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BDS Tag

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 13, 2017 9 Comments
On August 12, 2017, a farewell gala event honoring Rasmea Odeh was held in Chicago by a coalition of anti-Israel groups, and attended by several hundred people. This coming Thursday, August 17, 2017, Rasmea will be sentenced in federal court in Detroit after a guilty plea to immigration fraud. By her plea agreement, Rasmea will be deported and will lose her U.S. citizenship, but will not serve any further jail time.

Posted by Miriam Elman on August 10, 2017 4 Comments
Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Israel organization which is a leading player in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, has released an “updated” video for its “Deadly Exchange” campaign. We wrote about JVP’s “Deadly Exchange” initiative in a prior post, With “Deadly Exchange” Campaign, Jewish Voice for Peace moves from enabling to promoting antisemitism. As we highlighted, the campaign blames Israel and major Jewish American organizations for policing problems in minority communities, including police shootings. JVP thus sets up Jews as part of and the driving force behind a white police power structure oppressing non-whites. As demonstrated in the prior post, those accusations are false, but pernicious. JVP holds Jews out as the cause of unrelated problems, and does so in terms meant to exploit and incite antisemitism and racial hatred and resentment.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on August 07, 2017 1 Comment
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.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 05, 2017 8 Comments
I have frequently pointed out that the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions (BDS) movement not only is deeply rooted in historical anti-Semitic movements and boycotts, but also shares common ideals and membership with anti-American movements. Much as Iranian Islamists consider Israel the Little Satan and the United States the Great Satan, so too leftist and Islamist BDS supporters share a hatred of Israel and the United States. Israel is hated not just because it is Jewish, but also because it is viewed as an outpost of American-led oppression of non-whites, colonialism and imperialism. Under the now-fashionable doctrine of intersectionality, Israel is held out as the unique connecting force among capitalist and American-imperialist evils, much as the Jew has been held out in history through anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 03, 2017 3 Comments
Hen Mazzig is an Israeli who makes frequent appearances abroad to promote the truth about Israel. I first learned of Hen when he wrote about his experiences with the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in the U.S.:
As a young Israeli who had just completed five years of service in the IDF, I looked forward to my new job educating people in the Pacific Northwest about Israel. I was shocked, however, by the anti-Israel bigotry and hostility I encountered, especially in the greater Seattle area, Oregon, and Berkeley. I had been very liberal, a member of the leftist Zionist party, Meretz, but the anti-Semitism and hatred for Israel that I have seen in the U.S. has changed my outlook personally and politically….

Posted by Miriam Elman on July 23, 2017 7 Comments
Anti-Israel propaganda is common on America’s college and university campuses. But as we’ve highlighted in a number of recent posts, this biased messaging appears to be filtering down into the U.S. public school system. In 2015, we documented an effort to indoctrinate children in an Ithaca, NY 3rd grade classroom into becoming “freedom fighters for Palestine”. Then last February we reported how the NY State Education Department and the Board of Regents became embroiled in a controversy over the insertion of an offensive anti-Israel cartoon into a global studies Regents exam administered to 10th graders. These cases are important to document and record because they provide accumulating evidence of the expansion of the anti-Israel and BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement’s propaganda campaign. Now a new study by CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) offers another sobering example of biased anti-Israel curricular materials working their way out of higher education and down the chain into several U.S. public schools.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on July 16, 2017 3 Comments
There is an increasing recognition that most of the anti-Zionist movement, including Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), is the new format for centuries-old anti-Semitism. The reason anti-Zionists, with few exceptions, seek the destruction of Israel and deny the Jews the right to a homeland in their historic homeland, is because of Israel's Jewish identity. As we have posted before, historian Benny Morris documents how the Arab war against Israel's independence was viewed in the Arab world as a religious holy Jihad:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on July 03, 2017 7 Comments
On June 24, 2017, Jews who carried a Jewish LGBT Pride flag with a Star of David on it at the "Dyke March Chicago" were singled out by organizers and kicked out of the event, which was held on public property. The actions were anti-Semitic despite claims by the organizers they were only "anti-Zionist," as explained in our post, Psychosis-laced anti-Semitism: Anti-Israel LGBT activists ban Star of David from Chicago parade:
Claims of anti-Semitism are being made over actions yesterday by organizers of a “Dyke March” in Chicago to remove certain Jewish participants from the event because they carried a Jewish LGBT Pride Flag that had a Star of David in the Middle of a rainbow flag. The flag was alleged to be “triggering” to “pro-Palestinian” participants....

