David Rohrlich
Overview
David Rohrlich has expressed support for anti-Israel activist Professor Imad Ahmad Barghouthi, who is affiliated with Hamas. He also endorsed the discredited Goldstone Report, defended campus anti-Israel activists and demonized Israel.Rohrlich is a professor of number theory in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Boston University (BU).
Supporting Imad Ahmad Barghouthi
Rohrlich signed an open letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in support of professor Imad Ahmad Barghouthi. The letter was co-published in May 2016 by the anti-Israel Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) organization and the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI).The letter called 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 in 2016 to seven months in prison for incitement to violence.
Barghouthi 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 ofthe resistance” to [00:02:35] kill “zionist soldiers” in their bedrooms.
Endorsing the Goldstone Report
Rohrlich signed a petition that expressed support for the anti-Israel and widely criticized Goldstone Report.In October 2009 the US Palestinian Community Network (USPCN) published a petition addressed to the United Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon, demanded that the U.N. adopt and implement the Goldstone Report.
Signatories of the letter endorsed the report, claiming that it “irrefutably documents the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Israeli military in Gaza with a massive amount of undisputed evidence.”
The letter went on to “demand that the UN Secretary General pursues and oversees the full implementation of the report’s recommendations.”
The letter also defended violent acts of terrorism committed against Israel, declaring: “We reject any attempt to criminalize or equate the resistance of an occupied people to the institutional, state-directed, massive violence of the occupier.”
The Goldstone Report was the controversial product of a 2009 United Nations Fact-Finding Mission, sent to investigate Operation Cast Lead.
Israel commenced Operation Cast Lead (OCL)in 2008-09 in order to stop Hamas rocket fire from Gaza targeting Israeli civilians. In 2010, Hamas admitted that nearly 700 of the Palestinian casualties in OCL were combatants.
Following widespread criticism and rejection of the report for its “methodological failings, legal and factual errors, and falsehoods,” Judge Richard Goldstone, who authored the report, expressed “regrets about his report” and retracted its central thesis.
The Goldstone Report was the controversial product of a 2009 United Nations Fact-Finding Mission, sent to investigate Operation Cast Lead.
Israel commenced Operation Cast Lead (OCL)in 2008-09 in order to stop Hamas rocket fire from Gaza targeting Israeli civilians. In 2010, Hamas admitted that nearly 700 of the Palestinian casualties in OCL were combatants.
Following widespread criticism and rejection of the report for its “methodological failings, legal and factual errors, and falsehoods,” Judge Richard Goldstone, who authored the report, expressed “regrets about his report” and retracted its central thesis.
Supporting Campus Anti-Israel Activists
Rohrlich signed a 2017 letter, authored by the anti-Israel Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) organization, which condemned a decision by Fordham University (Fordham)’s dean to block the establishment of a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter at Fordham.Signatories demanded that Fordham “immediately rescind the rejection of SJP as a student group on campus, apologize to the students affected by this harmful decision, and reaffirm Fordham’s commitment to free speech and academic freedom.”
The petitioners also highlighted SJP’s BDS activity, characterizing SJP’s efforts to promote anti-Israel boycott as part of “a time-honored non-violent mode of political expression.” The petition accused Fordham’s administration of a “fundamental misunderstanding of what boycotts are, the purpose of a university, and the goals of SJP.”
The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in cooperation with Palestine Legal (PL), and civil rights attorney Alan Levine sued Fordham on behalf of four students in April 2017. A New York court annulled Fordham’s decision in August 2019, mandating that the university recognize SJP as an official club.
Fordham appealed the ruling to the NY State Supreme Court Appellate Division in January 2020. On July 24, 2020, Fordham SJP students filed a brief asking the appellate court to deny Fordham’s appeal of the lower court’s decision.
As of October 2020, a variety of groups, not directly involved in the case, filed amicus briefs with the Appellate Division for the court's consideration including JVP.
Demonizing Israel
In August 2014, during Operation Protective Edge (OPE), Rohrlich signed a petition that demonized Israel and condemned Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.Following Wiesel's death in 2016, anti-Israel journalist Max Blumenthal similarly said that "Elie Wiesel went from a victim of war crimes to a supporter of those who commit them." He was slammed for these comments by Hillary Clinton who rejected them as “offensive, hateful, and patently absurd statements.” U.S. President Obama in a statement on Wiesel's death called him “the conscience of the world.”
Throughout the summer of 2014 — during Operation Protective Edge (OPE) — Hamas's deployment of human shields was extensively documented and publicized. Hamas encouraged Gazans to act as human shields to frustrate Israeli efforts to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza.
In an official press release published by JVP on July 16, 2013, Rohrlich was named as one of two professors who had attempted but failed to deliver a letter to the retirement fund, TIAA-CREF, in the midst of an effort to protest “the investment of their own retirement funds in Israeli military occupation.”
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:https://www.bu.edu/math/people/faculty/algebra/rohrlich/_203x172_5lyjbB.jpg "Professor David Rohrlich")
- Status:
- Professor
- University:
- Boston
- Organizations:
- BDS
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- Last Modified:
- 05/04/2026
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