The activists and supporters of anti-Israel boycott movement, or BDS, are increasingly resorting to bullying and violence against pro-Israel groups and speakers. Last week, a mob of BDS agitators disrupted a pro-Israel event and attacked students and faculty at a university in the Brazilian city of Manaus.
The militants belonging of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement were enraged over a speech about Israel-Brazil cooperation by Andre Lajst, director of the Brazilian chapter of the StandWithUs, an Israel advocacy group.
Video clips on Twitter show the anti-Israel mob pushing and hitting students attending the event. A university employee suffered a nose injury while trying to protect his daughter. The Jewish Journal reported Wednesday that “the advisor to the university’s rector left the scene with a broken nose after attempting to safeguard her daughter. Several students entering the lecture were also harassed, and police officers escorted Lajst into and out of the venue.”
This is not an isolated incident. The terrorism-linked BDS campaign is increasingly showing its ugly violent face on college campuses across the world. In February, BDS activists in Spain attacked the Israeli Ambassador and prevented her from speaking at Madrid University. Video footage of the incident showed pro-BDS activists lunging at armed bodyguards protecting Ambassador Rodica Radian-Gordon, Israel’s first female envoy to Spain. The “ambassador was taken to a safe room by Israeli and local security guards, and one even pulled out his weapon and pointed it at the activists,” the Israeli broadcaster Arutz Sheva reported.
The Times of Israel reported Wednesday:
Pro-Palestinian protesters injured a university employee while demonstrating against a lecture speaker who heads the Brazilian chapter of a pro-Israel advocacy group.
Andre Lajst, the director of StandWithUs Brazil, was speaking about ways that Israeli technologies could help develop the Amazon region at the Federal University of Amazonas in Manaus on Thursday when protesters clashed with security and other university employees outside the lecture auditorium.
According to news reports, the advisor to the university’s rector left the scene with a broken nose after attempting to safeguard her daughter. Several students entering the lecture were also harassed, and police officers escorted Lajst into and out of the venue. One protester was reportedly arrested for pushing a police officer but later released.
“The tight security was commensurate with the widespread slander and slurs about me and about Israel,” Lajst later wrote in a social media post. “The extremism of a minority does not represent the university and the students.”
Protesters called Lajst, a Brazilian-born Jew who served in the Israeli Air Force from 2011-2013, a “defender of Israel’s apartheid regime.” The Arab-Palestinian Federation of Brazil had written before the event that “the university cannot be a stage to defend an apartheid regime.”
Lajst, a grandson of Polish Holocaust survivors, said the university’s Central Student Directory also called him a “Nazi” on their website. “There is no worse offense for me,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Here’s another raw clip showing BDS attackers clashing with students:
Unable to defend their position, the BDS campaigners on college campuses are increasingly turning to violence and disrupting events. A 2023 study found that the BDS was targeting Jewish students and eroding free speech in U.S. academic institutions.
The BDS “movement threatens not only Jewish students and scholars but also the political neutrality of higher education, creating an environment of academic politicization to the detriment of academic freedom, freedom of speech, and constructive civil discourse,” the study published by the New York-based National Association of Scholars (NAS) said.
Several Israeli studies have exposed linked between the BDS movement and Palestinian terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The BDS not only shares ideological aims of Palestinian terror outfits but maintains operational links with them, studies show.
(Disclaimer: the author was named “StandWithUs Social Media Ambassador” in 2016 for his Israel advocacy work as the founder of the “Indians For Israel” initiative)
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