Muqtedar Khan

Overview

Muqtedar Khan is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. In 2014, Khan signed a letter calling on "scholars and librarians within Middle East studies to boycott Israeli academic institutions." The letter further pledged "not to collaborate on projects and events involving Israeli academic institutions, not to teach at or to attend conferences and other events at such institutions, and not to publish in academic journals based in Israel.” Later that month, Khan signed a similar statement drafted by a group of “American Muslim organizations, academics, Imams, community leaders and activists.”

Khan is very active on social media and uses his Twitter and Facebook accounts to spread anti-Israel invective.

On May 12, 2016 Khan posted on Facebook "Hero!" after a Hebrew University professor donated $20,000 to Ta’ayush, an organization that supports BDS. In 2015, Ta’ayush’s leader, Ezra Nawi, was filmed bragging about his entrapping and handing over Palestinians who sold their property to Jews — to be tortured and executed by the Palestinian Authority.

Khan is an associate professor of Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of Delaware (UD).

Propagating Anti-Semitic Incitement

In 2014 and 2015, Khan tweeted the incendiary lie that the Al-Aqsa mosque was under attack. Hassan also tweeted a provocative article alleging falsely that "45 extremist settlers broke into Al-Aqsa mosque...under armed protection from Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) and special units of Israeli police."

Such propaganda was the excuse for an upsurge in violence by Palestinian Arabs that flared in the fall of 2015, and incited Palestinians to attempt mass casualty attacks on Israeli civilians in July of 2016.

Hamas have also called on Palestinians to violently “rise up and defend Al-Aqsa.”

Whitewashing The Terrorist Organization Hamas

On January 31, 2006, Khan wrote an article called "Hamas’ Victory Positive for all." Khan’s article discussed, from his perspective, positive aspects of the terror group Hamas’ election victory in Gaza. The Hamas charter is filled with classical and modern anti-Semitic ideas and conspiracy theories traditionally designed to instill fear and hatred of the Jewish people. The charter also calls for the destruction of Israel and the genocide of world Jewry.

In a January 1, 2009 article called “The War in Gaza: A Moral Recession in Democracies” Khan made light of Hamas terror attacks on Israeli civilian centers: “Hamas shot a few rockets into Israel; but that is who they are and that is what they do – they are a terrorist organization.” Khan also attempted to minimize the impact of Hamas’ terror attacks, writing “Hamas fired over 100 rockets into Israel without killing anyone but providing the necessary justification for Israel” to respond.

Despite the failures to inflict mass civilian casualties, Khan’s statements downplayed that Hamas had timed its terror attacks to correspond with Israeli civilian travel to or from school and work.

Anti-Israel Bigotry

In October 2007, Khan refused to sit on an academic panel at UD called "Anti-Americanism in the Middle East" with researcher Asaf Romirowsky, because Romirowsky, an Israeli-American, was a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

According to a Middle East Forum report, Khan wrote an email that "I am not sure that I will be comfortable occupying the same space with him." The student organizers of the panel subsequently disinvited Romirowsky from the panel.

Promoting Hatred of Israel

On January 4, 2016, Khan posted on Facebook and Twitter an article that, according to Khan, teaches “how to build alliances in the US to counter opposition to Israeli subjugation of Palestinians.” The article, titled “The Anti-Israel Trend You’ve Never Heard Of,” featured an image of a Muslim woman holding a sign that read “Everything about Israel is illegal.”

The article detailed the embrace of intersectionality by the BDS movement, as well as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)’s employment of the coat-tailing tactic that conjoins various forms of oppression — claiming that “racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and homophobia ... constitute an intersecting system of oppression.”

BDS and SJP have both used intersectionality to blame Israel and Zionism for rising tuition costs and New York state university's, police riots in Ferguson, Missouri, race-based violence in the US, negative environmental impacts of the fossil-fuel industry, and campus rape.

On February 26, 2016, Khan posted on Facebook that Israel is a “noble experiment, but a failure.”

In June 2010, the Middle East Forum reported that during a Georgetown University event called "Evangelicals & Muslims: Perspectives on Mission & Partnership," Khan discouraged Christians from supporting Israel. According to the report, Khan also stated that Israel is inflicting the "greatest oppression that Muslims suffer;" that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians has had a "profound impact on Muslim psychology," and “that all Muslims, particularly in Palestine, are powerless.”

Defending Anti-Semitic Professor Steven Salaita

Khan has tweeted support of anti-Semitic professor Steven Salaita and attempted to whitewash Salaita’s anti-Semitism as “academic freedom.” Khan has also implied that university donors, rather than Salaita’s hate speech, were the cause of Salaita’s de facto firing.

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.