Melinda Bunnage

Overview

Melinda Bunnage demonized Israel at Loyola University Chicago (Loyola), where she co-sponsored a Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement resolution as a student senator and Chair of the Justice Committee of Loyola’s Student Government in 2015.

As of October 2018, Bunnage was listed as a Women’s and Gender Studies major at Loyola. Also as of October 2018, Bunnage’s Facebook About page said she was a Union Organizer at Service Employees International Union (SEIU) since August 2016.

BDS Campus Activism

In 2015, Bunnage co-sponsored a Loyola Divestment resolution submitted to the Loyola Student Government and titled “Divestment from Companies Profiting from the Illegal Occupation of the Palestinian Territory To ensure adherence to Loyola’s University Chicago’s Socially Responsible Investment Policy.”

A March 2015 Loyola Phoenix article described Bunnage as one of “the most vocal advocates” of the resolution during a debate about the BDS campaign at Loyola.

Bunnage posed fora photo published on Loyola Divest’s Facebook page in March 2015, to promote the group’s 2015 BDS campaign. In the photo, she held a sign reading: “I SUPPORT LOYOLA DIVEST.”

On March 10, 2015, Bunnage featured [00:01:47] in a promotional video for Loyola Divest on Youtube.

The resolution resolved to urge the Loyola’s Chief Investment Office to collaborate with “students, faculty and staff” to “create and enforce a publicly available socially responsible investment policy and the Shareholder Advocacy Committee that will ensure that Loyola is upholding its Jesuit Catholic mission and Jesuit values in regard to investments” and divest from “corporations profiting from human rights violations committed against the Palestinian people.”

The resolution invoked the 2005 Palestine civil society call for BDS, and quoted Al Jazeera, claiming that “Israel had been buying and ‘weaponizing’ Caterpillar bulldozers then using them to demolish Palestinian homes, build settlements and the separation wall, clear land to build Jewish-only roads, uproot olive and fruit trees, and carry out military operation. [sic]”

The resolution, which was the third such proposed in as many years, passed on March 24, 2015, after an initial tie vote. The tie-breaking vote reportedly came from an intern for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). SJP Loyola’s chapter advisor and former executive board member, Nashiha Alam, was the chief sponsor of the resolution.

CAIR reportedly helped SJP Loyola after it was temporarily suspended from holding campus activities in late 2014, following its harassment of a Jewish group on campus on September 9, 2016.

Alam reportedly posted a video of the harassment on Facebook, with the comment: “What happens when you try to table for a racist manifest destiny trip to Israel at my school.”

The Loyola Divest Facebook page, created on January 30, 2014, said that it was previously named “SJP Loyola” and listed the group’s email address as “sjpluc@gmail.com” and the group’s website as “http://sjployola.com. The SJP Loyola Facebook page history said the page changed its name to “Loyola Divest” on September 16, 2014.

In response to the resolution, Loyola University President Michael J. Garanzini wrote an open letter, titled “Endorsing a Community of Dialogue” to the student body.

Garanzini’s letter decried the divestment resolution as a divisive, harmful and ineffective way to conduct discourse about the situation in Israel and the Palestinian territories. On March 31, 2015, Bunnage wrote a Facebook post demonizing Garanzini’s response and characterizing Zionist as a movement that promotes “white supremacy.”

On March 1, 2016, Bunnage promoted another Loyola Divest campaign on Facebook, to pressure Loyola to “divest from corporations that profit off the occupation of Palestine!”

On March 2, 2016, Loyola Divest released a statement saying that it was re-launching a campaign to “mobilize our faculty, administrators and staff to divest from the Israeli occupation,” after Associate Professor and Chair of University Senate, Noah Sobe, refused to put divestment on the University Senate’s agenda.

BDS

The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement was founded by Omar Barghouti in 2005 to challenge “international support for Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.” BDS is an allegedly “Palestinian-led movement,” although leading BDS activists have admitted [00:01:01] this is not true.

One of the demands of BDS includes [point 3] what is generally known as the “right of return,” a demand discredited as a way to eliminate Israel. Barghouti said the “right of return” is a means to “end Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.”

Barghouti has said that BDS “aims to turn Israel into a pariah state, as South Africa once was.”

In his activism, Barghouti has also said [00:05:55] regarding Israel: “Definitely, most definitely, we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. No…rational Palestinian, not a sellout Palestinian, will ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine.”

The movement has been linked to numerous terrorist organizations and received a public endorsement from Hamas in 2017.

BDS initiatives include calling on institutions and individuals to divest from Israeli-affiliated companies, promoting academic and cultural boycotts of Israel, and organizing anti-Israel rallies, protests and campaigns.

The movement’s most notable achievement has been the infiltration of university campuses through lobbying for “BDS resolutions.” In these cases, student governments and student groups, backed by their own anti-Israel members and affiliates, have proposed resolutions on some form of boycott of, or divestment from, Israel and Israeli-affiliated entities.

Boycott resolutions, although non-binding, have been passed by student governments on numerous North American campuses.

BDS activity is often aggressive and disruptive. It has been noted that universities that pass BDS resolutions see a marked increase in anti-Semitic incidents on campus. On one campus, when the student government debated a BDS resolution, reports emerged of violent threats against those opposing it.