Politicians protest college’s support of BDS forum

Students and politicians are mobilizing to denounce Brooklyn College’s president and Political science department for supporting and sponsoring an anti-Israel presentation on campus on February 7th.

The forum “BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanction) Movement Against Israel” will feature two speakers, Omar Barghouti, a founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (and who is currently studying in Tel Aviv University), and Judith Butler, a BDS supporter and an outspoken anti-Israel, anti-Zionist.

Notes American Friends for a Safe Israel, “sponsorship of such an anti-Israel event by a Department of the College, is something that would not occur with any other country. Only Israel is subjected to such hatred, disguised as "academic freedom.”

New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind quoted a statement from Brooklyn College President Karen Gould that “The event is co-sponsored by several campus and community organizations, including the Political Science Department.” He noted that, “The boycott campaign against Israel today and the philosophical war demonizing Jews and denying the rights of Jews to self-determination and equality, is the modern incarnation of anti-Semitism. Same stink, different excuse. This lecture, which is funded by tax dollars, gives a platform to the BDS movement, whose goal is to delegitimize Israel’s existence. Like its philosophical brothers in Hamas, BDS aims to eliminate the State of Israel from the map.”

New York State Assemblyman Steven Cymbrowitz wrote in a letter to Gould that, “No department or club in Brooklyn College, which boasts a richly diverse student body, has any business sponsoring events on the college campus that serve no useful purpose but to promulgate anti-Semitism. It is our task as responsible leaders to always stand on the right side of history, and Brooklyn College should not participate in or allow any event to take place on the college’s campus whose primary impetus is to shatter the already shaky bridges of peace and unity that so many of us have labored to build.”