Overview: Dina Al-Kassim has voiced support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement on Twitter and has signed petitions in support of the academic boycott of Israel. She is a supporter of convicted terrorist Rasmea Odeh and disgraced anti-Israel academic Steven Salaita.

Al-Kassim has also signed a petition conflating the suffering of the indigenous peoples of Canada with that of Palestinians, accusing Israel of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Al-Kassim has presented her lecture, “Taboo Words: Israel, Apartheid and Settler Colonialism" at conferences hosted by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP).

Al-Kassim is a professor at the Institute of Social Justice at the University of British Columbia.

Conflating Struggles
Al-Kassim signed a petition, published on December 23, 2012, entitled: “Palestinians in Solidarity with Idle No More and Indigenous Rights."

The petition accused Israel of “settler colonialism, occupation… apartheid… and genocide" and conflated the experience of indigenous peoples of Canada with those of Palestinians.

The petition specifically alleged that both the indigenous peoples of Canada and Palestinians were “subject to ethnic cleansing at the hands of the very same forces of European colonization."

Demonizing Israel
On July 30, 2015, Al-Kassim participated in a conference hosted by SJP. At the conference, Al-Kassim was featured on a panel discussion entitled: “Taboo Words: Israel, Apartheid and Settler Colonialism."

Al-Kassim presented the same lecture at the “Conference on Palestine, Israel and the Assault on Academic Freedom" on October 23, 2015.

The conference was sponsored by the University of California, Riverside (UC Riverside) SJP and accused Israel of implementing a “regime of occupation, dispossession and discrimination against the Palestinian people."

Support for BDS
On January 3, 2017, Al-Kassim retweeted an article advocating for the BDS petition to be passed by MLA.

On January 8, 2017, following the defeat of the BDS petition by MLA, she retweeted an article, authored by Mondoweiss, criticizing the decision.

Al-Kassim expressed her support for BDS by signing a petition for the academic boycott of Israel, published by Mondoweiss on August 6, 2014.

She had signed another petition, published on February 2, 2009, calling for an academic boycott and divestment from Israel.

The petition charged that Israel implements a “longtime racist jurisprudence against its indigenous Palestinian population, during which the Israeli state has systematically dispossessed, starved, tortured, and economically exploited the Palestinian people."

Supporting Rasmea Odeh
On October 24, 2014, Al-Kassim signed a petition, authored by the anti-Israel Electronic Intifada website, expressing support for convicted terrorist Rasmea Odeh.

Odeh was a key military operative [00:02:08] with the terrorist group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In 1969, Odeh masterminded a PFLP bombing that killed two college students in a Jerusalem supermarket. Odeh also attempted to bomb the British consulate.

Odeh confessed, in a highly detailed account, the day following her arrest. In a 2004 documentary, one of Odeh’s co-conspirators directly implicated [00:10:53] Odeh as the mastermind.

In 1970, an Israeli court tried and convicted Odeh for her involvement in both bombings and sentenced her to life imprisonment. However, Odeh was released 10 years later, in a prisoner swap and emigrated to the United States.

On November 10, 2014, a Michigan federal jury convicted Odeh for immigration fraud because she failed to disclose her prior conviction and life sentence on her immigration application. On March 12, 2015, she was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

In 2017, after an appeal and a lengthy court battle, Odeh admitted to immigration fraud, was stripped of her U.S. citizenship,deported to Jordan and banned from re-entering the U.S.

Defending Steven Salaita
Al-Kassim signed a petition, published on August 19, 2014, authored by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) entitled: “A Call to People of Conscience Not to Speak at the University Of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Until Chancellor Wise Honor [sic.] the Contract to Hire Professor Steven Salaita."

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.