Meriem Sadoun

In 2015, Sadoun was an affiliate of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Loyola. In October 2014, Sadoun was listed as the co-fundraising chair of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) at Loyola.

As of September 2018, Sadoun’s LinkedIn page said she graduated Loyola with a bachelor’s degree in Psychology, in 2016.

Sadoun worked as a Project Coordinator at Loyola, since July 2017.

BDS Campus Activism

In March 2015, Sadoun featured on Loyola Divest’s Facebook page promoting the group’s 2015 BDS campaign. In the photo, she held a sign reading: “I SUPPORT LOYOLA DIVEST” and wore a t-shirt that read: “Loyola Divest Students for Justice in Palestine.”

On March 10, 2015, Sadoun featured [00:01:29] in a promotional video for Loyola Divest on Youtube. On March 9, 2015, she promoted the BDS campaign twice on Facebook.

The divestment effort culminated in a resolution 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.”

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. 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 3, 2016, Sadoun promoted another Loyola Divest campaign on Facebook, “to pressure faculty on University Senate to vote yes on a resolution demanding the university divest from the occupation of Palestine.”

One day earlier, 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.   

On March 2 and March 1, 2016, Sadoun promoted the 2016 Loyola Divestment campaign on Facebook.

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.

MSA

The MSA was  established by members of the Muslim Brotherhood in January 1963 at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, with the goal of "spreading Islam as students in North America." A 2004 FBI investigation uncovered an internal Muslim Brotherhood document in which a brotherhood leader identified the MSA as "one of our organizations." 

The MSA reportedly has “nearly 600 chapters” located in the United States and Canada, and is “the most visible and influential Islamic student organization in North America,” boasting conferences, special events, publications, websites and other activities.

The organization includes a number of previous chapter presidents with explicit links to terrorist groups. Included are al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki (Colorado State University), Somali al-Shabaab militant leader Omar Shafik Hammami (University of South Alabama) and Pakistani Taliban recruiter Ramy Zamzam of the MSA's Washington, D.C. council.