I appeared on Breitbart News Sunday on SiriusXM Patriot 125 on December 19, 2021, to talk about the pending academic boycott of Israel by the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). The audio is at the bottom of this post.
That boycott, passed by the annual business meeting on December 2, and headed for a mid-to-late January 2022 full membership vote, was the subject of the column I wrote, along with Johanna E. Markind, Esq., of Legal Insurrection Foundation, in the NY Post. Our coverage is being noticed, with mentions in several publications.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office has made clear, in light of our coverage, that MESA will not be permitted to carry out its discriminatory boycott at or through Florida State University (a MESA institutional member):
“It is our expectation that Florida State University will not permit MESA to operate a boycott of Israel through a public institution, will not accept the academic boycott of Israel, and will not allow university funds to be paid indirectly or directly to any organization that endorses BDS. The same goes for any other institution that receives state funding.”
My radio appearance also was the subject of an article at Breitbart News, Exclusive — William Jacobson: BDS Boycotting Israeli Universities ‘Is Basically the Old Anti-Jewish Boycott’, which contains some quotes from the interview. Here is an excerpt, please click over to read the whole thing:
“As many countries in the Middle East — including Muslim Arab countries — are opening relations [and] exchanges with Israel, academics in the U.S. are moving in the opposite direction,” Jacobson said on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday with host Joel Pollak.He added, “[MESA is] fighting this dead-ender war. … These are people living in a really different world than current Middle East academics. Our U.S. universities are far more radical in many ways than the people who run some of the Arab Muslim countries.”Pollak noted that BDS’s push for an academic boycott of Israeli universities amounts to the organization cutting off its own ideological partners given the dominance of left-wing ideology across Israeli academia….Jacobson replied, “Because it’s not about the boycott. They actually don’t care if somebody goes to study in an Israeli university, just like they don’t care if a school dining hall or university serves Sabra hummus. They boycott that, too. The boycott is just a tactic. It’s a tactic that they used to try to delegitimize Israel.”“This is a generational project to demonize Israel, to ostracize Israel,” he continued, “in the hope that when 30 or 40 years of students have moved through academia — being told over and over again how evil Israel is — that those people will then be in power, and some of them are in power now in the Democratic Party.”The boycott “makes no sense,” Jacobson remarked. “They’re actually boycotting people who politically are, in many ways, aligned with them, but it’s a chance to demonize Israel. That’s the whole point of it. … This is also an outgrowth of the anti-Jewish boycotts in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine, and then the Arab League boycott of Jews. It wasn’t originally Israel. The Arab League boycott started before there was an Israel. It was a boycott of Jews, and then it was repackaged in social justice garb, and now they call it ‘Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions.’” …Jacobson emphasized, “It is an attempt to eliminate Israel and to delegitimize Israel in the United States because they recognize that that U.S. is Israel’s greatest ally, and frankly, it would be hard for Israel to survive if the U.S. were to abandon Israel, which is their project.”
Listen below (if player does not load, click here)
You can learn more about the anti-Jewish history of “pro-Palestinian” boycotts by viewing my 2016 presentation, The REAL history of the BDS movement.
[Featured Image: BDS protester, San Francisco, July 2014]
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