Sankaran Krishna

Overview

Sankaran Krishna is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and has defended anti-Israel agitators, including disgraced Professor Steven Salaita.  

As of October 2019, Krishna was a Professor of the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i (UH).

Supporting BDS

As of October 2019, Krishna was a signatory to a list of endorsers of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI). ”

In February 2014, Krishna signed an open letter condemning the administration of the University of Hawaii (UH), for expressing its opposition to the American Studies Association’s (ASA) recent endorsement of the academic boycott of Israel.

Signatories of the letter, signed by Krishna, charged that opponents of the academic boycott of Israel “support academic institutions that participate in the denial of human rights, including the right to education, experienced by Palestinians who, like Native Hawaiians, live under conditions of occupation.”

The letter went on to charge: “our administrators nowhere in their statement acknowledge Palestinian existence, let alone ways Palestinians’ academic and human rights are violated by Israel and with the support from the US of over three billion federal tax dollars a year in direct aid alone.”

Defending Anti-Israel Agitators

On November 26, 2018, Krishna published an article praising anti-Israel professor Jasbir Puar and “her remarkable book”.

Puar, an Advisory Board member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI), has penned dozens of anti-Israel articles and spoken against Israel across numerous forums.

In his article, Krishna wrote: “The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] shoots to maim rather than kill Palestinians– so that it may keep fatalities low and their resistance off-balance, even as Israel renews its membership in the liberal-democratic west by the ‘progressive’ ways in which accords disability rights to Jewish (ex)-soldiers, to (white) civilians, and to queers.”

In 2014, Krishna reportedly signed a letter to the Board of Trustees from UH staff, in support of a “boycott of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) until you reinstate Dr. Steven Salaita.”

Krishna 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.

In 2009, Krishna published a book “Globalization and Postcolonialism: Hegemony and Resistance in the Twenty-First Century.” In chapter three of the book, Krishna praised anti-Israel professor and anthropologist, Edward Said. 

In describing Said’s scholarship, Krishna wrote: “He was an erudite spokesman for the cause of the Palestinian people and their right to the recovery of their homeland, which was gradually and often forcibly occupied by Jewish peoples from all over the world in the early decades of the twentieth century, a process that culminated in the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.”