Jess Ghannam

Overview

Jess Ghannam is a promoter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and a member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) Organizing Collective.

Ghannam is also a member of the International Executive Committee of Al-Awda - The Palestinian Right to Return Coalition, which advocates for the destruction of Israel.

Ghannam uses his blog and Twitter account almost exclusively to spread anti-Israel invective. He frequently shares articles from sites that spread Israel-hating propaganda, such as Mondoweiss and Electronic Intifada (EI).

Ghannam is a professor of Psychiatry and Global Health Sciences in the School of Medicine at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). He is also the Chief of Medical Psychology at UCSF and a professor of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University (SFSU).

Supporting Terrorists

Ghannam has frequently tweeted and retweeted support for Palestinian terrorist Samer Issawi. Issawi received a 26-year prison sentence for attempted murder, possession of explosives and membership of an illegal organization. During the second Intifada, Issawi was convicted of manufacturing and distributing pipe bombs and opening fire on Israeli civilian vehicles.

In December of 2013, the Israeli Arab Hadash Party posted on its official Arabic Facebook page an interview with Issawi in which he called for the kidnapping of Israelis.

Demonizing Israel

Ghannam has claimed on Twitter that Israel is an "apartheid" state and alleged that Israelis are committing an “ethnic cleansing” of Palestine.” On August 4, 2014, Ghannam retweeted a tweet suggesting that Israel was committing “genocide.”

On July 16, 2013, Ghannam shared an article on his blog characterizing as "ethnic cleansing" a proposed Israeli government plan (the Begin-Prawer Plan) to officially recognize and register the vast majority of Bedouin settlements throughout southern Israel and relocate and compensate the residents of 35 unrecognized villages.

Ghannam 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.

Demonizing Zionism

In October of 2012, Ghannam signed a statement claiming that Zionism is a form of racism and bigotry.

In 2010, Ghannam signed a statement slamming Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for reportedly stating that he would "would never deny [the] Jewish right to the land of Israel." The letter stated that Abbas’ statement is “tantamount to a surrender of the right of Palestinian citizens of Israel to live in equality in their own homeland.”

Fostering Terror-Ties

On November 5, 2013, Ghannam promoted on his blog a "Right to Education" campaign initiated by Birzeit University (Birzeit).

The campaign brings students to U.S. campuses, who claim that Israel is obstructing the rights of Palestinians to higher education. These claims mischaracterize sweeps Israeli security forces have taken to shut down terror cells operating from Birzeit’s campus.

Birzeit’s student body elected Hamas to power in 2003, 2015 and 2016. In January of 2016, Birzeit characterized an IDF raid to arrest wanted militants as a "belligerent ... attack on the university and our right to education …"

In September of 2014, pro-Palestinian Haaretz reporter Amira Hass was thrown off of Birzeit’s campus — because Hass is Jewish.

Defending Hate Speech

Ghannam has frequently tweeted support for anti-Semitic professor Steven Salaita and has personally called for Salaita’s reinstatement.

In 2014, The University of Illinois (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."

On November 7, 2014, at a convention titled "Scholars Under Attack," Salaita, defended his hate speech, claiming: “Civility is the language of genocide... It’s a word whose connotations can be seen as nothing if not as racist.”

In a January 29, 2015 press release, U of I defended its decision to withdraw its job offer to Salaita, 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.”

Pushing BDS

In October of 2013, Ghannam was one of eleven professors to chastise the Journal of Academic Freedom for publishing a series of essays opposing the academic boycott of Israeli institutions.

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

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.