Overview: Asef Bayat is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and signed a 2014 letter demonizing Israel.
Bayat has also signed statements of support for disgraced anti-Israel Professor Steven Salaita.
Bayat is the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).
Supporting BDS
Bayat has signed an August 2014 letter titled “Middle East Scholars and Librarians Call for Boycott of Israeli Academia."
In signing this petition, Bayat committed “not to collaborate on projects and events involving Israeli academic institutions, not to teach at or to attend conferences and other events at such institutions, and not to publish in academic journals based in Israel."
During the annual 2014 conference of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), Bayat signed a resolution that defended “the right of scholarly associations to boycott Israel" and called on MESA to “provide platforms for a sustained discussion of the academic boycott and foster careful consideration of an appropriate position for MESA to assume."
MESA is considered the most important association of Middle East Studies.
Bayat also signed a July 2013 letter calling on Iranian Filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf to boycott the Jerusalem International Film Festival and reject an award from the festival. The letter accused Israel of practicing “apartheid" and “ethnic cleansing."
Demonizing Israel
Bayat signed a July 2014 letter addressed to Israeli academics that called for the condemnation of Israel.
The letter claimed that the Israeli government had “provoked the firing of rockets" into Israeli territory in order to justify military intervention and ultimately influence internal Palestinian politics.
The letter was written during Israel’s Operation Protective Edge (OPE).
Israel commenced Operation Protective Edge (OPE) in July 2014, to stop rocket fire targeting Israeli civilians and to destroy Hamas attack tunnels.
Defending Steven Salaita
Bayat signed two letters, written in August and September 2014, demanding Professor Steven Salaita’s reinstatement at the University of Illinois (U of I).
In 2014, The University of Illinois (U of I) withdrew an offer of employment to Salaita after becoming aware of his anti-Semitic tweets. One tweet, posted shortly after Hamas kidnapped three teenage Israeli high school students, read: "You may be too refined to say it, but I’m not: I wish all the f**king West Bank settlers would go missing."
A month later, Salaita tweeted "Zionists: transforming ‘antisemitism’ from something horrible into something honorable since 1948." On July 8, 2014, he tweeted: "There's something profoundly sexual to the Zionist pleasure w/#Israel's aggression. Sublimation through bloodletting, a common perversion."
U of I defended its decision to withdraw the job offer to Salaita in a January 29, 2015 press release, saying: “These statements [his tweets] and many more like them demonstrate that Dr. Salaita lacks the judgment, temperament and thoughtfulness to serve as a member of our faculty in any capacity, but particularly to teach courses related to the Middle East."
After being denied the position at U of I, Salaita took a teaching position at the American University of Beirut (AUB) in Lebanon, where he was employed from 2015 through 2017. The position at AUB was not tenured and so, following the close of the 2017 academic year, Salaita again sought employment.
Unable to find a teaching position “on four continents," Salaita again took to social media, stating on Facebook I “no longer consider myself among the professoriate." Salaita went on to say that “People ask if I would go back in time and change anything. I would not… I will die unapologetic."
In February 2019, Salaita stated that he became a school bus driver in the Washington, D.C area.