British gov’t cuts funding to pro-BDS charity
Britain begins to address its role in funding the demonization of Israel that contributes to anti-Semitism.
British civil and governmental societies are undergoing a soul searching as to the role Britain plays in funding terrorism against Israel and the BDS movement.
As Jonathan reported, Britain Rocked By Revelation Of Taxpayer-Funded Palestinian Terror:
Great Britain’s Foreign Office and Department for International Development (“DFID”) have funneled million of Pounds, at least, to terrorists. The report from the Daily Mail details how the UK’s policy of spending .7% of revenue on foreign aid distorts priorities and leads it to fund terror. The Daily Mail report builds on a broader investigation from Palestinian Media Watch (“PMW”) evidencing the Palestinian Authority’s (“PA”) attempts to hide banned payments to terrorists from Western donors.
Anti-Semitism acting under the banner of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement also has garnered attention recently in Britain, British Campus Anti-Semitism on Display During Israel Hate Week:
Now, the British government has stepped in. According to the Telegraph, “Oxford University was yesterday ordered by the Government to investigate allegations of widespread anti-Semitism as it was engulfed by new claims that students were escaping punishment for racist attacks.”
At Kings College, a BDS protest turned violent when an Israeli speaker appeared:
Here is some of the footage I filmed last night of people banging on the windows and intimidating those inside pic.twitter.com/0hKTo48qC9
— Russell Langer (@R_Langer) January 20, 2016
The British government has taken another step, cutting off funding for a supposed charity that funded many of the propaganda events contributing to the rise of anti-Semitism in Britain.
The Telegraph reports, Charity backing anti-Israel rallies has state cash pulled, including reference to two names familiar to Legal Insurrection readers, Max Blumenthal and Steven Salaita:
The government has ceased funding a British charity which sponsored events accused of promoting hatred and violence against Jews.
The Department for International Development (Dfid) said that it no longer supported War on Want, which helped pay for “Israeli Apartheid Week” in February this year.
The statement comes as the Telegraph obtained undercover recordings of events where anti-Semitism, demands for the destruction of Israel or naked support for terror were expressed by academics and others at meetings in some of Britain’s most prestigious universities.
One speaker, Max Blumenthal, the son of a close adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, praised a massacre by Hamas as sending an “incredible message” and said that taking up arms should be “normal” for Palestinians. He compared Israel to the terrorist group Isil, describing it as “the Jewish State of Israel and the Levant, Jsil”….
War on Want also paid for the accommodation of another speaker, Steven Salaita, an academic who used the event to attack Israel’s “tenuous colonial existence” and defend violence, saying: “If we are going to reduce a project of ethnic cleansing, illegal settlement and military occupation to the minuscule chance that a soldier or a settler will be harmed by an act of resistance by the natives, then we forfeit all right to be taken seriously.”
It was a decision by Oxford University Labour Club to endorse Israeli Apartheid Week which triggered the row about anti-Semitism within Labour.
The club’s co-chairman, Alex Chalmers, resigned, saying that a “large proportion of Oxford University Labour Club and the student Left in Oxford more generally have some kind of problem with Jews.”
Focusing on European government support for the anti-Israel propaganda machine is a good start. As we know, European governments provide much of the funding for biased non-governmental organizations whose primary job is to present a skewed picture of Israeli society.
They may have a “right” to spew their hatred, but they don’t have a right to a taxpayer subsidy to do it.
[Featured Image: Max Blumenthal with convicted supermarket bomber Rasmea Odeh]
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