Image 01 Image 03

BDS Tag

Search for Vassar College in Legal Insurrection's archives, and you'll find scores of posts documenting Vassar students' efforts to shut down speech with which they disagree. This is a longstanding problem on today's college campuses, and it is perhaps most commonly manifested in attacks on Israeli, pro-Israel, and/or Jewish speakers. Vassar College Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has a particularly sordid history, including posting of an anti-Jewish and anti-American Nazi cartoon, glorifying terrorists, and picketing a course that involved travel to Israel.

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled that goods produced outside Israel's pre-1967 lines must be labeled as such, and may not be marketed as Israeli products. The judgment will impact food products imported into Europe from East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, Judea, and Samaria, which the European Union does not recognize as Israeli territory. "Foodstuffs originating in the territories occupied by the State of Israel must bear the indication of their territory of origin, accompanied, where those foodstuffs come from an Israeli settlement within that territory, by the indication of that provenance," the top EU court declared on Tuesday morning.

Ending an 18-months legal battle, Israel’s Supreme Court decided last Tuesday to uphold the Interior Ministry’s refusal to renew the work visa of Omar Shakir, who had first entered the country as “Israel and Palestine Country Director” of Human Rights Watch (HRW) in February 2017. The court reportedly ruled that Shakir must now leave Israel within 20 days. As I have previously documented in considerable detail, both Shakir and his employer HRW have a long record of anti-Israel activism. (See here and here).

In October 2019, CodePink took another in a long line of trips to the Islamic Republic of Iran on the premise of promoting peace. The latest trip, even more so than the prior trips, amounted to a whitewash of Iranian human rights violations, particularly towards women. The CodePink group was led by National Co-Director Ariel Gold, and included several of her Ithaca (NY) anti-Israel activist friends, including Beth Harris and Amber Gilewski. (In the featured image, these three are circled, from left to right, Harris, Gold and Gilewski.)

The Czech parliament passed a resolution last Tuesday condemning the Israel boycott movement as antisemitic. The non-binding resolution calling on the government to stop funding to groups promoting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against the Jewish State, was adopted with overwhelming support from the deputies in the country's Lower House, receiving 120 votes in favor and 20 against.

In early September 2019, Legal Insurrection published our half of a joint-investigation of anti-Israel groups with The Washington Free Beacon. Our research—reported in Investigation: Anti- ICE “Never Again Action” Not The Spontaneous Grassroots Group It Claims To Be—showed that the organization Never Again Action, a group claiming that Immigration and Customs Enforcement operates Nazi-esque "concentration camps" and must thus be "shut down", is not the immigration-focused coalition it purports to be.

Linda Sarsour was the keynote speaker on March 31, 2019, in Hillsborough, NC at an event sponsored by Orange County’s Department of Human Rights & Relations and The Orange County Human Relations Commission (HRC) of NC. Sarsour is an American-Palestinian activist who has said “nothing is creepier than Zionism” and has advised Muslims not to “humanize” Israelis.

Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs has released a report exposing the antisemitic agenda being the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS). The anti-Israel boycott campaign now direct "classic antisemitic tropes and motifs once directed at “the Jew” at “the Jew among the nations,” the State of Israel," the reported said. Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan released the report titled Behind The Mask: The Anti-Semitic Nature of BDS Exposed at the European Parliament building in Brussels. The minister urged the European Union and Western governments to stop funding organizations promoting the antisemitic BDS movement.

Sunday, Rep. Ilhan Omar joined Face the Nation where she used the platform to promote the boycott, divest, and sanction movement (BDS) against Israel, though she denies supporting the movement while running for office.

Every now and then Bill Maher hits a left-wing dogma squarely on the head and it's particularly persuasive coming from someone who is on the left. We've covered several such occasions, even if most of the time we disagree with Maher. Maher just did it again with regard to the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, setting off a fury of recrimination from Rep. Rashida Tlaib and other anti-Israel activists.

The Palestinian grandmother of Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib wished "ruin" on President Donald Trump in an ongoing controversy over Michigan lawmaker's proposed visit to Israel. "May God ruin him," Tlaib's grandmother was quoted saying by news agency Reuters.

Yesterday, Israel denied visas for Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, after pressure from Trump, under a law permitting the government to bar entry to advocates of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The decision kicked off a firestorm, including false accusations by former Democrat Vice Presidential candidate and current Senator Tim Kaine that Israel had imposed a "Muslim ban".

Anti-Israel representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, both of whom support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement (though they denied that while running for office), are planning a trip to Israel. BDS is widely recognized as anti-Semitic and subterfuge for the destruction of Israel. Both also credibly have been accused of making anti-Semitic statements themselves.

The anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement insists it is merely "pro-Palestinian" and not anti-Semitic. There is a mountain of evidence otherwise, but sometimes there is a clarifying moment as to how calls to boycott Israel have become mainstreamed. Such a moment came on Twitter regarding India's recent moves in Kashmir, which we covered in India Revokes Special Status for Muslim-Majority Kashmir, May Open Up Region to Hindu Immigration.

Legal Insurrection has long tracked and opposed the spread of anti-Israel curricula at the university level, and has documented efforts to push that political activism into high school and elementary schools. Our research and litigation exposing anti-Israel activism in a third-grade class in Ithaca received national attention, VIDEO: Activists manipulate third-graders into hating Israel. One of the most audacious anti-Israel propaganda efforts is taking place right now in California, through the proposed California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC). As described below, Legal Insurrection joins over 80 groups in opposing ESMC and urging California educational authorities to revise the curriculum to remove clear politicization designed to imbue young students with hatred of Israel.

On April 16, 2018, the Durham North Carolina City Council passed the “Israel Resolution” making Durham the first city in the United States to boycott police training specifically with Israel. This took place even though Durham conducted no police training with Israel, and had no plans to do so. It was purely an anti-Israel symbolic act designed to demonize Israel, as part of a broader racist, anti-Semitic campaign under the banner of "Deadly Exchange" to falsely blame Israel for policing problems, including shootings, in minority communities in the United States.

Dr. Einat Wilf writes and lecture extensively on Zionism and anti-Semitism. A point we've made here repeatedly, particularly as to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, is that while in theory there is a difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, in the real world they are almost always the same.