San Francisco State University Hit With Lawsuit Alleging 'Hostile Anti-Jewish Environment'

From PJM:

San Francisco State University (SFSU) was hit by a lawsuit last week by Jewish students and community members who allege that the school foments a “pervasively hostile anti-Jewish environment.” 

While colleges across the nation have seen a near exponential rise in the number of anti-Semitic incidents, the lawsuit contends that SFSU is a particularly hostile school, which started with the founding of the College of Ethnic Studies (COES) in 1968, a social justice-themed school that focuses on minority issues. 

Since the founding of COES, anti-Jewish sentiment has only gotten worse, as administrators have rushed to support anti-Jewish student groups and departments, such as the General Union of Palestine Students and the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative. 

The lawsuit contends that these groups have “doggedly organized their efforts to target, threaten, and intimidate Jewish students on campus and deprive them of their civil rights” and their ability to be “safe and secure” as they pursue their education at SFSU. 

While the administration has been mostly silent on the issue, in 1997 the then-president of SFSU, Robert Corrigan, did note that his school fostered “the most anti-Semitic campus in the nation,” according to the lawsuit. 

The plaintiffs include the former president of Hillel at SFSU, two current students, and three community members — all of whom were in attendance at a 2016 lecture given at SFSU by Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat. 

The lecture was deliberately hijacked by anti-Jewish student groups, whose members shouted down the speaker and allegedly made threats to members in the audience, yelling that Israel is an “Apartheid state” and “Long live the Intifada!” Mayor 

Barkat did not finish his speech, nor did he accept a second invitation to speak at SFSU, as The Algemeiner reported.