Natalie Melas
Overview
Natalie Melas has defended a pro-Hamas professor, showed support for violent protesters and is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.As of December 2023, Melas was an associate professor in the Department of English at Cornell University (Cornell).
Defending a Pro-Hamas Professor
Melas signed a November 2023 letter defending a professor at Cornell who expressed support for the Hamas terror group the previous month.The November 21, 2023 letter was authored by “Members of Cornell University’s Faculty” and it called on Cornell to take action following “attacks on a faculty member over comments about Israel’s war on Gaza.”
The letter referred to Professor Russell Rickford, who gave a speech on October 15, 2023, praising [00:00:04] Hamas terror attacks and war crimes against Israeli civilians, including mass murder, torture, rape, beheadings and kidnappings. Hamas executed the terror attacks on October 7, 2023, and left over 1,200 Israelis dead, hundreds kidnapped and thousands wounded. Israel retaliated with a war called “Swords of Iron.”
Rickford said [00:01:39]: “It was exhilarating! It was exhilarating! It was energizing!” He then said [00:01:47] that if Palestinians “weren’t exhilarated by this challenge to the monopoly of violence, by this shifting of the balance of power, then they would not be human. I was exhilarated!”
Rickford made his statements at a rally hosted by the anti-Israel Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) organization.
Supporting Violent Protesters
Melas signed a letter to the editor, published on May 6, 2018 by the Cornell Daily Sun newspaper, whose purpose was to “call on Cornellians of conscience to denounce the Israeli military’s recent massacre of unarmed Palestinian protesters participating in the Great March of Return in the Gaza Strip.”The letter continued: “While many countries assault human rights on a daily basis, Israel is unique in its insistence that its actions — including those on the Gaza border in past weeks — are compatible with international law.”
The letter concluded: “...we salute those Palestinian demonstrators who are facing one of the world’s military giants armed only with their determination to be free.”
Supporting BDS
As of August 2020, Melas was a signatory to an open letter, authored by CodePink, calling on United States Senator Jeanne Shaheen to stop accepting financial campaign support from an Israeli company.The letter, signed by Melas, charged the Israeli company with “manufacturing repression and death from Palestine to the U.S.-Mexico border” and claimed that “They produce armed drones, surveillance equipment and other products used for violence in Gaza and repression along the Israeli apartheid wall and U.S. -Mexico border.”
Melas was a signatory to an open letter, published on September 24, 2019, expressing “shock and disappointment” that an award, granted to Kamila Shamsie by the City of Dortmund, Germany, had been rescinded because of Shamsie’s support for BDS.
The letter came in response to the 2019 decision by the City of Dortmund to rescind the Nelly Sachs Award for Literature from Kamila Shamsie because it was discovered that she actively supports the BDS movement.
The letter Melas signed described Shamsie’s support for BDS as an expression of “the values of justice and fairness.”
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.
Social Media and Weblinks
University Website: https://english.cornell.edu/natalie-melas
- Status:
- Professor
- University:
- Cornell
- Organizations:
- BDS
- Related Profiles:
- Last Modified:
- 05/04/2026
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