Stanford professor Palumbo-Liu promotes site publishing antisemitic conspiracy theories

Earlier today, I wrote about “BDS solidarity with murderous hatred” at my new Times of Israel (TOI) blog. This post highlights an article written by Stanford professor David Palumbo-Liu in the Huffington Post, where he supports a recent BDS initiative to show solidarity with Palestinians despite (or because of?) the current wave of Palestinian terror attacks; he also seemed to endorse baseless accusations that Israel is threatening Al-Aqsa – which, as I’ve pointed out previously, is a lethal libel first promoted by the man who became notorious as Hitler’s mufti. (See also Jeffrey Goldberg’s similar post on “The Paranoid, Supremacist Roots of the Stabbing Intifada.”)

I noted in my TOI post on BDS that Palumbo-Liu is supporting his views with links that lead to sites devoted to the demonization of Israel, and I argued that “[j]ust as readers who got their news about Jews from Der Stürmer would have found it hard to doubt that ‘the Jews are our misfortune,’ readers who get their news about Israel from the sites cited by Palumbo-Liu will find it hard to doubt that ‘the Jewish state is our misfortune.’”

Among the sites cited by Palumbo-Liu was one I was not familiar with, but when I checked it, I immediately noticed an article promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories, and it quickly turned out that the site features several writers specializing in this field.

Shockingly, Palumbo-Liu – who claims to take antisemitism very seriously – has allowed this site to cross-post his Huffington Post column [archived here], which I noticed only now when I saw that he is promoting the cross-post on Twitter.

The Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor at Stanford University apparently likes to be featured on a site that publishes articles explicitly relying on insights garnered from contributors to David Duke’s website. This screenshot of the archived page of the relevant article as it currently appears provides a striking visual illustration: you have the approving reference to “an article on David Duke’s website,” while Palumbo-Liu’s article is featured in the side bar. [as marked in red]

From Palumbo-Liu’s article on the site, you could also continue on to another post featured among the recent entries in the sidebar, which promotes a video entitled “They are killing our children.” This post is an excellent example of the 21st century version of the medieval blood libel.

The 13-year old Palestinian “killed” in this video had just stabbed and critically injured a 13-year old Israeli Jewish boy; in the meantime, the young terrorist was released from hospital into police custody, while his victim remains hospitalized due to the serious injuries he suffered.

Apparently, Palumbo-Liu didn’t really mean it when he wrote in a Salon article that “Anti-Semitism must be challenged swiftly and decisively by each and every one of us.”

Quite the contrary: as documented here, Palumbo-Liu actually lends his prestige as a Stanford professor to sites and causes that promote antisemitism.