The BDS movement has claimed another academic group in its vile, anti-Israel cause.

Elizabeth Redden reports at Inside Higher Ed.

Another Association Backs Israel Boycott

The National Women’s Studies Association is the newest scholarly group to back the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel.

In a vote that involved 35 percent of the association’s total membership, 88.4 percent, or 653 individuals, voted in favor of a boycott measure. Members of the NWSA’s executive committee then took their own vote on Friday to approve the membership’s recommendation that the association support BDS.

The NWSA measure does not limit itself to a boycott just of Israeli academic institutions, but rather affirms the association’s endorsement of “the 2005 call by Palestinian civil society for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) of economic, military and cultural entities and projects sponsored by the state of Israel.”

Simona Sharoni, one of the co-founders of Feminists for Justice in/for Palestine, an ad-hoc group that sponsored the pro-boycott measure, described the NWSA vote in support of BDS as significant in positioning Palestinian solidarity as a “feminist issue.” The text of the recommendation approved by the membership states, in part: “As feminist scholars, activists, teachers and public intellectuals we recognize the interconnectedness of systemic forms of oppression. In the spirit of this intersectional perspective, we cannot overlook the injustice and violence, including sexual and gender-based violence, perpetrated against Palestinians and other Arabs in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, within Israel and in the Golan Heights, as well as the colonial displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba.” (“Nakba” is the term used by Palestinians to describe their displacement by the creation of the state of Israel.)

“We’re basically redefining feminism and putting solidarity with Palestine into that definition of what it means to be a feminist,” said Sharoni, a professor of gender and women’s studies at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. “Or, to put it differently, the vote of almost 90 percent of the members of the National Women’s Studies Association in support of this resolution underscores the fact that boycott, divestment and sanctions can be or is seen by members of our association as an example of expressing feminist solidarity.”