American student leader Joshua Nass discusses the ASA's boycott of Israeli academics. Photo: Screenshot.

An American student leader called for U.S. universities to fire academics that voted in favor of a recent American Studies Association (ASA) boycott of Israel, in an interview on Fox Business Network on Thursday.

Joshua Nass, founder of Voices of Conservative Youth said he was “…calling for every single one of these academics that went ahead and voted to boycott this… to be fired by their employers. Every university that is employing them ought to… fire them, get rid of them.”

On December 16th, the ASA voted by a margin of more than 2 to 1 to endorse a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. The move has so far been rejected by over 100 universities and academic institutions including Brandies University, where Nass studies, which went so far as to sever ties with the umbrella group.

Nass encouraged other academic institutions to follow suit.

“In the wake of this boycott… there were four universities that chose to go ahead and sever their ties with the American Studies Association, 92 universities came out and issued some sort of condemnation, they rebuked this. I don’t think they went far enough,” he said. “They ought to have the courage of their convictions to come out and also terminate their relationship to whatever extent it might be with the ASA.”

Nass’s interviewer, Fox News host Stuart Varney, was bewildered by the ASA’s boycott decision.

“I am just astonished that 5000 American academics should vote to boycott Israel,” he said. “I mean I find that absolutely incomprehensible, it is the only democracy of any sort in the Middle East, the only democracy by a long way, and yet they are saying they are going to boycott it.”

Nass’s group, Voices of Conservative Youth, bills itself as “an organization dedicated to defining and evolving conservatism’s perception to America’s youth.”

Watch a video of the interview here.