Elliott Colla

Overview

Elliott Colla is an avid promoter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and frequently uses Twitter to advocate for BDS. He is also a member of anti-Israel hate group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP).

Colla has endorsed the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI). He also signed a BDS petition put forward by the Modern Language Association — a call by Middle East Studies Scholars and Librarians for the Academic Boycott of Israel — as well as a letter calling on the Brooklyn Book Festival to "no longer accept partnerships with the Israeli government or complicit institutions."

On November 13, 2009, Colla was a featured speaker at the Palestine Center Annual Conference called “The Erasure of Palestine.” He was featured on a panel alongside anti-Israel propagandist Ali Abunimah, the co-founder of the anti-Israel online magazine Electronic Intifada (EI).

Colla is an associate professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University (Georgetown). He is a co-editor of the anti-Israel e-zine, Jadaliyya.

Depicting Terrorists as Victims and Defense Against Terror as Aggression

On October 6, 2015, Colla tweeted an EI article and wrote “Death-chanting Israeli mob rejoices as Palestinian teen is executed.” The article linked to a video titled, “Israeli police kill Fadi Alloun in cold blood.”

Fadi Aloon was shot by Israeli security forces after he stabbed a 15-year-old Israeli boy. Several hours before the attack, Aloon posted “Either martyrdom or victory” on his Facebook page. 

More than a year earlier, Colla whitewashed the actions of Jihadis and reckless anti-Israel activists who, respectively, attacked or interfere with security forces fighting terror. On July 21, 2014, Colla deceptively tweeted, "Why won't the US investigate Israeli violence against US citizens?" The tweet linked to an EI article that discussed U.S. citizens Furkan Dogan, Tariq Abukhdeir and International Solidarity Movement (ISM) volunteers Rachel Corrie, Tristan Anderson, and Brian Avery.

Furkan Dogan was one of nine Americans on the May 2010 Gaza“Freedom Flotilla.” Agitators on the Mavi Marmara, the lead ship, heard speeches advocating [00:06:00] confrontation and encouraging [00:00:24] the killing of Jews. Dogan wrote in his diary: “These are the last hours before I join the sweet experience of being a shahid [martyr]. Is there anything more beautiful…?”  

Abukhdeir was injured while participating in a violent anti-Israel riot.

Corrie, Anderson, and Avery were accidentally killed after they knowingly entered an active military zone in defiance of Israeli Defense Force warnings. ISM has encouraged its foreign volunteers to act as human shields in cities, towns and refugee camps and to break curfew and disregard Israeli directives prohibiting access to concerning closed military zones.

Spreading Lies to Demonize Israel

According to a Campus Watch report, Colla was a signatory to a 2002 open letter suggesting that Israel would use the war in Iraq to engage in "ethnic cleansing" against Palestinians. No retractions were ever issued for the letter after its claims failed to materialize.

On January 18, 2016, Colla tweeted "Why BDS? Reason #423. Israeli intelligence manufacturing anti-Semitism on Facebook…" Colla’s misleading tweet linked to an EI article that covered an experiment conducted by Shurat HaDin, a legal NGO, which created two essentially identical Facebook pages — one page called “Stop Israel” (containing “manufactured” anti-Semitism) and the other Stop Palestine (containing similarly “manufactured” mirroring anti-Palestinian content) — to demonstrate that Facebook would remove anti-Palestinian content but retain the anti-Semitic content. The result of Shurat HaDin’s experiment proved Shurat HaDin’s hypothesis correct.

Blaming Israel for Hamas’ War Crimes

In early July 2014, Colla signed a "An International Scholars’ Statement on Gaza," whitewashing Hamas’ rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, claiming they were a “direct response” to the Israelis “terrifying the entire population of the West Bank.”

The statement accused Israel of "collective punishment" for sweeping the Palestinian controlled territory for suspects and victims following Hamas’ June 12, 2014 kidnapping of three Israeli high-schoolers snatched on their way home from school. The Hamas captors murdered the abducted boys, whose bodies were found buried in Palestinian-controlled territory on June 30, 2014.

The statement cynically asserted that Israel used the event as a smokescreen in order to initiate Operation Protective Edge (OPE) in Gaza and then went on to mischaracterize the Operation as "the wholesale slaughter of a civilian population."

Israel commenced Operation Protective Edge (OPE) in July 2014, to stop rocket fire targeting Israeli civilians and to destroy Hamas attack tunnels.  

The statement concluded by demanding a set of conditions wholly violative of Israel’s sovereign status: "a return to 1967 borders, Jerusalem as the shared capital of the two peoples, and the right of refugees expelled during the Nakba to return to Israel." The scholars also commanded: “If the parties cannot agree to this themselves then the international community must step in to force a resolution.”

