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BDS Tag

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 29, 2015 22 Comments
Earlier today we reported that controversial former professor Steven Salaita had filed a federal lawsuit over his non-hiring. I identified what I saw as a glaring defect in the Complaint. The University of Illinois has responded with a Statement which previews how the case will be defended. The defense hones in on what I saw as a glaring defect in the Complaint, namely that Salaita never claimed that anyone -- much less anyone with authority -- promised him that Board of Trustees approval was not needed or waived. As such, Salaita will have a more difficult time converting a contingent offer into an enforceable agreement. Similarly, much like the official faculty committee, the University views the tweets in the context of Salaita's fitness, citing a tweet from June, before the Gaza fighting:
Specifically, Dr. Salaita began making a series of statements via social media on precisely the subject matter that he proposed to teach at our University. For example, on June 19, 2014, after three Israeli teenagers were reported kidnapped and presumed dead, Dr. Salaita posted a statement on Twitter which read: “You may be too refined to say it, but I’m not: I wish all the f**king West Bank settlers would go missing.” Dr. Salaita continued to post this comment even after the three teens were found murdered later that month.... These statements and many more like them demonstrate that Dr. Salaita lacks the judgment, temperament and thoughtfulness to serve as a member of our faculty in any capacity, but particularly to teach courses related to the Middle East.
The University denies that donor pressure influenced the decision. Presumably, as Chancellor Wise said in an interview recently, the university constantly gets donor complaints on a variety of issues, including sports. Those among Salaita's BDS supporters -- who have driven the protests -- who thought that Salaita had a strong case may be in for a rude awakening. They want to put the university, the Chancellor and the donors on trial, but Salaita may find himself on trial. As someone who handled employment cases as a large part of my private practice prior to joining academia, almost always for the employee, the Salaita case will be no easy win, no matter how much supportive websites with an anti-Israel agenda and pro-BDS faculty tweet out support and urge Salaita on. When this story first broke on August 6, I asked the following question to readers:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 28, 2015 8 Comments
On Tuesday night, January 27, 2015, I spoke at the Rochester (NY) Jewish Community Center on the topic of Boycotting Israel - The insidious threat of the BDS movement I was invited to speak by Rochesterians for Israel (Roc4Israel), a very active multi-faith group. The official attendance count was 354 people, quite a crowd. Before my speech, the organizers played the video of the Cornell student harassed and attacked by anti-Israel activists on campus, as well as a video of aggressive anti-Israel campus activities: (Language Warning) (BTW, that "Gandhi Quote" is fake.) In my speech I put the aggressiveness of anti-Israel student groups in context. I focused on the academic boycott movement pushed by faculty professional organizations, which deprives faculty, students and the greater academic community of academic freedom.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 26, 2015 36 Comments
We previously reported how anti-Israel activists hijacked a Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day #BlackLivesMatter protest and turned it into an anti-Israel event. They trapped hundreds, if not thousands, of motorists by setting up a protest line at the highest point of the bridge span, and also abandoning their own cars on the bridge to block traffic. This was an extremely dangerous maneuver. Unlike the blockade of Route 93 in Boston, for example, there was no possibility of motorists exiting. If an ambulance or someone in need of medical care had been trapped, there would have been no way out and no way to redirect ambulances or other emergency vehicles that needed to cross the bay. This maneuver created havoc on the bridge, with motorists driving the wrong way near the toll area in a desperate attempt to escape. [caption id="attachment_113843" align="alignnone" width="600"]http://kron4.com/2015/01/19/protesters-block-westbound-lanes-on-san-mateo-bridge/ (Source: KRON4 Video)[/caption] For extensive video and photographic coverage, see our prior posts: Here's a video we have not previously posted:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 23, 2015 25 Comments
We previously reported how, on Monday, January 19, 2015, Anti-Israel activists blocked the San Mateo - Hayward Bridge. While the protest ostensibly was about the #BlackLivesMatter movement and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, it was hijacked as so many such protests are by the anti-Israel contingent, just like in Ferguson and to a lesser extent in New York City during the Eric Garner protests. Subsequent to that initial report, we have learned that it was much worse than originally thought. The tactics used were designed to cause maximum traffic disruption and mayhem, including protester cars being abandoned on the roadway, resulting in several car crashes and emergency vehicles being blocked. The activists used a dangerous tactic of blocking both directions initially, making the scene inaccessible initially to emergency vehicles:
Over 100 Stanford students and community members demonstrating against police brutality temporarily shut down the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge Monday afternoon, snarling the evening commute. The group made their way on eastbound and westbound lanes of state Highway 92 on the bridge at the high-rise around 4:50 p.m., CHP Officer Daniel Hill said. The protesters had been dropped off by cars on westbound lanes and briefly made their way to both sides of the freeway, he said. As of shortly after 5 p.m., eastbound lanes were reopened for motorists heading to Hayward but westbound lanes were still closed off for cars traveling to Foster City, Van Eckhardt said. Drivers were seen turning around at the toll plaza and going the wrong way on the bridge as CHP tried to find tow trucks to take away abandoned cars left on the bridge by protesters. The bridge was reopened shortly before 5:30 p.m.
[caption id="attachment_113857" align="alignnone" width="600"]https://twitter.com/farah_salazar/status/558214869648814080 (Image via Farah Salazar Twitter)[/caption] In this video taken by a stalled driver on the other side of the highway, you can see how initially traffic was backed up on both sides creating a dangerous situation high on the span (the initial comments seem to indicate the drivers thought it was an abortion protest until they got closer):

