Barbara Weinstein

Overview

Barbara Weinstein is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, has demonized Israel and has defended disgraced anti-Israel Professor Steven Salaita.  

She is a professor in the Department of History at New York University (NYU).

Supporting BDS

Weinstein signed an open letter expressing support for BDS.

The July 31, 2014 letter, addressed to former U.S. President Barack Obama and the American Congress, called “to suspend US military aid to Israel, until there is assurance that this aid will no longer be used for the commission of war crimes.”

Demonizing Israel

In a video published by the American Historical Association (AHA) on January 3, 2015, Weinstein explained to colleagues how to effectively infuse political messages relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into unrelated courses in ways that do not annoy students.

In her introduction, Weinstein explained that she felt “obliged” to raise the issue in her teaching context and offers strategies on how to do that despite, as she acknowledges, “students really don’t like you taking time out of a course about Brazil to talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Specifically, she suggests finding ways “to talk about it” without explicitly introducing the topic but rather, to bring it up in a “context that the students are expecting.”

Weinstein signed a controversial petition submitted to the AHA which sought to demonize Israel.

The petition, submitted to the American Historical Association (AHA) in 2014, alleged that “Israel arbitrarily limits the entry of foreign nationals who seek to lecture, teach and attend conferences at Palestinian universities, denying both faculty and students the rich experience enjoyed by their peers at Israeli universities and other universities around the world.”

The petition went on to say “that the AHA demands that the U.S. Department of State honor the academic freedom of U.S. citizens by contesting Israel’s denials of entry of U.S. academics who have been invited to teach, confer, or do research at Palestinian universities.”

Two years later Weinstein signed another petition to the AHA.

This petition, submitted to the AHA in 2016, which claimed “in summer 2014, Israel bombarded fourteen institutions of higher learning in Gaza, partially or completely destroying nine [sic], and its military routinely invades campuses in Jerusalem and the West Bank and frequently impedes entry.”

The petition also claimed “Israel’s restrictions on the movement of faculty, staff and visitors in the West Bank impede instruction at Palestinian institutions of higher learning” and resolved “ the AHA commits itself to monitoring Israeli actions restricting the right to education in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”

During the summer of 2014, Hamas and other terrorist organizations used schools to warehouse rockets used to attack Israel and also as staging and training areas to further terrorist activity.

University faculty often was complicit in incitement of terror activity. For example, an October 22, 2014 video showed Astrophysicist Professor Imad Barghouthi of Al Quds University at a university Hamas rally, draped in a Hamas banner, [00:00:33] urging students to design precision-guided missiles, and sniper rifles as [00:01:11] “weapons of  the resistance” to [00:02:35] kill “zionist soldiers” in their bedrooms.

Defending Steven Salaita

Weinstein signed a petition published on August 21, 2014, by the BDS movement titled:“A Call to People of Conscience Not to Speak at the University Of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Until Chancellor Wise Honor [sic.] the Contract to Hire Professor Steven Salaita.”  

In 2014, The University of Illinois withdrew an offer of employment to Salaita after becoming aware of his anti-Semitic tweets. One tweet, posted shortly after Hamas kidnapped three teenage Israeli high school students, 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.” In 2017, Salaita posted to Facebook: “People ask if I would go back in time and change anything. I would not…I will die unapologetic.” In February 2019, Salaita stated that he had become a school bus driver in the Washington, D.C., area.

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: http://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/faculty/barbara-weinstein.html