Ian Balfour

As of September 2023, Balfour was listed as a professor emeritus and member of the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies at York University (York) in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He was also listed as a principal supervisor of Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations in the Graduate Program in Humanities at York. 

According to his York profile, Balfour received a PhD from Yale University (Yale) and a master’s degree from the University of Toronto (U of T).

Anti-Israel Activism (BDS)

In May 2016, Balfour submitted a personal statement urging the MLA to adopt a resolution, to which Balfour was a signatory, that would boycott Israeli academic institutions.

In his statement, Balfour wrote that Israeli “universities and all kinds of cultural institutions cannot be divorced neatly from the massive effort to oppress and marginalize and keep at bay the Palestinian people.”

Balfour also claimed that “universities and schools in Israel thrive and function well when the possibilities for a decent education in the occupied territories are undermined at every level from material infrastructure to day-to-day teaching.”

During the annual MLA meeting in January 2017, the 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.

Balfour signed a January 30, 2017 statement urging MLA’s executive council to vote down the resolution prohibiting the MLA from adopting BDS.

Eligible MLA members voted to adopt the resolution calling on the MLA to refrain from engaging in the boycott of Israeli academic institutions in June 2017. The vote passed with 1,954 votes for and 885 votes against. Balfour then signed a statement condemning the MLA’s adoption of the anti-BDS resolution, which it characterized as “support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine.”

In 2014, Balfour signed a petition demanding Professor Steven Salaita’s reinstatement at the University of Illinois (U of I) and calling for a boycott of the university until it complied with the petition’s demands.

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 January 12, 2009, Balfour signed an open letter organized by the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) which accused Israel of “war crimes” and “acts of terror.”

The USACBI letter accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and compared Israel to Apartheid South Africa and concluded that “Israel too maintains an apartheid regime.”

After charging Israel with inflicting “one of the most massive, ethnocidal atrocities of modern times,” the signatories called upon Obama to join in the BDS movement. 

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://profiles.laps.yorku.ca/profiles/ibalfour/ 

http://www.yorku.ca/ibalfour/index.htm

Academia.edu:https://yorku.academia.edu/IanBalfour

Google Scholar:https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=OdX-nUUAAAAJ