Only days into the new school year, and already anti-Israel activists are making a splash on college campuses from one corner of the country to the other. Two reports today confirm that activists with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, commonly referred to as the BDS Movement, are maintaining their efforts to silence any voices that may express pro-Israel positions on campuses.
In the first case, first reported by the Atlantic, a prominent Israeli filmmaker was uninvited from a conference on Religion and Film at Syracuse University in New York because one of its organizers feared retaliation from BDS supporters on campus.
The filmmaker, Shimon Dotan, was initially invited to the March 2017 conference to screen his film, The Settlers, about the history of the religious settler movement in the West Bank. The film has been widely praised by critics as “one of the first close-up views of the motives and personalities in a group that rarely opens up to outsiders,” said the New York Times.
A few weeks after the invitation went out, however, Professor M. Gail Hamner, a member of the Syracuse University Religion Department, emailed Dotan and said he was not welcome after all.
“I now am embarrassed to share that my SU colleagues, on hearing about my attempt to secure your presentation, have warned me that the BDS faction on campus will make matters very unpleasant for you and for me if you come,” Hamner said in an email to Dotan that was obtained by the Atlantic.
Hamner admitted that she had not even seen the film, but that allowing its screening on campus would cause her to “lose credibility with a number of my film and Women/Gender studies colleagues.”
“If the email was truthful, the decision was made in a strikingly anti-intellectual manner, with Syracuse colleagues speculating that other members of their community would persecute them merely for inviting a filmmaker to show his work,” Conor Friedersdorf writes in the magazine. “There is a chilling effect at Syracuse University. Fear of ideologically motivated retaliation is affecting the content of the academic enterprise.”
Friday morning, following publication of the Atlantic article, Michele Wheatly, vice chancellor and provost at Syracuse, emailed the campus community to say that Hamner’s decision was not consistent with university policies. She said the university would be reaching out to the filmmaker to arrange a screening on campus.
In the other case, first reported by Jewish Journal, the president of the Graduate Student Association at the University of California Los Angeles, said he has had to move all the way across the country because of the “hostile and unsafe campus climate” for people who express pro-Israel or anti-BDS sentiment on campus.
Milan Chatterjee, a third-year law student at UCLA and an Indian-American Hindu, said he will finish out his studies at New York University instead.
“It’s really unfortunate,” he told the paper. “I love UCLA, I think it’s a great school and I have lots of friends there. It has just become so hostile and unsafe I can’t stay there anymore.”
Chatterjee’s crime was trying to keep politics out of a November 2015 Diversity Caucus event by, as president of the GSA, withholding funds from sponsors associated with the divest-from-Israel movement. The decision prompted an outcry from anti-Israel BDS activists, a censure from the GSA board of directors, and an investigation earlier this summer by UCLA’s Discrimination Prevention Office.
A school official said Chatterjee’s move was a violation of a UC policy that requires viewpoint neutrality in the distribution of campus funds and stands by the reprimand.
Chatterjee filed a formal complaint with the school charging that he was discriminated against “because I refused to support an anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist activity, organization and position.” It was harassment and intimidation following the brouhaha that drove him off-campus, he said.
Such harassment, according to other students, is common at UCLA.
“What we’ve seen at UCLA is an attempt by BDS activists to use legal intimidation and other forms of social stigmatization to silence those who oppose BDS,” grad student Josh Saidoff told the Journal. “They’ve used the judicial process within student government to try to silence and marginalize and exclude those people who do not advocate on behalf of BDS.”