Image 01 Image 03
Sign In or RegisterLogout

BDS Tag

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 08, 2016 2 Comments
WAJ Intro: The post below is by Prof. Cary Nelson, a leading scholar and expert on issues of academic freedom and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. He was co-Editor of The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel (2014)(from the cover of which the Featured Image was taken) and was Editor of Dreams Deferred: A Concise Guide to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Movement to Boycott Israel (2016). Prof. Nelson's very important research report addresses the lack of academic freedom at Palestinian universities. That subject has been of interest to me for some time, but has not been well documented. There are few if any investigative groups who can operate and write freely in areas controlled by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, including universities. Reporting critical of the regimes is suppressed violently.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 07, 2016 7 Comments
Omar Barghouti is the co-founder of the BDS movement. He lives in Israel because he married an Israeli woman and is a Ph.D. student at Tel Aviv University. [*] Yet he supports the academic boycott of Israel. Contrary to Barghouti's narrative, the BDS movement was founded at the anti-Semitic 2001 Durban Conference, not by a gathering of Palestinian civil society groups in 2005. The 2005 boycott call, co-founded by Barghouti, was simply window dressing designed to trick naive Western liberals into thinking BDS is about social justice and equal rights. In fact, BDS is about destroying Israel and, in their minds, reclaiming not just the territory re-captured by Israel in 1967, but all of Israel. BDS in its literature, again to fool naive liberals, plays coy with what it means when it says it wants an end to Israeli occupation of "Palestinian lands." That allows groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and the U.S. Campaign to End to Israeli Occupation to claim that BDS only is about liberating the post-1967 territories. But that vagueness also allows BDS to appeal to those who do not accept the existence of Israel within any border.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 05, 2016 7 Comments
The purge of Turkish academia has been extensive, as we documented in several posts since the July 15, 2016 failed coup. That purge met with some letters of criticism from American academic groups, but no calls for boycotts of Turkish academia of the sort that are pushed aggressively against Israel. We noted that hypocrisy previously: If you thought that Erdogan was done with the purge, you would be wrong. It continued this week, Turkey detains another 15 academics over use of ‘suspected’ mobile app:

Posted by Miriam Elman on October 05, 2016 0 Comments
Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) is a non-Jewish organization that provides cover to the anti-Israel boycott movement (BDS) by legitimizing and mainstreaming its assault on Jewish identity. As we’ve noted in prior posts (see here and here), JVP activists operate in multiple arenas to exploit Jewish culture and traditions, putting them into service for a vehemently anti-Israel and anti-Zionist propaganda campaign. Various Jewish celebrations and commemorative life-cycle events are constantly being manipulated for Israel-bashing and pro-boycott messaging. Last April, this identity theft of Jewish heritage was particularly visible during Passover, when JVP promoted BDS in a newly released Haggadah and staged ‘liberation seders’, appropriating the holiday’s rituals and texts for an anti-Israel narrative. Now, JVP is usurping the Jewish High Holidays.

Posted by Miriam Elman on October 04, 2016 3 Comments
Last month, Syracuse University (SU) made headlines when a faculty member in the Religious Studies Department dis-invited an award-winning Israeli NYU Professor and filmmaker from a campus event out of fear of offending the political sensibilities of her BDS-supporting colleagues (see our prior posts covering the story). At the time, pro-BDS faculty signed a petition (subsequently posted onto Facebook) denying that any pressure to disinvite the filmmaker had existed and expressing their commitment to free speech and academic freedom. But now many of these same professors, keen on moving the campus in a BDS direction, are making demands that call into question this articulated devotion to a campus community open to free expression.

