Ling-Chi Wang

Overview

Ling-Chi Wang has expressed support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and demonized Israel.

Wang is a Professor Emeritus in the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). 

Supporting BDS

Wang signed an open letter to former United States President Barack Obama and the American Congress, demonizing Israel and calling for an end to foreign aid. 

The July 31, 2014 letter, addressed to former U.S. President Barack Obama and the American Congress, called “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.”

Demonizing Israel

Wang signed an open letter, published on March 31, 2009, opposing the reinstitution of the University of California Education Abroad Program (EAP) in Israel. 

Signatories of the petition claimed that "Israel has deprived hundreds of thousands of Palestinians of their right to education” and that “The designated site of UC’s EAP, Hebrew University (HU), has a longstanding and documented record of discriminating against Palestinian students.”

Wang also signed “A Statement in Support of Open and Free Discussion about U.S. and Israeli Foreign Policy and Against Suppression of Speech,” which alleged: “there is a very well organized and continuous campaign on behalf of Israel, openly coordinated with the work of the Israel embassy and with the government in Jerusalem.”

The statement specifically claimed that “students (in a practice reminiscent of the most sordid aspects of the McCarthy years) have been enlisted to act as informers on their teachers” and that “the U.S. Congress is under surveillance far more intense than the usual sort of lobbying.”

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.