David Lloyd

Overview

David Lloyd is a leader within the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and a founding member the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI). He is also a member of USACBI’s Organizing Collective and a member of the Members for Justice in Palestine (MJP) of the Modern Language Association (MLA).

Lloyd is the faculty sponsor of the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter at the University of California, Riverside (UC Riverside) and has sponsored SJP groups at other California universities. In October of 2015, Lloyd announced his intention to found a branch of Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UC Riverside.

Lloyd has also published a number of articles for anti-Israel websites Mondoweiss and Electronic Intifada (EI).

Lloyd is a professor of English at UC Riverside.

Hosting Omar Barghouti

On January 14, 2014, Lloyd organized a pro-BDS lecture at UC Riverside that featured BDS founder Omar Barghouti.

According to a report from the event, Barghouti accused Israeli soldiers of hunting Palestinian children and murdering them for sport, claiming that “Israel and its well oiled lobby groups” control the United States Congress.

Lloyd reportedly stated that he “was the professor who very proudly invited Omar Barghouti to speak on this campus,” adding that he had“absolutely no shame for having done so.”

Sponsoring and Defending Anti-Israel Course

In 2015, Lloyd sponsored a Fall 2015 course at UC Riverside entitled “Palestine & Israel: Settler-Colonialism and Apartheid.” The course was taught by then-president of SJP at UC Riverside, Tina Matar.

The syllabus of the course, developed by Lloyd, was analyzed by Verity Educate — an independent organization that provides analysis of the accuracy and objectivity of educational material — and found to contain primarily anti-Israel propaganda. The analysis also found that the course sought to indoctrinate students and encourage anti-Israel activism.

In May of 2015, over 25 groups sent a letter to UC Riverside’s president and provost, voicing their concern over the course. The letter stated that Matar’s course violates a UC policy prohibiting political indoctrination in the classroom.

In October 2015, Lloyd defended the course as “the simple study of the facts of Israel” and criticized backlash to the course as “ignorance and stupidity.” Lloyd also likened Matar’s course to a “group of black students getting together to study their history.”

In a May 2015 article, Lloyd claimed that critics of Matar’s course were “asking to ‘eliminate’ the study of Palestinian issues from a Palestinian perspective.”

At a November 6, 2015 UCLA conference titled “Palestine and Pedagogy,” Lloyd claimed that opponents of propaganda in the classroom were opposed to debate and doubled down on his defense of anti-Israel propaganda taught as fact (53:11).

Lloyd went on to paint critics of Matar’s course as a “misogynist” and accused critics of the course of “not reading any of the documents they were castigating” (56:35).

Demonizing the Jewish State

At the November 6, 2015 UCLA conference, Lloyd stated that it was “stupidity” to deny that the idea of “a Jewish state for a Jewish people” is the same as “a white state for a white people” in South Africa, and called for Israel to stop being a Jewish state (1:05:30).

Lloyd went on to imply that Israel fabricates its security needs against Palestinian terrorism and suggested that the mere existence of the Palestinians leads to Zionist “rage” and “loathing” (1:08:50), culminating in Zionists’ attempt to eliminate freedom of expression (1:12:50).

Lloyd also suggested that Palestinians have the unfettered right to take up arms against Israelis (1:48:20) and stated that Israelis are guilty of inflicting “terrorism” on Palestinians (1:49:45).

Anti-Israel Conspiracy Theories

On August 11, 2014, Lloyd wrote an article claiming that Israeli snipers “gratuitously killed” Palestinian youths. He then accused Israel of inflicting “collective punishment” after Hamas’ June 12, 2014 kidnapping and murder of three Israeli high-schoolers.

Lloyd claimed that Israel used the kidnapping and murder as a smokescreen for “the further murder of Palestinians young and old” and to initiate Operation Protective Edge (OPE) in Gaza.

Israel implemented OPE to stop rocket attacks from Gaza, targeting Israeli civilians — that increased dramatically in the weeks following the kidnapping — and to destroy Hamas attack tunnels.

In the article, Lloyd also claimed that Israel is committing an “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians— “especially their children”— and intends to commit an “incremental genocide” of Palestinians.

Supporting BDS

Lloyd is a member of the American Studies Association (ASA) and its Activism and Community Caucus (ASA Caucus). He participated in drafting an ASA Caucus resolution calling for an academic boycott of Israel, which was later adopted at the ASA Conference in December of 2013.

In a May 13, 2014 article titled “It is our belief that Palestine is a feminist issue,” Lloyd wrote that “It is our belief that the Palestinian struggle and the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions is a feminist issue. It may be, indeed, above all a feminist issue.”

In March of 2015, Lloyd signed a statement slamming UC Davis Chancellor, Linda P.B. Katehi, for refusing to enforce a BDS resolution proposed by SJP UC Davis. He further called for the adoption of BDS on all University of California campuses.

Since 2014, Lloyd has been leading an effort to force the the MLA to adopt a resolution that would boycott Israeli academic institutions. During the annual MLA meeting in January 2017, MLA’s delegate council rejected the resolution and instead voted to support Resolution 2017-1 (2017-1), which urged the MLA to refrain from adopting BDS.

In 2014, Lloyd signed an open letter calling on Israeli academics who believed it “urgent” to “act to end the illegal occupation in Palestine” and Israeli “atrocities” to sign a petition. The petition was closed to overseas signers after only 83 Israeli professors signed on.

In March of 2010, Lloyd signed a petition to have an Israeli scholar ejected from an academic conference in Los Angeles.

In 2009, Lloyd stated that USACBI seeks “a full boycott of Israel, both academic and economic.”

Praising SJP at UC Riverside

During an October 2015 conference at UC Riverside, titled “Palestine, Israel and the Assault on Academic Freedom,” Lloyd praised SJP UC Riverside for passing two divestment resolutions at the university.

Lloyd also praised the group’s “persistence,” “organizing capacity” and “spirit” as something he had been “very, very pleased to observe.”

According to former SJP UC Riverside President Tina Matar, the group has launched at least four divestment campaigns, a de-shelving campaign to boycott Sabra hummus from campus stores and many anti-Israel protests and demonstrations.

In 2013, SJP UC Riverside members dressed up to portray Israeli soldiers at a mock checkpoint set up for “Palestine Awareness Week.”

In 2012, SJP members disrupted a talk given by two Israeli army reservists who were invited to speak on campus. The disrupters also called Israelis “baby-killers” at a rally that same year.

Defending Steven Salaita

On August 11, 2014, Lloyd published an article calling for Professor Steven Salaita’s reinstatement at the University of Illinois (U of I).

In 2014, 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 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, declaring on Facebook that he would “no longer consider myself among the professoriate.” In his post, 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.”

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.

SJP

SJP is a student organization engaged in anti-Israel activity on North American college and university campuses.

The first chapter of SJP was founded in 2001 at the University of California at Berkeley by Professor Hatem Bazian. Bazian has spread classic anti-Semitism, reportedly promoted religious anti-Semitism and defended the Hamas terror group. In 2004, Bazian called for “intifada” in America.

SJP organizes anti-Israel campaigns, including running annual Israel Apartheid Weeks, often in collaboration with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Muslim Students Association (MSA) campus chapters.

SJP has been a major force in pushing the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement on campuses. Chapters have initiated dozens of BDS resolutions in student governments, which have been proposed on or around Jewish holidays, a time when many Jewish students are off-campus.

SJP activists have reportedly physically assaulted, intimidated and harassed Jewish students, disrupted pro-Israel campus events and demonized pro-Israel campus organizations.

Chapters have often endorsed and campaigned for numerous terrorists and whitewashed terrorism.