Overview: Amit Baishya [Amit R. Baishya] is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and is an Assistant Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies for the English Department at Oklahoma University (OU).

Supporting BDS

Baishya is a signatory to a faculty petition calling on the TIAA-CREF (Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association, College Retirement Equities Fund) to divest from its holdings in Israel.

In 2016, Baishya signed an open letter calling for the academic boycott of Israel.

The open letter was addressed to the Modern Language Association (MLA), “calling on the association to pass a resolution endorsing the boycott of Israeli academic institutions."

In January 2017, the MLA Delegate Assembly approved a resolution (2017-1) acknowledging “the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel contradicts the MLA’s purpose" and conflicted with another resolution (2002-1), that condemned boycotts against scholars. Therefore, the Assembly “resolved that the MLA refrain from endorsing the boycott."

Baishya signed an open letter published on April 19, 2015, expressing support for the cultural boycott of Israel.

The 2015 letter condemned the decision to feature French intellectual Monique Canto-Sperber as the keynote speaker of a “Night of Philosophy" event, because of her pro-Israel activism.

Signatories of the letter stated that “we find it incumbent upon ourselves to register our profound disappointment and to protest in the strongest terms possible that one of the key people you have selected to promote free speech at your Night of Philosophy has been an open practitioner of denying the same to Palestinians and their supporters."

In March 2015, Baishya signed an open letter calling for the adoption of BDS by the MLA.

The letter, signed by members of the MLA, accused Israel of “Detentions without trial, torture and war crimes, and use of deadly force by the Israeli military against non-violent protesters" and called upon Israel to “Honor the right of Palestinian refugees to return."

Baishya also signed a 2009 USACBI open letter, calling for former U.S. President Barack Obama to join the BDS movement.

The USACBI letter accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing" and compared Israel to Apartheid South Africa and concluded that “Israel too maintains an apartheid regime."

After charging Israel with inflicting “one of the most massive, ethnocidal atrocities of modern times," the signatories called upon Obama to join in the BDS movement.

The letter also claimed that Americas’s support of Israel “has fuelled the legitimate anger of the Islamic world, supplied the justification for terrorism, and continually tarnished the United States’ reputation among the democracies of the world."

It went on: “That the United States has stood so often alone in defending Israel before the court of world opinion in the United Nations is not a sign of its virtue, but of the obstinacy and arrogance of its stance."