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.
Palestinian terrorist Leila Khaled speaks at an event in Barcelona, Spain, in 2017. Photo: Fira Literal Barcelona / Wikimedia Commons.
Zoom has introduced a new policy on “academic freedom” for higher education users, which will limit its interference in the shutdown of controversial virtual events hosted on its video conferencing platform. The move comes as Eventbrite last week decided to remove a San Francisco State University-sponsored event on April 23 featuring Leila Khaled a member of US-designated terrorist organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) – from its platform, as it violates the event management platform’s terms of service.
The new policy, which according to the education outlet
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.