Roxanna Kazem

Roxanna Kazem [Roxy Kazem] promoted the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement at the  University of Maryland (UMD), in 2019.

As of August 2019, Kazem was a member of the Iranian Students' Foundation (ISF) at UMD, College Park Facebook group. She was affiliated with ISF at UMD in 2018, 2017, and 2016.

In April 2019, Kazem said in a Facebook video she was a “Junior Finance and IS [Information Systems] double major” at UMD.

Promoting BDS

On April 25, 2019, Kazem was featured [02:29:18] in a video posted on Facebook by the UMD Student Government Association (SGA), urging the SGA to pass a BDS bill. The bill was launched by Divest UMD.

Divest UMD is a campaign that calls on UMD to divest from companies that do business with Israel. 

In the video, Kazem said [02:29:58]: “Who would want their money funding companies who create weapons that are used to kill the lives of the innocent? Donors are giving money to the university to provide students the best quality education and to fund scholarships for students who excel, they are not giving their money to fund a war or human rights violations. As a student, I do not want my education funded by companies violating human rights.” 

On April 25, 2019, Divest UMD announced on Facebook that following a UMD student government vote, the BDS bill failed to pass with “a vote of 9 for, 25 against, and 2 abstentions.”

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

Facebook:www.facebook.com/100000432325737