Chandra Talpade Mohanty

Overview

Chandra Talpade Mohanty is a supporter of the United States Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI), a subdivision of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign.

Mohanty is the Department Chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies department at Syracuse University (Syracuse).

Mohanty is also a professor in the departments of Sociology and the Cultural Foundations of Education. She teaches at the Syracuse Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and is the Dean’s Professor of the Humanities.

Demonizing Israel

On March 8, 2014, Mohanty signed and shared a pro-BDS petition on Facebook stating that Israel practices "apartheid."

On August 6, 2014, Mohanty claimed on Facebook that Israel was committing "Genocide."

Mohanty co-signed a letter that labeled Israel’s Operation Protective Edge (OPE) — launched to stop Hamas’ rocket attacks targeting Israeli civilians and to destroy Hamas’ attack tunnels — a "massacre."

Co-signers slammed Israel for "the destruction of crucial infrastructure such as sanitation, hospitals, and schools,"omitting that Hamas had commandeered the civilian infrastructure to attack Israel.

On November 20, 2012, Mohanty signed and shared a petition on Facebook that called Gaza the "largest open-air prison in the world" and whitewashed Hamas’s history of violence in Gaza and its role in Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense.

Trivializing The Holocaust

On October 17, 2016, Mohanty shared a petition on Facebook, which claimed that the "Nakba" was the “ethical equivalent” of the Nazi Holocaust. Nakba means “catastrophe” in Arabic and refers to the outcome of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and is often used to delegitimize the creation of the State of Israel.

The petition asked "what is anti-Semitic about" the “observation that…‘the Zionist regime officially denies the Nakba, the ethical equivalent of Holocaust denial’?” The petition also attempted to define Zionism as racist, colonialist and synonymous with apartheid.

Defending A Terrorist

On October 24, 2014, Mohanty signed a petition defending terrorist Rasmea Odeh titled "Feminist scholars to Obama: End prosecution of Palestinian survivor of sexual torture."

Odeh was a key military operative [00:02:08]with the terrorist group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In 1969, Odeh masterminded a PFLP bombing that killed two college students in a Jerusalem supermarket. Odeh also attempted to bomb the British consulate. 

Odeh confessed, in a highly detailed account, the day following her arrest. In a 2004 documentary, one of Odeh’s co-conspirators directly implicated [00:10:53] Odeh as the mastermind. 

In 1970, an Israeli court tried and convicted Odeh for her involvement in both bombings and sentenced her to life imprisonment. However, Odeh was released 10 years later, in a prisoner swap and emigrated to the United States.

On November 10, 2014, a Michigan federal jury convicted Odeh for immigration fraud because she failed to disclose her prior conviction and life sentence on her immigration application. On March 12, 2015, she was sentenced to 18 months in prison. 

In 2017, after an appeal and a lengthy court battle, Odeh admitted to immigration fraud, was stripped of her U.S. citizenship, deported to Jordan and banned from re-entering the U.S.

The petition Mohanty signed called on the Department of Justice to drop the charges against Odeh and recognized her as "a leader in the international struggle to empower women and end violence against women."

Defending Hate Speech

On August 7, 2014, Mohanty signed and shared on Facebook a petition demanding the reinstatement of Professor Steven Salaita, the Edward Said Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut (AUB).

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.

The petition Mohanty signed described Salaita’s tweets as "political views on Israel" and part of an effort to expose propaganda “in the name of truth and justice.”

Supporting Violence Against Israel

On July 12, 2011, Mohanty co-signed a letter alleging that Israel practices "apartheid and ethnic cleansing." She and other co-signers reported that they visited Israel in June 2011 and met with “an Islamist leader just after his release from prison and heard “a riveting account of his experience on the Mavi Marmara and the 2010 Gaza Flotilla.”

The May 2010 "Freedom Flotilla" — which the co-signers characterized as “political activity” — was an attempt by militants to breach the U.N.-approved joint Israeli and Egyptian naval blockade of the Gaza Strip. The blockade was implemented to stop Hamas from acquiring more sophisticated rockets to fire at Israeli civilians.

Activists aboard the flotilla’s lead ship — the Mavi Marmara — agitated for violent confrontation with Israeli security forces and chanted "Khaibar, khaibar ya yahud," a slogan about the killing of Jews. The protesters refused all instructions to change course and attacked Israeli security forces with iron bars, metal chairs, knives, stun grenades and firearms, rocks and bottles, as soon as they boarded the Marmara. No humanitarian aid was found aboard the ship.

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:https://www.facebook.com/100000876777321

Twitter:https://twitter.com/ctmohant

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChandraTalpadeMohanty

University Website: https://thecollege.syr.edu/people/faculty/mohanty-chandra-talpade/