Anti-Israel BDS Following ‘Nazi Tradition’, Declares Student Gov’t at Germany’s Goethe University
Student Government condemns BDS as antisemitic, calls for boycotting the boycotters on the campus
The student government at the University of Frankfurt has condemned the anti-Israel boycott campaign as antisemitic, by unanimously passing a resolution last week.
The university, also referred to as the Goethe University, joins the Leipzig University, which passed a similar resolution last year that rejected the BDS activism creeping onto German campuses.
Taking the fight to the anti-Israel camp, the student body called for a boycott of the anti-Israel boycotters on the campus.
“With the unanimously reached resolution the Student Parliament calls upon all its partners to refrain from any cooperation with the BDS Campaign,” declared the General Students’ Committee (AStA) at the Goethe University on its official website. With 46,000 students, Goethe University is one of the largest universities in Germany.
“BDS Campaign demands economic sanctions against Israel, and calls for the boycott of Israeli products [and] cultural institutions: “The calls for scientific boycott” is a massive attack of scientific freedom, therefore BDS has no business of being on the campus,” the Student Government said in a statement announcing the resolution.
The resolution passed by the Goethe University’s General Students’ Committee (AStA) declares (translation by me):
The Student Parliament condemns the anti-Semitic “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)” campaign and stands against any emergence of this or similar campaigns, be it in form of flyers, events or stands at the Goethe University, Frankfurt or any other place.
The Student Parliament further calls upon all its partners to refrain from cooperating [with the BDS campaign].
The call to boycott products from — described by the BDS campaign as “occupied territories” in parts of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Golan Heights — stands undoubtedly in the National Socialistic [Nazi] tradition of so-called Jewish Boycott and the slogan “don’t buy from the Jews!”. Apart from the demands for economic sanctions and divesting investments, the BDS puts massive pressure on world renowned artists in order to stop planned events in Israel and culturally boycott the State of Israel. Furthermore, the BDS calls for a scientific boycott with deep consequences, for example the ceasing of all forms of cooperation with the Israeli institutions. This is an attack on scientific freedom and would particularly lead to massive restrictions in the research and teaching of Shoah and National Socialism.
The continued demands by the BDS campaign to remove all security installations [meant to prevent] terrorist attacks along the border with Gaza and West Bank and to facilitate the return of all who have been denoted by UNRWA [the UN agency dealing with “Palestinian refugees”] as “Palestinian refugees”, would mean the end of Israel as the Jewish State and that of Jewish existence in the Near East. It is beyond imagination to conceive a Jewish population that is turned into a minority would be accepted and treated with parity, given the broad support for antisemitic terror against Jewish men and women within the Palestinian population in Gaza Strip and West Bank.
The antisemitism of the BDS movement is evident by the consistent labelling of Israel as an “Apartheid Regime”. It part of the attempt to demonise and highlight the supposed racist character of Zionism. In addition, this baseless accusation relativizes the (more or less) former institutional racism in South Africa and mocks the victims of actual apartheid. [Translation by author]
Addressing the rise of antisemitism on the university’s own campus, the resolution says:
The anti-Zionist, [or in other words] the antisemitic tendencies, are on the rise in Frankfurt as well. This is evident in the growing presence of the group “Free Palestine FFM” that openly professes to be anti-Zionist or the BDS-affiliated KoPi Konferenz “50 years of Israeli occupation”
Frankfurt University (Germany) Anti-BDS Resolution by Legal Insurrection on Scribd
The story was first broken by Benjamin Weinthal, Jerusalem Post’s Europe correspondent and fellow for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).
This is turning out to be a bad week for anti-Israel BDS activists in Germany. The country’s special police unit for political extremism has launched an investigation into a group of BDS activists. Berlin police launched the proceedings in response to a physical and verbal attack by BDS activists that took place two months ago that targeted the visiting Israeli parliamentarian MK Aliza Lavie and a Holocaust survivor.
However, it will take lot more than campus mobilisation and sporadic police investigations in order to clamp down on nationwide antisemitic and anti-Israel networks in Germany. According to Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (BfV), around 300 active Hamas and 950 Hezbollah members have found safe haven in Germany. If members of these terrorist outfits continue to operate out of Germany, sooner or later they will turn on their unwitting host as well.
[Featured Image: Frankfurt anti-Israel protest, sign says “The Jews are Beasts”]
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Comments
They should be careful about their language. I hear the Germans arrest people who remind them of their past, although that might only apply to Chinese.