All 10 UC Chancellors blast BDS movement

Finally, California got something right. All ten of the University of California chancellors signed a letter that condemned the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement, calling it a "serious threat to academic freedom" and making the state the first university system to have the balls to do so.

The letter was written in response to a request from 101 organizations and calls from the public. The effort was organized by AMCHA Initiative following recent incidents at Pitzer College and the University of Michigan, where faculty or faculty members sought to boycott Israel.

The AMCHA Initiative is a nonprofit organization based in California and whose goals are to investigate, document, educate and combat anti-Semitism at schools of higher learning in the U.S.A. The term Amcha is Hebrew for "your people" or "your nation" and intends to signify grassroots, the masses, and ordinary people.

At Pitzer (Go Fightin' Putz's!) the faculty voted to end the institution's year abroad program with the University of Haifa last month. But Pitzer College President Melvin L. Oliver said the boycott was a "repudiation of Pitzer's values," and he disavowed the vote.

Earlier this year, a "professor" at the University of Michigan refused to write a letter of recommendation for a student seeking to spend her year abroad in Israel. 

Initially, Prof. John Cheney-Lippold had told the student he would write a letter for her but when he discovered where she was planning to spend her year abroad, [at Tel Aviv University] he said that he wouldn’t write the letter because as an anti-Semite, doing so would violate the terms of the BDS movement campaign, designed to help the Middle East, Linda Sarsour, Marc Lamont Hill, Louis Farrakhan and their ilk, destroy the Jewish State.

Tammi Rossman-Benjamin

The U of M subsequently issued a statement saying it “has consistently opposed any boycott of Israeli institutions of higher education,” and criticized Cheney-Lippold for failing to offer proper “support” to the student. 

Later, Michigan disciplined the schmuck, sending a letter that stated, “Your conduct has fallen far short of the University’s and College’s expectations for how LSA faculty interact with and treat students.” The professor was also warned that if he did it again, he would be subject to dismissal. Now he just professes anti-Semitism.

Behind the backdrop of the Pritzer and Michigan situations, AMCHA composed a letter which they sent to 250 university presidents asking them to sign a statement opposing academic boycotts of Israel.

The letter states that abiding by the guidelines of the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), the main BDS organization in the United States, “will not only inflict serious harm on Israeli academic institutions, but on faculty and students at our own schools as well.”

AMCHA’s founder and director Tammi Rossman-Benjamin said in a statement. “If this was just about Israel, we would not be involved, as AMCHA is not an Israel advocacy organization. However, this is about protecting the academic freedom and educational rights of Jewish students, which will be violated if an academic boycott is permitted.”

Good for her, good for AMCHA and good for California.

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