rights (including multiple USACBI co-founders, organizers and endorsers) along with lists of names of faculty and students involved in Palestine activism, these posters label voices of conscience “supporters of terrorism” and are a racist, anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic assault on academic voices for justice in Palestine.
The campaign has targeted well-known professors who have frequently been targeted by right-wing Zionist campaigns, including Rabab Abdulhadi and Hatem Bazian. Abdulhadi is currently facing a “lawfare” harassment lawsuit filed by far-right organizations, only the latest effort in the campaign to silence her scholarship on Palestinian and Arab history and experiences. In fact, the entire Ethnic Studies program at SFSU has come under attack by these organizations in a concerted racist push that represents the position of the “alt-right” alongside these long-established right Zionist organizations.
University administrations must take a clear stand against these defamatory, threatening posters that label faculty and students “terrorists” or “supporters of terrorism” for expressing support for Palestinian rights. They are anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian, Islamophobic and racist and represent an attempt to intimidate and silence students and faculty on campuses across the United States. Designed to intimidate, in the current climate of Islamophobia, these posters are also incitements to violence. They are in fact attempts to impose a state of political and racial terror on the campus.
Furthermore, these university administrations must go further to end complicity in anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia: stop collaborations with Israeli state entities and institutions based on the racist dispossession of millions of Palestinian refugees denied their right to return, a brutal military occupation and an ongoing apartheid regime throughout occupied Palestine by supporting the academic boycott of apartheid Israel.
