UCLA's Sondra Hale Supports ASA Boycott

by Cinnamon Stillwell • Nov 13, 2014 at 6:52 pm

http://www.campus-watch.org/blog/2014/11/ucla-sondra-hale-supports-asa-boycott

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Sondra Hale

A Jewish Telegraph Agency (JTA) article about the annual meeting of the American Studies Association (ASA) a year after it adopted a resolution for an academic boycott of Israel demonstrates how the politicization of Middle East studies has come to infect other academic fields. According to University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) professor emerita, former chair of the Faculty Advisory Committee for the notoriously biased Center for Near Eastern Studies, and self-described "activist academic" Sondra Hale:
[The boycott resolution] woke up American studies to the significance of Palestine in some of their own studies. . . . Hale said issues of Palestinian indignity can link to Native American studies, and that Israeli settler colonialism links to the study of Africa and the African-American experience.
Hale, a long time anti-Israel activist, knows of what she speaks. On the occasion of her retirement in 2012, Campus Watch summed up her dubious achievements:

Hale was one of the founding members of the organizing committee for the Campaign for the Cultural and Academic Boycott of Israel. At the time of its inception, she touted her prominent involvement, telling the Daily Bruin in February, 2009 that, were it to go into effect, "foreign exchange and cooperative programs with Israel would cease."
At an October, 2009 conference at the Center for Near Eastern Studies (CNES)--for which she served as chair of the Faculty Advisory Committee--Hale equated the pro-Israel groups StandWithUs and the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) with "Nazis" and "McCarthyists."
In response to widespread criticism regarding the blatantly anti-Israel and, at times, anti-Semitic nature of a January, 2009 "Human Rights and Gaza" CNES symposium, Hale penned an op-ed in the Daily Bruin slamming UCLA student and member of Bruins for Israel, Ben Meiselman, for having the temerity to publish a piece criticizing the symposium.
Hale was one of the signatories to a conspiratorial 2002 open letter warning that Israel would use the Iraq war to perpetrate "ethnic cleansing" against the Palestinians.
Shifting focus to her other specialty, Africa, Hale suggested in November, 2007 that Islamist-perpetrated genocide in Darfur could be prevented by sending in "mediation, negotiation, healing and psychotherapy . . . professionals to work with people when tensions are building up."

Would that Hale's baleful influence had ended with her retirement, but her promotion of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) lives on, and academic organizations such as the ASA have clearly taken note. When Hale tells the JTA, "We've got the floor now, and that's highly significant," we should take her at her word.

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