Anti-Israel academic Ihmoud rejected for job by BU Sociology department
Rejection comes amid increasing scrutiny towards Ihmoud’s alleged antisemitic bias in academic research regarding Israeli-Palestinian history
By JERUSALEM POST STAFFthe Charles River in front of the skyline of Boston(photo credit: BRIAN SNYDER/REUTERS)
Reports indicate that Anti-Israel Sarah Ihmoud has been rejected by Boston University for a position as professor in the school’s Sociology department but is still being considered for the Women’s studies department.“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,” Sarah Ihmoud, a postdoctoral associate, wrote in a paper titled “Sexual Violence, Women’s Bodies, and Israeli Settler Colonialism,” that she presented to the university.Additional articles written by Ihmoud highlights further controversial ideas presented in her academic research, including the notion, found in “ Policing the Intimate, Israel’s Anti- Miscegenation Movement,” that Israel maintains an official anti-misegenation movement, that “that constructs Palestinian masculinity as a hypersexualized threat to Jewish women, and thus, the Jewish nation. I term this ‘policing the intimate.’ Jewish women emerge, within this context, as symbolic ‘border guards’ whose bodies and sexualities must be controlled and protected.In her discussion of its application to Israeli nationalism, she argues that it is “…[A]s part of a gendered nationalism that not only works to justify violence against Palestinian masculinities, and Palestinian communities more generally, but also helps produce the Jewish self as dominant, enabling both Jewish men and women to achieve a sense of gendered racial superiority.”Ilmoud further adds, in reference to the intention of this “policy,” that it is designed to “‘purify’ the Jewish race and maintain exclusivity of the ‘chosen people’” A profile of the scholar posted on BU’s website describes her as a postdoctoral fellow in the women’s studies department for the years 2017-2019.The profile reads that “her fieldwork is centered in the Middle East and Latin America regions, where she uses ethnographic research methods to investigate gendered experiences of militarization and violence in colonial and conflict contexts.”
