If you're Jewish and involved in the battle to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitic harassment on US campuses, then the odds are that the name Hatem "Hate'em" Bazian rings a very unpleasant bell. Likewise if you're Jewish and involved in UK politics, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn gets a very unpleasant reaction. But what if you bring the two of them together?
The leader of the UK’s Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn — long dogged by accusations of personal and party-wide antisemitism — met Tuesday evening with the founder of an internationally renowned anti-Israel student group, The Algemeiner has learned.
According to information gathered by covert campus watchdog group Canary Mission, Corbyn attended the London book signing of Dr. Hatem Bazian, senior lecturer at UC Berkeley and father of Students for Justice in Palestine.
Corbyn has a long history of meeting with Muslim anti-Semitic figures and Bazianhas his own veryugly history of hate.
This was the MSA chapter which the ADL reported had distributed copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Hatem Bazian, who has called for Jewish genocide, had headed this chapter. While at Berkeley, Bazian had responded to the arrest of members of his anti-Semitic SJP group for disrupting a Holocaust remembrance event by accusing Jews of controlling the university.
Steven Emerson, in his book American Jihad, quotes Bazian sermonizing at an American Muslim Alliance conference in May 1999, promoting the Islamic State of Palestine. Excerpts from the quote read, “In the Hadith, the Day of Judgment will never happen until you fight the Jews . . . and the stones will say, ‘Oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him!’”
A rise in incidents of anti-Semitism was reported by Jewish students at San Francisco State University coinciding with Bazian's increasing influence on campus, and contemporaneous Jewish students have said that Bazian was a critical player in fomenting this environment. Throughout the early 1990s at San Francisco State, Bazian continued his involvement in student politics supporting Pro-Palestinian groups on campus.
While Hatem was at San Francisco State University, he participated in an assault on the offices of the Golden Gater student newspaper accusing it of being full of Jewish spies. Jewish students had complained about anti-Semitic behavior by Bazian, in his role as student body president, and his campaign against Hillel, the leading Jewish campus organization, was a direct attempt to disenfranchise Jewish students.
When a controversial mural of Malcolm X containing dollar signs surrounded by Jewish Stars was painted on the student union building at San Francisco State, Bazian was an organizer of and a featured speaker at a press conference in support of the mural. According to the campus newspaper, The Golden Gater, Jewish students were forcibly excluded from this press conference despite it being held in the public Student Union building.
After a 2002 Students for Justice in Palestine rally at UC Berkeley resulted in the arrest of 79 protesters, Bazian spoke at a follow-up rally protesting the arrests. "If you want to know where the pressure on the university [i.e., to prosecute the demonstrators] is coming from, look at the Jewish names on the school buildings," he said.
Business as usual for Jeremy.