The University of Hamburg’s appointment of a professor who has shown support for a Palestinian terrorist has brought heavy criticism down on the academic institution, Benjamin Weinthal reported for The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday.
Farid Esack, a leader of the anti-Israel boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign in his native South Africa, was named a guest lecturer of Islamic theology at the University of Hamburg, sparking outrage in Germany. At a 2015 fundraiser, Esack praised Leila Khaled, who carried out two hijackings for Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the 1960s and 1970s, calling her his “comrade.”
“This is a man who expressed anti-Semitic statements, and who is sympathetic to Holocaust denial,” the Israeli embassy in Germany told Weinthal. “A person with such views has no place as an educator in a university, in particular not in Germany; due to both professional as well as moral and probably also legal reasons.”
In a similar vein, Dr. Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center commented that “A person who is sponsoring an unrepentant terrorist is hardly a person who should be educating German students.”
A spokesman for the ruling Christian Democratic Union party told the German newspaper Die Welt earlier this week that “Who today under the flag of the BDS movement calls to boycott Israeli goods and services speaks the same language in which people were called on not to buy from Jews.” This echoed a resolution the party passed last month, declaring “its disapproval and rejection of every form of BDS activity and condemns these activities as anti-Semitic.”
Esack will also be speaking at Hamburg’s Islamic Center, which is reportedly supported by the Iranian government. The Islamic Center often hosts BDS events and hosts annual Qods Day events calling for the destruction of Israel.
Researchers at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies noted last November that prominent BDS campaigners and groups have ties to the PFLP, which is considered a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union.
Many leaders of the BDS campaign, which was launched by Palestinian groups in 2005, have publicly affirmed that they seek Israel’s destruction. BDS co-founder Omar Barghouti, an opponent of the two-state solution, said in 2014 that Palestinians have a right to “resistance by any means, including armed resistance,” while leading activist As’ad Abu Khalil acknowledged in 2012 that “the real aim of BDS is to bring down the state of Israel.”
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