Mary Nolan

Overview

Mary Nolan has promoted the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, defended disgraced anti-Israel Professor Steven Salaita and has supported anti-Israel campus activists. 

Nolan is a professor in the Department of History at New York University (NYU).

Promoting BDS

Nolan 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.”
Nolan also signed a controversial petition submitted to the American Historical Association (AHA) in 2016. The petition alleged tthat “Israel’s restrictions on the movement of faculty, staff and visitors in the West Bank impede instruction at Palestinian institutions of higher learning” and that “Israel restricts the right to lecture or teach at Palestinian universities.”

Nolan signed a petition, published in March 2011, calling on the financial consultant 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. 

Defending Steven Salaita

Nolan 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.

Supporting Anti-Israel Campus Activists

On February 25, 2009, Nolan signed a petition, published by the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) expressing faculty support for students who participated in the “Kimmel Occupation” and demanding that the administration “reinstate those students who have been summarily suspended.”

In February 2009, a group of activists from the group Take Back NYU (TBNYU) barricaded themselves in the cafeteria at the university’s Kimmel Center and refused to leave until the administration agreed to meet their demands. 

Included in the group’s list of demands was that NYU “provide 13 scholarships a year to students from the Gaza Strip and give surplus supplies to the Islamic University of Gaza.” 

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://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/faculty/mary-nolan.html