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 22, 2015 10 Comments
This has to be a new low. Anti-Israel activists in New York City have started a campaign as part of the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement to try to prevent City Council members and other politicians from visiting Israel. A coalition of 40 groups, most of which are quite small but including the usual suspects like the inaccurately named Jewish Voice for Peace are leading the effort. At a NY City Council meeting today, anti-Israel activists disrupted a vote commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, shouting for one of the council members not to travel to Israel, as reported by Jacob Kornbluh at Jewish Political News & Updates website, which has video:
Pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel activists disrupted the City Council’s stated meeting on Thursday while members were voting on a resolution commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The protesters started yelling, “shame on you, Melissa”, “why are you supporting an apartheid” and “Palestinian lives matter.” After five minutes of yelling and screaming, the some 40 protesters were ordered to leave and escorted out the balcony. Council member Cory Johnson called it “incredibly disrespectful and offensive. Simply awful.” Councilman Mark Weprin added, “The State of Israel has never supported the killing of innocent people, and they want to love in peace.” “I am still shaken, upset and angry,” Councilman David Greenfield. “Shame on them for hating Jews.” “But I’m pleased, because we can stop pretending that this is about Israel. What we saw here was blatant antisemitism, good old fashioned antisemitism,” Greenfield roared. “They were angry, you know why? because Hitler did not finish the job.” The trip to Israel is a message that “we will not be cowered by this fear and hatred,” he added.... Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito said in an emailed statement, “At a time when the Council was voting on a resolution commemorating the 70thanniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, this outburst was offensive, outrageous and counter to the values of the City Council.”
One of the people in the protest recorded Vine loops(h/t Gothamist).

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 20, 2015 18 Comments
Don't say I didn't warn you about how anti-Israel activists have set on a deliberate course to hijack the Ferguson and #BlackLivesMatters protests to their own anti-Israel agenda: It started in Ferguson, then the Eric Garner protests, and is being pushed by the anti-Israel Students for Justice in Palestine through groups like Dream Defenders, which carries a Tides Foundation logo on it's website.  Dream Defenders was responsible for Marc Lamont Hill's trip to "Palestine" in which he recorded a video supporting "Revolutionary Struggle" against Israel. http://youtu.be/L2yMMdPTQ30 A key player in the effort to turn the #BlackLivesMatter movement into an anti-Israel movement is recently graduated Stanford student and SJP activist Kristian Davis Bailey, who writes not only for the anti-Zionist Mondoweiss website, but also has been promoting the effort in Ebony Magazine.

Posted by Russell Berman on January 17, 2015 2 Comments
[WAJ Note: On January 10, 2015, we reported how Modern Language Assoc postpones anti-Israel boycott vote until 2017.  I asked Stanford Professor Russell Berman, a former President of MLA who attended the debate and vote, to provide us with a first-hand account and analysis.] ----------------------------------- At the recent Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention in Vancouver, proponents of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement made a concerted effort to score an electoral victory for their anti-Israel campaign. BDS and its supporters failed. I was present during the debate and votes at the Delegate Assembly, and the failure was clear. Nonetheless BDS supporters have rushed to claim success, asserting that straw polls taken at the Delegate Assembly supported both BDS and Professor Steven Salaita (who is in a dispute with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). To make such claims requires misrepresentation of the facts of what happened. But facts matter, and a reasonable examination of the series of votes in Vancouver leads to the conclusion that BDS lost.

