Boston University has been considering hiring an anti-Israel postdoctoral associate as a professor, reported Americans for Peace and Tolerance.
While the school has yet to hire Sarah Ihmoud, the offer is “imminent,” according to APT.
Ihmoud presented her paper, “Sexual Violence, Women’s Bodies, and Israeli Settler Colonialism,” to the university. In it, she alleges that the “rape and killing of Palestinian women was a central aspect of Israeli troops’ systematic massacres and evictions during the destruction of Palestinian villages in 1948.”
She also wrote, “Israeli officials’ repressive policies and incitement against the Palestinian people work to empower and embolden Israeli settler society to embody the power of the state and viciously attack Palestinians. This is clearly exhibited in the attacks on Palestinian women’s bodies inside Al-Aqsa mosque these last weeks in Jerusalem, by both settler publics empowered by the state’s military protection, and members of the state security forces.”
APT stated that “the claims made are false,” and that “the paper, like all of Ihmoud’s writings, is not simply anti-Israeli, it is blatantly anti-Semitic and unsupported by any facts and does not merit ‘academic scholarship’ status.”
It continued, “Boston University should not hire a person who portrays Jews as rapists, Jewish leaders and academics as promoting rape … and more. This hateful propaganda, posing as scholarship, is no different from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the crudest German junk science proving that Jews are genetically inferior to Aryans.”
Boston University president Robert Brown could not respond to a request for comment, as the university is in the midst of hiring-consideration reviews.
“The fact that Ms. Ihmoud has presented this work as academic scholarship and is now being considered for a faculty position at a university as esteemed and reputable as Boston University is extremely troubling,” The Lawfare Project wrote in a letter sent last week to Boston University. “Ms. Ihmoud portrays Jews as rapists, Jewish leaders and academics as promoting rape, and Jewish women as having orgasms while thinking about Jewish men raping Palestinian women.”
The letter continued, “It must be asked how a person who publicly promotes these views can be deemed suitable for a faculty position at Boston University? If Ms. Ihmoud had made these same claims about African-Americans, would she be considered a viable candidate for a faculty position at Boston?”
‘BU did not conduct a proper review process’
Asaf Romirowsky, executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, told JNS that Ihmoud’s work exemplifies the current state of academia.
“Ihmoud represents the Palestinianization of the academy and how propaganda has replaced scholarship,” he said. “It is clear that BU did not conduct a proper review process, as there is nothing here that was based on “peer evaluation of a candidate’s scholarly and professional achievements within the appropriate discipline and according to established disciplinary criteria.”
“Rather, it is nearly impossible that anyone in the sociology department has checked any of Dr. Ihmoud’s footnotes, which are uniformly based on unreliable, unverifiable claims, which cites either a self-referential “scholarly” literature (much like Holocaust-denial “scholarship”), and notoriously unreliable propaganda sites like Electronic Intifada,” he continued. “Nowhere is there any reference to the extensive controversy surrounding her claims (e.g., her lurid and unsubstantiated claims of what happened at Deir Yassin).”
Finally, said Romirowsky, “it is extremely concerning that an individual such ad Dr. Ihmoud who has proven to not be scholar but a professional propagandist, whose task, much like traditional practitioners of the longest hatred, is to accuse Israel (i.e., sovereign Jews) of deliberately and maliciously attacking innocent Palestinians. She does this with manufactured claims (hence, the importance of her unreliable references), which she then folds into a post-colonial theoretical structure that turns Israel into a pariah nation, guilty of genocide.”
