Academics who supported BDS were found to be 40 times more likely to accuse Israel of genocide after Oct 7.
By Dion J. Pierre, The Algemeiner
The proliferation of academic speech and expressive activity which accused Israel of genocide following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack was built on a cultural framework established years earlier through faculty advocacy for the “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” (BDS) movement, according to a new statistical study by the California-based AMCHA Initiative group.
A report generated from the study found that, of a sample of 278 campus events held during the 2024-2025 academic year, those featuring at least one speaker with preexisting support for BDS were about 40 times more likely to include an accusation of the false blood libel that Israel is seeking to eliminate the Palestinian people.
Specifically, while 85 percent of academic events featuring a speaker with documented pre-Oct. 7 activism for boycotting Israel platformed the claim that the Jewish state was perpetrating a genocide, just 2 percent of events with no identified BDS activist pushed such an accusation.
Titled “When Political Advocacy Acquires Academic Authority: BDS and the Genocide Accusation,” the 28-page report stressed that higher education’s legitimizing the charge had caused profound consequences beyond the campus, foremost of which being a pandemic of antisemitic hate crimes across the US and the wider world.
The statistics are harrowing. Events featuring a pro-BDS speaker were nine times more likely to be sponsored by an academic unit led by a pre-Oct. 7 supporter of boycotting Israel. Furthermore, academic departments were more likely to promote the genocide accusation if they had been led by someone who supported BDS before Oct. 7.
On Monday, AMCHA Initiative explained to The Algemeiner that the report is groundbreaking for exposing that the increasing popularity of accusing Israel of genocide was not caused by any new discovery of Israel’s military conduct but by a predisposition. Faculty were primed to utter the most invective accusations about Israel anyway to achieve what they identified as the political objective of destroying the Zionist project, according to the watchdog group.
This means that very little which anti-Zionist faculty say about Israel in their classrooms and in their writing carry validity now even as they color how college students view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to the AMCHA Initiative’s executive director, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin.
“What’s underneath the statistics is like a lawyer cross examining a witness giving untrue testimony against a defendant and showing that it is motivated by self-interest. And in that case, you throw out the witness, and the charge goes with it as well,” she explained. “This report was different than other reports because the issue wasn’t highlighting that the academy is biased. We know that it is. What this study does is show how the genocide charge was unduly granted legitimacy.”
Rossman-Benjamin stressed that the Jewish public should take the scholar-activists who imagine the genocide blood libels seriously as they have de facto governing power in American culture despite coming in strange forms — such as eccentrics with piercings and dyed hair. Their ideas helped turn American campuses into hotbeds of anti-Jewish bigotry, setting off incidents of violence, discrimination, and, sometimes, public humiliation for the purpose of sabotaging burgeoning academic careers.
“Of course, the BDS supporters are the ones to accuse Israel of genocide. But think about that. What does that mean for the accusation?” she continued. “It’s not just that it confirms what we know to be true about these lousy academics. It’s about what it means for what’s happening in the world right now.”
The study comes amid a wave of statistics showing an explosion of anti-Jewish violence in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack.
According to newly released data from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), nearly two-thirds of all religion-based hate crimes nationwide in 2025 targeted American Jews.
A striking 63 percent of religious-based hate crimes and 14 percent of total hate crimes in the US last year were perpetrated against Jews, the FBI’s annual Hate Crime Statistics report said, recording 1,528 such incidents. Jews comprise just 2 percent of the total US population.
The next most targeted religious group, Muslims, were the victims of 205 hate crime incidents, meaning Jews were attacked seven times more often.
Jews remained disproportionately targeted even as overall reported hate crime incidents across the country decreased from 11,679 in 2024 to 10,881 in 2025. Even though anti-Jewish incidents nationwide decreased last year from a total of 1,938 in 2024, the latest data marked the third-highest year on record of antisemitic hate crimes.
So rampant was anti-Jewish hatred, the FBI data showed, that the antisemitic hate crime total reached just over 50 percent of the total perpetrated against the Black community, which is over six times larger than the Jewish community.
In May 2025, the year reviewed by the FBI, experts told The Algemeiner that antisemitism and anti-Israel activism on university campuses helped to inspire the fatal shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers leaving a Jewish event in Washington, DC.
Elias Rodriguez, a 31-year-old left-wing and anti-Israel activist from Chicago, was charged in US federal court with murdering the aides, who were reported to be a couple. According to witnesses and federal agents, he chanted, “Free, Free Palestine” during the attack — a war cry that has been a staple of the pro-Hamas movement on campuses across the US. An affidavit filed by federal authorities in support of the criminal complaint charging Rodriguez revealed that he also said at the scene of the shooting, “I did it for Palestine; I did it for Gaza.”
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