William Messing

Overview

William Messing is an advocate of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. He has also expressed his support for disgraced anti-Israel Professor Steven Salaita and for Hamas supporter Imad Ahmad Barghouthi.

Messing is a professor in the School of Mathematics at the University of Minnesota (UMinn).

Supporting BDS

Messing signed a petition, published on October 13, 2016, that praised the boycott of Israeli communities in the West Bank but condemned the exclusion of other Israeli products from the boycott.

Urging those endorsers of BDS to expand the scope of the boycott, the petition “called for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against all entities, Israeli or international, that are complicit in denying Palestinians everywhere their rights.”

On August 29, 2014, Messing signed the “Open Letter on Gaza and BDS from the Middle East Caucus of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.”

The letter described “indiscriminate and disproportionate violence that has been waged… by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) against the civilian population of Gaza” which it characterized as “the largest ‘open air prison’ in the world.”

The letter went on to  endorse the BDS movement and conclude that “the violence has taken an unprecedented and savage turn, having reached genocidal proportions.”

On August 12, 2013, Messing signed a petition, authored by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), calling for the boycott of an upcoming conference at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (HUJI).

The petition charged that “While all Israeli universities are deeply complicit in the occupation, settler-colonialism, and apartheid, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is particularly noteworthy.”

Based on these accusations, the petition went on to state that “We call on our colleagues to treat Israel exactly the same way that most of the world treated racist South Africa - or indeed any other state that legislates and practices apartheid: as a pariah state.”

Defending Steven Salaita

In 2014, Messing posted a comment to an article written about disgraced anti-Israel Professor Steven Salaita, in which he stated that “The University of Illinois disgraces itself through rescinding its agreement to hire Steven Salaita… Having read what Salaita wrote, I found nothing so objectionable as to keep him from teaching.”

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.

Defending Imad Ahmad Barghouthi

Messing signed an open letter, published by the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on behalf of Imad Ahmad Barghouthi.

The purpose of the letter was to call upon Prime Minister Netanyahu “to order the immediate release of Dr. Imad Ahmad Barghouthi from Israeli military custody.”

Palestinian Astrophysicist Professor Imad Barghouthi of Al-Quds University was sentenced to seven months in prison for incitement to violence.

Barghouti is a vocal supporter of Hamas’s military wing — the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades — and has called for killing and being killed in the name of Islam.

An October 22, 2014 video showed Barghouthi at an Al-Quds university Hamas rally, draped in a Hamas banner, [00:00:33] urging students to design precision guided missiles, and sniper rifles as [00:01:11] “weapons of  the resistance” to [00:02:35] kill “zionist soldiers” in their bedrooms.