Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

San Francisco College Chief Slams Anti-Israel ‘Killer’ Signs

San Francisco State University’s president condemned placards at a Palestinian campus event that said, “My heroes have always killed colonizers.”

Stencils allowing attendees to paint the slogan on placards were available at a Nov. 7 event celebrating the sixth anniversary of the creation of a campus mural honoring the late Palestinian-American academic Edward Said.

According to the San Francisco Examiner, the stencils were provided at one of the tables at the event manned by various organizations.

“I am dismayed by the glorification of violence that this message conveys,” the university’s president, Les Wong, said in a statement this week, referring to the stencils. “There is no place at SF State for celebrating violence or promoting intolerance, bigotry, anti-Semitism or any other form of hate-mongering.”

Wong promised to convey his “firm commitment to a safe and civil campus environment directly to any students involved.”

Wong’s statement followed complaints to his office about the stencils by the AMCHA Initiative, a group that opposes anti-Semitism on campus.

A second stencil reportedly available at the event featured an image of Leila Khaled, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who participated in a 1969 plane hijacking. She was captured the following year by Israeli air marshals as she tried to hijack a second plane.

The mural celebration was organized by the General Union of Palestinian Students and the school’s Cesar Chavez Student Center. In a statement, the Palestinian student group had urged Wong to condemn AMCHA’s reaction to its event.

“This belligerent smear campaign meant to slander the Palestinian movement on campus has directly created a hostile environment that makes it impossible for us to express our views and exercise our academic freedom,” the Palestinian student group’s statement said. The statement made no mention of the stencils.

The mural celebration was co-sponsored by several Palestinian and Arab groups, as well as the university’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.