Irene Gendzier

In 2005, Nasrallah wished for the death of Zionist Jews as “the grandsons of apes and pigs.”

Nasrallah also accused Jews of racism, stating: “Racism is deeply rooted in the souls of the followers of the Jewish religion – especially since their exile to Iraq, or Babylon, in 586 BCE. There they wrote a new Torah, completely different from the Torah received by Moses. Into this Torah they inserted the spirit of racism, which spread like a virus in the mind of every Jew ever since.”

Supporting BDS

Gendzier is a signatory to a list of individuals endorsing the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI).

Gendzier signed a petition, published on October 21, 2016, condemning a call for BDS limited exclusively to the West Bank. The petition claimed such a limited call would be “letting Israel, the state that has illegally built and maintained those settlements for decades, off the hook.”

Gendzier signed an open letter to United States President Barack Obama and the American Congress, dated July 31, 2014, condemning “the disproportionate harm that the Israeli military, which the United States has armed and supported for decades, is inflicting on the population of Gaza.”

The letter exclusively blamed Israel for the Gazan civilian crisis  and called upon the administration “to suspend US military aid to Israel, until there is assurance that this aid will no longer be used for the commission of war crimes.”

The letter was in response to Operation Protective Edge (OPE). 

Gendzier signed a petition, published in March 2011, calling on the financial services company, TIAA-CREF, to “divest from Israeli occupation.” The petition provided a list of Israeli companies from which signatories demanded TIAA-CREF divest its funds.

Gendzier signed a letter published on May 10, 2010, authored by the International Society for Iranian Studies’ (ISIS), calling on the organization to withdraw its recognition of Ariel University, which the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel’s (USACBI) website labeled a “settler colonial university.”

Signatories of the letter specifically condemned ISIS’s inclusion of a professor from Ariel University in its 2010 Biennial Conference.

The letter claimed that “by hosting a representative of such ‘university,’ your organization… lends legitimacy to the brutal military occupation of a people’s homeland.  By recognizing this ‘university,’ the ISIS is endorsing the illegal and immoral occupation of Palestine.”

Supporting Steven Salaita

Gendzier signed a petition published on August 21, 2014, 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.” 

 

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.

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.