Riham Barghouti
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- “Founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, which is part of the BDS National Committee in Palestine. Riham is also a founding member of Adalah-NY: The New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel.”
- Teaches high school in Brooklyn.
- Organized BDS academic campaigns against Israel in 2002 as Birzeit University’s external relations officer.
- Barghouti was among the organizers of a BDS initiative against the Bat Sheva dancing group in NYC on 2009, in which she insisted that “Groups like the Bat-Sheva dancing group are been used to cover the harsh reality of Israeli apartheid, and are improving Israel’s image. New-York’s residents should know that the money they pay will indirectly go to support war crimes and laundering Israel’s image, and the group’s dancers that go to reserve duty directly support human rights violations.”
- In an article perpetuating the false claim that Israel allegedly killed 40 civilians in a bombing at a UN school, Barghouti stated, “American slavery had to end. So did South African apartheid and the Jewish Holocaust. These colonial, racist policies were abolished because people had said, enough. Someday soon, that will happen with the Israeli colonization and racism that has plagued Palestine these past 60 years.”
- “‘Israel was built, a colonial country, on another people’s land,’ said protester Riham Barghouti. ‘We’re here to say that this is not something that we should, as New Yorkers, as people, as human beings, celebrate.’”
- On BDS: “Which really aims to begin to hold Israeli accountable for its numerous violations of not only Palestinian human rights but international law…So it’s important to know that BDS is very strongly rooted in the Palestinian resistance movement. …In the context of Israel, it is the academic establishment that is most revered, and therefore needs to be targeted, especially in light of its complicity in Israeli atrocities.”
- Routinely erases the context of terrorism and Arab massacres of Jews during the British mandate period.
- On the history of BDS: “As far back as 1936 we had the great revolt where Palestinian movement carried out general strikes against the British at the time, and refused to pay taxes to the British mandate government. We also had general strikes from the period from 1948 to 1967 in different times to protest the Israeli aggression, the confiscation of land, and the imprisonment, killing and injuring of Palestinians. During the first intifada in January 5th 1988, several prominent Palestinians called for boycott of Israeli products…And it’s really because there has been sustainable and systematic attacks against the Palestinian educational system throughout the Israeli occupation and colonization…The current BDS movement dates back to 2001, in Durban South Africa, when despite Western governments’ unwillingness to hold Israel to account, the NGO forum, of the UN World conference against racism, widely adopted a resolution stating that Israel’s special form of apartheid must be met with the same tools that brought down its South Africa predecessor.”