(JNS) Boston University’s sociology department has rejected the candidacy of Sarah Ihmoud, an anti-Israel postdoctoral associate, as a professor, JNS has learned from a university source late Thursday, Nov. 7. However, the university’s women’s studies department is apparently still considering whether or not to hire Sarah Ihmoud.
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 that “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.”
Americans for Peace and Tolerance 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 antisemitic 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.”