San Francisco Independent, 5/28/02

THE HINCKLE FILE
BY WARREN HINCKLE

THE SAD, SORRY STORY ABOUT S.F. STATE

How can the most liberal city in the country have its largest college known as "Hate Jew U."?

He had strongly developed anti-Semitic views,
about which I argued with him whenever
we hit a straight piece of the road.
—Noel Coward

Jacques Chirac, the president of France, says there is no anti-Semitism in France, as the synagogues burn. Robert Corrigan, the president of San Francisco State University, says ditto for his place, while students march around with pictures of Palestinian babies that say they were killed by Jews to drink their blood.

Anyone want to go to the canned laugh track? These denials would be funny if it weren't all so awful.

Nobody can tell the French what to do. But San Francisco State is San Francisco's problem, and there is plenty the city can do about the escalating waves of virulent anti-Semitism disrupting campus life out at 19th and Holloway.

The S.F. State administration seems particularly disarranged about what to do about an increasingly ugly situation that has, in the words of the university's director of JewishStudies, Laurie Zoloth, let the school become a "venue for antiSemitism" over the past six weeks.

The state officials finally called in the cops—the San Francisco cops—to escort a group of Jewish studedts and parents safety across campus on 19th Avenue, when they had their backs literally to the wall of the Cesar Chavez building and were trapped by an anti-Israeli mob yelling, Hitler didn't finish the job" and "Death of Jews," which were among the milder epithets.

The SF State campus police didn't seem to want to get involved, according to many in attendance. Perhaps the authorities out there are still freaked by distant memories of that wild man S. I. Hayakawa pulling the plug on the leftie students' sound truck in 1968, in an incident that brought a whole lot of SFPD uniforms to the school.

The ironic thing about the near-riot at State on May 8 was that the Jews who had gathered for a peace rally were leftie Jews —they were in favor of a Palestinian state on the Left Bank—but the anti-Israeli fervor at State has boiled to the point that their rally was busted up and they were threatened to get off campus or they'd risk being dead left-wing Jews.

The torrent of e-mails— some outraged, some just plain scared—that went to State president Corrigan and other administrators from Jewish students and their parents swayed the administration to make a move by forwarding to the San Francisco district attorney some names of students who might be charged with violating the hate-crime laws.

In typical trimming fashion, the names of both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel students were forwarded, as if there were any question that it was the anti-Israel group that had broken up the pro-Israel peace rally.

"As the counter demonstrators poured into the plaza, screaming at the Jews to 'Get out or we will kill you' and 'Hitler did not finish the job,' I turned to the [campus] police and to every administrator I could find and asked them to remove the counter demonstrators.... The police told me that they had been told not to arrest anyone, and if they did, 'it would start a riot.'I told them that it was already a riot," Zoloth wrote in an e-mail sent to Corrigan.

The problem we have here is that, simply put, it is not acceptable in this town for anti-Israeli students to be yelling at Jews on a college campus—and one supported by taxpayer funds—in the same way it is not tolerable for Jews to be yelling at Palestinians and breaking up their rallies.

The volume of anti-Jewish posters and statements on campus has increased intolerably since a similar beef occurred at a Holocaust Memorial ceremony in April to the point where Jewish students are writing the administration that they are uncomfortable even going to school and some far-right commentators are beginning to call S.F. State "Hate-Jew U."

HJU has no place in San Francisco and if the state college administration cannot maintain civility on campus there are sufficient rules and regulations— from the college standards governing public assembly (you can't drown out the other groups' speeches with your own noise, or rip down signs, et cetera) to San Franciscos hate crime laws —that should put a stop to this badness, pronto.

It would be too bad if the city had to do the dirty work for the university's campus police, because this is indeed a dirty business. Perhaps the governor should call Corrigan. Someone has to be responsible here.