Benjamin deLee

Overview

Benjamin deLee is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. He has also expressed support for disgraced anti-Israel professor Steven Salaita and Hamas-supporter Imad Ahmad Barghouthi.

He is an assistant professor of Byzantine-Islamic relations and the Middle East at State University of New York, Cortland (SUNY Cortland).

Supporting BDS

On August 29, 2014 Bowman signed the “Open Letter on Gaza and BDS from the Middle East Caucus of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.”

The letter described “indiscriminate and disproportionate violence that has been waged… by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) against the civilian population of Gaza” which it characterized as “the largest ‘open air prison’ in the world.”

The letter went on to endorse the BDS movement and to conclude that “the violence has taken an unprecedented and savage turn, having reached genocidal proportions.”

Defending Steven Salaita

Benjamin deLee signed a petition, published on August 21, 2014, entitled “A Call to People of Conscience Not to Speak at the University Of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Until Chancellor Wise Honor the Contract to Hire Professor Steven Salaita.”

In 2014, The University of Illinois (U of I) 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.”

A month later, Salaita tweeted "Zionists: transforming ‘antisemitism’ from something horrible into something honorable since 1948." On July 8, 2014, he tweeted: "There's something profoundly sexual to the Zionist pleasure w/#Israel's aggression. Sublimation through bloodletting, a common perversion."

U of I defended its decision to withdraw the job offer to Salaita in a January 29, 2015 press release, saying: “These statements [his tweets] and many more like them demonstrate that Dr. Salaita lacks the judgment, temperament and thoughtfulness to serve as a member of our faculty in any capacity, but particularly to teach courses related to the Middle East.”

After being denied the position at U of I, Salaita took a teaching position at the American University of Beirut (AUB) in Lebanon, where he was employed from 2015 through 2017. The position at AUB was not tenured and so, following the close of the 2017 academic year, Salaita again sought employment.

Unable to find a teaching position “on four continents,” Salaita again took to social media, stating on Facebook  I“no longer consider myself among the professoriate.” Salaita went on to say that “People ask if I would go back in time and change anything. I would not… I will die unapologetic.”

Defending Hamas-Supporter

Benjamin deLee signed an open letter, published by the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on behalf of Imad Ahmad Barghouthi.

The purpose of the letter was to call upon Prime Minister Netanyahu “to order the immediate release of Dr. Imad Ahmad Barghouthi from Israeli military custody.”

Palestinian Astrophysicist Professor Imad Barghouthi of Al-Quds University was sentenced to seven months in prison for incitement to violence.

Barghouti is a vocal supporter of Hamas’s military wing — the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades — and has called for killing and being killed in the name of Islam.

An October 22, 2014 video showed Barghouthi at an Al-Quds 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.