On July 26, 2014, Colla doubled down and tweeted an article from the Israel-hating propaganda website Mondoweiss that perpetrated more lies regarding OPE. In addition to claiming that OPE was initiated in retaliation for the kidnapping of the three teenagers, the article fraudulently asserted that Israel fabricated the kidnapping charge, to justify their military action. Colla’s comment on the article in the tweet read — "Claim that Hamas killed 3 teens is turning out to be the WMD of Gaza onslaught."

Demonizing Israel’s Defense Against Genocidal Terror

On July 31, 2014, Colla tweeted, twice, a blog post by Joel Beinin, a founder of Israel-hate group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), who claimed that the true motive behind launching OPE was Israeli racism.

Then, on August 1, 2014, Colla reversed the true nature of the Gaza conflict and spread a blood libel that Israel had intended to commit "genocide" against Palestinians in OPE, tweeting “[i]s it a victory that Palestinian resistance has compelled Israelis to acknowledge that genocide is actually the goal?”

Defending Anti-Semitic Professor Steven Salaita

Colla frequently tweets in support of anti-Semitic professor Steven Salaita and has called for Salaita’s reinstatement.

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.

Endorsing Hate Speech

In 2016, Colla signed a letter to Vassar College President Catherine Bond Hill defending Jasbir Puar

Puar, a virulently anti-Israel Rutgers professor, gave a lecture at Vassar College in February 2016 titled "Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters."

Puar began her speech by calling for armed struggle against Israel. She went on to demonize Israel, suggesting that Israelis harvest the organs of dead Palestinians. Puar also claimed that Israel was maiming and "stunting" Palestinians via food restrictions — despite Gaza having one of the highest obesity rates in the world.

Puar also opined that the reason Israeli Jews have not killed Palestinians is “[t]hey need the Palestinians alive in order to keep the kind of rationalization for their victimhood and their militarized economy.”

The letter addressed to President Hill slammed objections to Puar’s libelous incitement against Israel, as attacks on freedom of speech and the integrity of “an invited guest.”

The letter also cited an October 2015 report by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Palestine Legal that conjured anti-Semitic conspiracies of a powerful Israel lobby controlling the U.S. government and silencing legitimate criticism of Israel. The letter claimed the report revealed “the ways in which ‘a network of lobbying groups... funded by, working in coordination with, and/or staunchly supportive of the policies and practices of the Israeli government primarily drives efforts to silence speech on behalf of Palestinian rights’.” The letter also claimed “these groups… are supported or even initiated through many millions of dollars in donations from right-wing, hawkish Israel advocates …”

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.

JVP

JVP was founded in Berkeley, California in 1996, as an activist group with an emphasis on the “Jewish tradition” of peace, social justice and human rights. The organization is currently led by Rebecca Vilkomerson and its board members include Israel critics Naomi Klein, Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky and Tony Kushner.

JVP, which generally employs civil disobedience tactics to disrupt pro-Israel speakers and events, consists of American Jews and non-Jewish “allies” highly critical of Israeli policies. A staunch supporter of the BDS movement, JVP claims to aim its campaigns at companies that either support the Israeli military (Hewlett-Packard) or are active in the West Bank (SodaStream).

Although several Jewish groups critical of Israeli policies, like J Street and Partners for a Progressive Israel, make efforts to operate within the mainstream American Jewish community, JVP functions outside. The group is often criticized for serving as a tokenized Jewish voice for the pro-Palestinian camp and is widely regarded as the BDS movement’s “Jewish wing.” 

JVP denies the notion of “Jewish peoplehood” and has even gone so far as to refer to its own Ashkenazi (Jews who spent the Diaspora in European countries) leadership as “white supremacy inside of JVP.”

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has accused JVP of being “the largest and most influential Jewish anti-Zionist group in the United States,” and said the group “exploits Jewish culture and rituals to reassure its own supporters that opposition to Israel not only does not contradict, but is actually consistent with, Jewish values.”

The ADL also claimed that “JVP consistently co-sponsors rallies to oppose Israeli military policy that are marked by signs and slogans  comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, demonizing Jews and voicing support for groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.”

According to the ADL website, JVP “uses its Jewish identity to shield the anti-Israel movement from allegations of anti-Semitism and provide it with a greater degree of legitimacy and credibility.”

Social Media and Weblinks

Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/pages/Elliott-Colla/117187275045632

Twitter:https://twitter.com/AbuMrouj/

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

Website:http://www.elliottcolla.com/