Boycott Resolution Delayed Two Years

First some background: in the run-up to the convention, two resolutions were submitted to the MLA’s Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee (DAOC). One resolution called for a boycott of Israeli universities, while the other opposed academic boycotts. Because the two resolutions were in direct conflict with each other, the DAOC requested that both proposals be withdrawn during a two-year moratorium on any resolutions concerning Israel. Instead the DAOC proposed a series of discussions about the matter in order to inform the membership. Both sides agreed, and neither resolution was brought to the floor. However, when the Delegate Assembly convened in Vancouver, the DAOC had to bring its two-year moratorium proposal before the assembly for a vote. BDS supporters attacked it bitterly because they were eager to vote against Israel, and they correctly saw the moratorium as prohibiting such a vote until 2017 at the earliest. The voting showed that they were a distinct minority: the Delegate Assembly adopted the moratorium proposal 95 to 49. This was a victory for the DAOC and a dramatic 2 to 1 loss for BDS. That first vote was important not only because it rejected the BDS effort to accelerate its anti-Israel campaign but because it took place relatively early in the afternoon when attendance was still high.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 15, 2015 10 Comments
The University of Illinois Board of Trustees has just issued a statement that it will not reconsider its decision not to hire controversial anti-Israel activist Steven Salatia. Salaita had a contingent offer of employment, requiring Board approval for the tenured position. That approval was denied in early September, after Salaita's tweets raised questions as to his fitness. An official faculty committee report suggested reconsideration, subject to a fitness evaluation. A second non-official report by five prominent professors rejected reconsideration. The American Association of University Professors is expected to issue a report demanding Salaita's hiring and threatening censure. The Trustees decision effectively preempts the AAUP's expected report. The Board just announced its decision on reconsideration, via Via AP:
University of Illinois trustees say they will not reconsider a September decision to rescind a job offer to a professor over his profane, anti-Israel Twitter messages. The trustees issued a statement Thursday that said the decision was final. A committee of university faculty had recommended that the school reconsider hiring Steven Salaita. Salaita was offered a job teaching Native American Studies at the Urbana-Champaign campus starting last August but the offer was rescinded after he wrote the Twitter messages. Some university donors complained they were anti-Semitic.
http://uofi.uillinois.edu/emailer/newsletter/65730.html The Urbana News-Gazette further reports:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 14, 2015 3 Comments
Ronald Reagan's "A Time for Choosing" speech set forth the stark choice facing free societies in the fight against Communism: After the attacks in France and throughout Europe on Jews, often motivated and perpetrated in the name of anti-Zionism, it's no longer possible to sit on the sidelines. It's another time for choosing. Whatever Israel's problems with regard to balancing the fight against terror with preservation of freedom, such problems pale in comparison to what goes on in the rest of the region and most of the world, where balance is not even attempted. We saw it in the intimidation and threats against "journalists" in Gaza during the 2014 summer conflict, where Hamas bullying resulted in refusals to report key facts such as Hamas using schools, hospitals and other civilian infrastructure as rocket firing locations. Some evidence, however, slipped out, particularly after "journalists" left Gaza. That is true also in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority, where there is no independent journalism except directed at Israel. Israel and Israel alone is under a microscope from hundreds of journalists and Non-Governmental Organizations whose primary job is to wake up every morning and find something wrong that then can be broadcast through Western and Arab media.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 10, 2015 1 Comment
In what only can be described as a serious setback for anti-Israel academic boycott activists, the Modern Language Association just voted at its Annual Conference to postpone a boycott resolution vote until 2017. https://twitter.com/roopikarisam/status/554035899953315841 At the 2014 annual meeting a resolution critical of Israel's alleged breach of Palestinian academic freedom barely passed the House of Delegates, but then failed when the resolution was sent to the full membership. There was no boycott resolution to be voted on this year.  Given that even a condemnation of Israel failed last year, hopes to advance the anti-Israel, anti-academic freedom agenda will have to wait for two years. The vote to confirm this delayed timetable was not a surprise. According to one person in the room during discussion of the delay, the boycotters came "off as silly. Especially after events like this weekend." [referring to attacks on Jews in Paris by Islamic terrorists] But pro-boycott faculty formed a working group, led by Stanford Professor David Palumbo-Liu (recently elected to the MLA Executive Board), David Lloyd of UC-Riverside (one of the co-founders of the U.S. boycott movement) and Rebecca Comay of the University of Toronto, who will be organizing for the next two years to push the boycott resolution in 2017.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 09, 2015 8 Comments
The attack by radical Islamists at the Paris Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket left four hostages dead, plus one of the gunmen. The Hyper Cacher supermarket attack appears to have been coordinated with the two men who killed 12 at Charlie Hebdo. The specter of widespread anti-Semitism on the streets of Paris is nothing new. It has been fueled not only by centuries-old hatreds, but by the more modern Islamist, "anti-Zionist" and BDS movements whose hatred of Israel is obsessive and dehumanizing. Below are a couple of videos from the assaults on Jewish sections of Paris and a Synagogue during "pro-Palestinian" riots last summer over the Gaza conflict. See also several of my posts (some of the videos in the posts have gone bad):

