Northeastern University. Photo: Wiki Commons.

This week, Americans for Peace and Tolerance issued an alert:

Boston University to hire radical anti-Israel lecturer
Sarah Ihmoud says Jews are rapists and Jewish women orgasm to fantasies of the IDF bombing Palestinian civilians.

Here is an excerpt they cite from her research:

Rape and killing of Palestinian women was a central aspect of Israeli troops’ systematic massacres and evictions during the destruction of Palestinian villages in 1948. During the Deir Yassin massacre, for instance:

All the inhabitants were ordered into the village square. Here, they were lined up against a wall and shot. One eyewitness said her sister, who was nine months pregnant, was shot in the back of the neck. Her assailants then cut open her stomach with a butcher’s knife and extracted the unborn baby. When an Arab woman tried to take the baby, she was shot. … Women were raped before the eyes of their children before being murdered and dumped down the well.

According to Americans for Peace for Peace and Tolerance, in her research, “There are claims of criminal actions and pronouncements attributed to Jewish leaders and community similar to the blood libel, accusations of poisoning of the wells, etc. NONE of them is supported by any references to evidence because the supporting evidence does not exist — the claims made are false. The paper, like all of Ihmoud’s writings, is not simply anti-Israeli, it is blatantly anti-Semitic and unsupported by any facts and does not merit ‘“academic scholarship’ status.”

They argue that “Boston University should not hire a person who portrays Jews as rapists, Jewish leaders and academics as promoting rape, Jewish women as having orgasms while thinking about bombs being dropped on Gaza, and more. This hateful propaganda, posing as scholarship, is no different from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the crudest German junk science proving that Jews are genetically inferior to Aryans.”

Her paper was not published in any scholarly journal. It was published instead by the Arab Studies Institute website Jadaliyya. There does not appear to be any serious peer review. But despite that, Ihmoud’s lies and sick theories in this article have been accepted by academia. I found 10 academic papers and books that used this paper as a source.

In the social sciences, any crackpot theory — or even lie — can become mainstream as long as it is quoted by others. No evidence or proof is required. Here we see that the libels and antisemitism of Ihmoud and her co-authors can be converted into respectability, as long as academics who share the same hate launder the source though their own papers.