It’s been a hectic year for Bay Area Jewish college students.
San Francisco Hillel, which serves hundreds of students on multiple campuses, has stepped up by offering virtual Shabbat programs and other events for stuck-at-home students yearning for connection during the pandemic.
And in the middle all the pandemic
mishegas, San Francisco State University was caught up in a drama in which Palestinian hijacker and activist Leila Khaled was invited virtually not once but twice to the university. (Both times, tech companies blocked the event from happening.)
“Here we are a year later, and believe me, what a year it’s been,” Rick Lenat, S.F. Hillel’s board president, said last week at the organization’s fundraiser, “Activate 2021,” which raised $20,000, according to S.F. Hillel executive director Rachel Nilson Ralston.
A program in Muslim and Arab studies at San Francisco State is again attempting to present an online forum featuring a Palestinian militant who participated in two airplane hijackings, and is again running into roadblocks by internet companies and opposition from Jewish groups.
On Thursday, a page for the forum was removed by Eventbrite, a San Francisco-based ticketing and event registration company. Facebook also reportedly took down its page for the forum, called “Whose Narratives? What Free Speech for Palestine?”
The internet companies’ rebuffs come as little surprise after a similar forum held last September and featuring many of the same panelists encountered equal pushback: Its Zoom registration link was deactivated, Facebook removed the event page, and YouTube, which is owned by Google, cut the talk short after 23 minutes.
Antifa’s ‘street thugs’
Your editorial “We need a big-tent antifascist movement” (Dec. 9) properly warned of the potential danger of the Proud Boys, one of whose factions openly calls for the organization to formally become white supremacist and “anti-Zionist.” However, your treatment of antifa, while laudably covering their recent “random acts of vandalism like smashing the cars of Trump supporters” in Sacramento, seriously understated the danger posed by this anarchist group. The editorial said, “Many members … are peaceful.” A better description would have been a collection of street thugs for whom violence is the norm.
Last spring and summer, antifa and BLM rioters took a terrible toll in American cities. In Seattle, their violence led to at least 12 injured police on July 19 and 55 on July 25. One day later, the Department of Homeland Security reported that in Portland there had been at least 14 injured federal officers over the previous 24-hour perio