Posted by Jeffrey Herf on January 06, 2015 1 Comment
[WAJ Intro: University of Maryland Professor Jeffrey Herf helped lead the battle to defeat anti-Israel resolutions at the American Historical Association, as we wrote about on Sunday.  I asked him to submit this Guest Post to recount the events and strategies, in the hope they will inform others facing similar anti-Israel tactics.] --------------- By now readers of this blog probably know that by a vote of 144 to 51 with three abstentions, members of the American Historical Association, at their Business Meeting of annual meeting in New York City on January 4, 2015, decided not to pursue two resolutions that denounced aspects of the policies of the government of Israel. For readers of Legal Insurrection it is important to point out that the defeat of these resolutions was due to procedural issues that were also matters of substance. Details of the events are readily available in the reports by The New York Times, Inside Higher Education, Algemeiner and The Tablet . It is the most decisive defeat that groups supporting resolutions denouncing Israel have suffered since “BDS” (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) efforts gathered steam in American universities in recent years. This is a preliminary anatomy of its defeat.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 04, 2015 4 Comments
At the American Historical Association annual meeting in New York City, an anti-Israel group called Historians Against the War sought to present two anti-Israel resolutions (here and here). Neither resolution called for a boycott of Israel, because they knew that would not pass (the AHA apparently is not controlled by anti-Israel radical activists, unlike the American Studies Association). So in a strategy we have seen at the Modern Language Association, a resolution condemning alleged Israeli offenses against Palestinian academic freedom was offered. (It failed at MLA, btw.) This is the stepping stone approach -- first get a resolution condemning, then later come back with a boycott resolution. The resolutions were factually inaccurate and engaged in unsubstantiated hyperbole. But the resolution sponsors missed the November 1 deadline for the resolutions to be considered at the business meeting. Only an affirmative vote at the business meeting could send the resolutions to a full membership vote. So the anti-Israel activists sought to have the business meeting rules suspended. That would require at least a 100 person quorum and a two-thirds vote. Based on the Twitter feed, it appears that the motion to suspend the rules met spirited opposition on a variety of grounds, including the lack of good grounds for missing the deadline, the importance of providing adequate time to fact check the resolution, and the merits of the ultimate resolution. The vote at the business meeting was taken just minutes ago.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 02, 2015 3 Comments
When talking about the obsessive-compulsive haters of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement, it's easy to focus on opposing what they do. In fact, this weekend at the American Historical Association, some BDS activist-professors are trying to get business meeting rules waived so they can introduce a biased and inaccurate anti-Israel resolution. These efforts need to be opposed, but opposition is not the ultimate answer. The answer to those who seek to demonize and deligitimize Israel through the BDS movement is to build even more academic and other relationships with Israel. The University of Chicago is doing just that, cooperating wtih Ben Gurion University on water resource management for desert climates. This is not a political move, but shared scientific research on its own merits. It's only anti-Israel activists who turn such research to benefit all humanity into a political issue. The Chicago Tribune reports For water's sake, Chicago researchers reach across the seas to Israel:
The Arava desert, a salty wasteland dotted with tufts of scrub, gets only about an inch of rain each year. And yet cows lazily low at dairy farms that collectively produce nearly 8 million gallons of milk annually. Orange bell peppers flourish in a long swath of greenhouses that skirts the Jordanian border. Kibbutzim with vineyards somehow manage to churn out shiraz and sauvignon blanc, unfazed by the desert sun. The clusters of farms and wineries in the Arava are a testament to Israel's acumen in water technology. One of the most parched places on earth has found a way to beat water woes once so severe that Israel's national mood rose and fell with the changing level of the Sea of Galilee, one of their most critical water sources. That expertise helps explain why the University of Chicago sought out Israel's Ben-Gurion University to help tackle one of the world's most worrisome problems — water scarcity....
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