Nikhil Pal Singh

Overview

Nikhil Pal Singh is an advisory board member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) and promotes the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.

In 2009, Singh signed a letter addressed to U.S. President Barack Obama, calling Israel the perpetrator of "one of the most massive, ethnocidal atrocities of modern times." The letter was written during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, launched to stop Hamas rocket fire, targeting civilians, as well as weapons smuggling into the Gaza strip.

In a 2012 interview, Singh implied that Jews have no ancient historic connection to the city of Hebron (3:55), and described the claim of a Jewish connection to Hebron “bizarre.” Later in the interview, Singh doubled down and described Jewish claims to the land of Israel “bogus historical claims” (21:14).

Singh is an associate professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, at New York University (NYU).

Demonizing Israel

On July 6, 2012, Singh wrote a personal account of a USACBI delegation “fact-finding” trip to Israel and the West Bank. Singh suggested that contemporary Israeli social and political policies are inhuman, “totalitarian” and akin to that of the Nazis.

Singh repeatedly claimed that Israel practices “apartheid.” He also lied that Palestinians are not allowed to live in Area C of the West Bank and that Israelis are committing an “ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”

Singh presented the demolition of terrorists’ homes, and eviction of Palestinian squatters in East Jerusalem as examples of Israeli “brutality.” He then disparaged Israeli security measures as a means to oppress Palestinians.

Singh’s account was published in the Social Text journal alongside a series of essays — written by anti-Israel professors and USACBI members Magid Shihade, Sunaina Maira, Bill Mullen, Robin D.G. Kelley, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui. The essays, edited by Neferti Tadiar, all demonized Israel.

Pushing BDS Deception

Singh was signatory to a BDS campaign of the Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS) — which, on April 20, 2013 passed the first resolution by a North American academic organization urging a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

The second page of the AAAS resolution promoted a misleading series of maps that presented lands once controlled by Britain, Egypt, and Jordan as autonomous “Palestinian land,” purportedly stolen by Israel. In February of 2016, publishing giant McGraw-Hill Education recalled and destroyed copies of a college level textbook that contained copies of the erroneous map series. In October 2015, the U.S. cable news network MSNBC apologized for airing a similar grouping of maps and retracted them.

Without providing any hint of the terrorism rife on Palestinian campuses, the AAAS resolution claimed: "...Palestinian universities and schools have been periodically forced to close as a result of actions related to the Israeli occupation, or have been destroyed by Israeli military strikes, and Palestinian students and scholars face restrictions on movement and travel that limit their ability to attend and work at universities, travel to conferences and to study abroad, and thereby obstruct their right to education."

Defending Hate Speech

Singh is a supporter of anti-Semitic professor Steven Salaita and signed a petition demanding Salaita’s reinstatement at University of Illinois (U of I) Urbana-Champaign. The petition also called on scholars to boycott U of I.

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.

At a talk held at the New School in New York City on November 19, 2014, Singh said that Salaita’s “firing was a sign of ‘U.S. violence: a person deprived of his livelihood for expressing his viewpoint’... Salaita’s bold case, he said reminds ‘us of the solidarities and how to scale up our concern for social and economic justice.’”

Salaita is now the Said Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut (AUB).

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:

Faculty Page:http://sca.as.nyu.edu/object/NikhilPalSingh

Academia.edu:http://nyu.academia.edu/NikhilSingh

Website:https://web.archive.org/web/20081208071841/http://www.nikhilpalsingh.com/