Posted by Occam's Razor on October 01, 2016 1 Comment
We wrote recently how BDS is a settler-colonial ideology, in that it invades, conquers, and subjugates other movements to advance anti-Israel actvism. There are few instances where this is more apparent than Dream Defenders, one of the key groups in the Black Lives Matter movement. Dream Defenders was initially formed to protest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws in Florida, in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting. Yet, following the pattern of many organizations who organize under the ideology of 'intersectionality', Dream Defenders has transformed itself from an organization fighting for a change in the criminal laws of the state of Florida, into one which is identified with the bizarre attempt to link Black Lives Matter to the Palestinian cause. The struggle to protect young black men in Florida and elsewhere in the U.S. from allegedly unlawful police violence apparently also involves 'liberating' Palestine, i.e. the destruction of the state of Israel, and bizarre crushes on terrorist organizations like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. How? Why? What is the connection? Everything's connected, say advocates of intersectionality.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 01, 2016 32 Comments
You may remember Joy Karega, the Oberlin College Social Justice Writing professor (yes, there is such a position) who, when not helping organize anti-Israel BDS events with Students for a Free Palestine, posted bizarre Jewish conspiracy theories on Facebook. Like this image of how the Rothschild family controls the world: Karega Rotshchild Image Karega also pushed other conspiracy theories, such as that the attacks on a Paris theater and Charlie Hebdo were Israeli false flag operations to distract attention from the Palestinian demands, and that Israel was behind ISIS:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 29, 2016 1 Comment
Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY, has had an abysmal few years when it comes to anti-Israel and sometimes antisemitic activity. You can scroll through our Vassar Tag for dozens of posts. Here are a few of those posts that provide an overview: When I appeared on campus in 2014 to challenge pro-BDS faculty to a debate, one of those faculty tried to organize a boycott of me!

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 28, 2016 3 Comments
I reported the other day how Israeli anti-Israel activist and BDS supporter Miko Peled was disinvited by a pro-Palestinian group at Princeton and denounced by Jewish Voice for Peace after a tweet characterizing Jews as having a "reputation 4being sleazy thieves," Jewish Voice for Peace disavows BDS activist Miko Peled: “No place 4 antisemitism in our movement”. https://twitter.com/mikopeled/status/776147480299835392

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 24, 2016 6 Comments
We have written dozens of times about Jewish Voice for Peace, which is a leader of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. As Prof. Miriam Elman has thoroughly documented, JVP uses the "Jewish" in its name (even thought it's not a Jewish group) to lend cover to all manner of anti-Israel groups, Jewish Voice for Peace – “Jew Washing” the anti-Israel movement. Local branches of JVP, such as the NYC branch that disrupted a City Council commemoration of the Liberation of Auschwitz and the Ithaca (NY) branch that conducted an anti-Israel event for public school third graders, often are even more radical than the national JVP. Because BDS is a Settler Colonial Ideology which seeks alliances and to co-opt other movements through the concept of intersectionality, BDS of necessity singles out the Jewish Israeli as uniquely evil and the source of problems in the world. The distinction between Israelis and Jews quickly evaporates, as we witness in Europe where anti-Israel protests frequently use blatantly anti-Semitic rhetoric and where Jews are attacked on the street in the name of anti-Zionism. So, it is no surprise that while groups like JVP disavow anti-Semitism, BDS attracts both open Jew haters and those who traffic in negative Jewish stereotypes in the anti-Zionist cause.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 23, 2016 20 Comments
On Friday morning, September 18, 2015, the third grade classes at the Beverly J. Martin School in Ithaca, NY, heard a presentation on “human rights” by Palestinian activist Bassem Tamimi and local anti-Israel activists, including Ariel Gold of the local chapter of the anti-Israel Jewish Voice for Peace (she also is a full time employee of Code Pink), and Mary Grady Flores. The event was arranged through third grade teacher Brooke Burnett, a friend of Gold and Flores. Bassem Tamimi Beverly Martin School Ariel Gold redacted w border

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 20, 2016 10 Comments
We have followed the problems at Oberlin College for years. Rather than revisiting everything, please scroll through our Oberlin Tag. The most recent incident involved Professor Joy Karega, who posted blatantly anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on Facebook, including linking the Rothschild family to a global conspiracy. Karega Rotshchild Image Karega also accused Israel of attacking Charlie Hebdo as part of a false flag operation and being the equivalent of ISIS.

Posted by Miriam Elman on September 20, 2016 3 Comments
Yesterday the University of California at Berkeley rescinded its suspension of a course, Ethnic Studies 198: Palestine: A Colonial Settler Analysis—a vehemently anti-Israel, one-credit, once-a-week, student-led course. The entire purpose of the course appears to be political advocacy and organizing, in violation of university policy for an academic class. California Regents Policy 2301 provides:
“The Regents…are responsible to ensure that public confidence in the University is justified. And they are responsible to see that the University remain aloof from politics and never function as an instrument for the advance of partisan interest. Misuse of the classroom by, for example, allowing it to be used for political indoctrination…constitutes misuse of the University as an institution”.
The course was so obviously political advocacy that the course poster [see Featured Image and below] used the completely discredited BDS propaganda map which was so false and misleading that MNSBC apologized for once using it during a news segment.
Accessibility by WAH