Rabab Abdulhadi, a San Francisco State University associate professor with a history of expressing support for terrorist groups, has received the 2022 Jere L. Bacharach Service Award from the Middle East Studies Association.

“I wanted to grow up to be like Leila Khaled. I didn’t want to grow up to become a homemaker. I really wanted to be part of the struggle,” said Abdulhadi during a 2020 panel discussion streamed on Youtube (28:41 onwards), referring to the Jordan-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist notorious for her role in hijacking two civilian airliners in 1969 and 1970.

Abdulhadi has also praised other PFLP terrorists on social media, including Georges Abdallah, Rasmieh Odeh and Shadia Abu Ghazaleh.

Antisemitism watchdog Canary Mission has archived many of Abdulhadi’s comments and social media posts. 

In a 2021 post on Facebook, she hailed Odeh and Abu Ghazaleh as "freedom fighters" who “garnered most attention.” 

Odeh is a Jordan-based anti-Israel activist, convicted by an Israeli court in 1970 for her participation in a 1969 supermarket bombing terrorist attack that killed Israeli college students Leon Kanner and Eddie Joffe. After she was released from an Israeli prison in a prisoner exchange in 1980, Odeh immigrated to the United States, from where she was deported 

in 2017 for immigration fraud, for failing to declare her terrorism-related conviction in her immigration papers.

Abu Ghazaleh was a 19-year-old PFLP terrorist notorious for crafting explosives used in attacks carried out against Israel. Abu Ghazaleh died in 1968 when a bomb she was preparing for an attack in Tel Aviv detonated in her home.

Abdulhadi is the San Fransisco State University’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies Program’s founding director and senior scholar. She is also a founding member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel —an organization advocating for the boycott of Israeli academia and cultural organizations in alignment with the goals of the BDS Movement. 

Before joining San Francisco State University, she was the first director of the University of Michigan-Dearborn’s Center for Arab American Studies.

Abdulhadi and the San Francisco State University Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora Studies program were the organizers of a 2020 Zoom conference featuring Kaled 

that Zoom Video Communications canceled out of fears that hosting such an event could be a felony.

In 2020, Abdulhadi wrote 

on Facebook that she was the faculty adviser for the San Francisco State University chapter of the General Union of Palestinian Students.

Abdulhadi has also made comments accusing pro-Israel and Jewish members of Congress of having dual loyalty to Israel and the U.S.