Christina Bacchilega

Overview

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

As of October 2019, Bacchilega was listed as the Graduate Director of the Department of English onthe University of Hawai’i (UH) website.

Supporting BDS

Bacchilega is a signatory to a list of endorsers of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI). 

In 2016, Bacchilega signed an open letter calling for the academic boycott of Israel. 

The open letter was addressed to the Modern Language Association (MLA), “calling on the association to pass a resolution endorsing the boycott of Israeli academic institutions.”
In February 2014, Bacchilega signed an open letter condemning the administration of the University of Hawaii (UH), for expressing its opposition to the American Studies Association’s (ASA) then-recent endorsement of the academic boycott of Israel.

Signatories of the letter, signed by Bacchilega, claimed that those who opposethe academic boycott against Israel “support academic institutions that participate in the denial of human rights, including the right to education, experienced by Palestinians who, like Native Hawaiians, live under conditions of occupation.”

The letter went on to charge: “our administrators nowhere in their statement acknowledge Palestinian existence, let alone ways Palestinians’ academic and human rights are violated by Israel and with the support from the US of over three billion federal tax dollars a year in direct aid alone.”

Defending Steven Salaita

In 2014, Bacchilega reportedly signed a letter to the Board of Trustees from UH staff, in support of a “boycott of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) until you reinstate Dr. 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.

On August 21, 2014, Aikau signed a petition published 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.”

Social Media and Weblinks

University Website: http://english.hawaii.edu/faculty/cristina-bacchilega/