Posted by Miriam Elman on July 02, 2017 31 Comments
For a century Palestinians have been denying and denigrating the Jewish people’s attachment to the Land of Israel even as they’ve been doubling-down on their own fictitious claims to ‘Palestine’ in antiquity and to family lineages in the Holy Land that predate that of the ancient Hebrews. A former adjunct lecturer of Jewish history at Haifa University, now the creative director at a Tel Aviv advertising agency, decided to poke fun at this absurd situation in which Palestinians reject the historical accuracy of a Hebrew/Jewish presence in the land while simultaneously concocting an essentially fraudulent narrative of their own history. The literary product is History of the Palestinian People: From Ancient Times to the Modern Era.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on July 01, 2017 2 Comments
The anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is becoming increasingly violent. We have seen this in the U.S. through frequent physical disruptions of Israel-related events. Indeed, as I have documented many times, disruption of Israel-related events was a precursor to the more general campus intolerance we are seeing at places such as Berkeley, Middlebury, and universities in Britain and Ireland. In my post, With campus shout downs, first they came for the Jews and Israel, I provide many examples of increasing BDS violence and physical intimidation that accompanies these shout downs. Disrupting Israel-related events is not limited to the U.S. and Britain. At Humboldt University in Berlin, a criminal complaint has been filed after an aggressive disruption.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on June 22, 2017 6 Comments
Germany’s Jewish community has criticised the government and lawmakers for failing to act against the rising antisemitism in the country. The Head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, slammed the German politicians over 'lack of interest' when it comes to combatting the rising antisemitism within the country. The Central Council of Jews in Germany is the umbrella organization of Jewish communities in the country. The statements coincides with the recent parliamentary debate centred on a detailed report on antisemitism by a group of independent experts tabled in the German Bundestag. The 311-page report by the 'Independent Expert Group on Anti-Semitism' deals with -- to quote a German news network -- the "current anti-Jewish sentiment in Germany." The German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported the recent parliamentary debate saying, “One by one, politicians from all of Germany's major parties took to the podium to condemn anti-Semitism and stress how seriously they took the problem”. Deutsche Welle revealingly called the parliamentary debate on Antisemitism a “ritualized speech-making.” The Bundestag debate ended with Merkel's government deciding to put the report on the back burner.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on June 14, 2017 2 Comments
In a severe blow to the anti-Israel academic boycott movement, the 18,000 member Modern Language Association has passed a Resolution explicitly rejecting the academic boycott of Israel. The academic boycott of Israel had been termed a grave threat to the academic freedom of everyone and the free exchange of ideas by over 250 university presidents and numerous prominent university organizations. Nonetheless, the academic boycott, which is part of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, is a focal point of anti-Israel activist professors and graduate students. We have highlighted this MLA Resolution in prior votes, including a recent post, Tables turned: Modern Language Association in midst of voting on Anti-BDS Resolution:

Posted by Miriam Elman on May 30, 2017 4 Comments
We’ve written before about Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada in connection to BDS and virulently anti-Israel activism crossing over into flagrant antisemitism and creating a toxic environment for Jews, Anti-Israel protest disrupts vote to support Holocaust Education Week at Ryerson U. In that earlier post we highlighted how several groups of Ryerson students, members of Students for Justice in Palestine and the Muslim Students Association, reportedly staged an “unofficial” walk-out so that a student government vote on a resolution to commemorate Holocaust Education Week would be deprived of a quorum. Now, a new disturbing story has surfaced at Ryerson. But this time it involves anti-Israel, pro-BDS faculty there allegedly behaving badly toward a Jewish undergraduate student.

Posted by Occam's Razor on May 26, 2017 5 Comments
We've written extensively of the disturbing phenomenon of anti-Israel activists taking over professional and academic associations (even associations in memory of holocaust victims), and diverting them for their own radical political agendas. This has been especially pronounced in the long battle that seems to dominate large portions of the social sciences and humanities academy: we refer of course to the apparently serious question of whether the academy should be devoted to the furtherance of knowledge and wisdom...or whether it should be devoted to fighting the State of Israel.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on May 23, 2017 5 Comments
We previously wrote about the firestorm that erupted over the appointment of Professor N. Bruce Duthu to be Dean of the Faculty at Dartmouth College, New Dartmouth Dean of Faculty endorsed academic boycott of Israel, here’s what that entails. In that post, I questioned how Duthu could fulfill the duties of the position of Dean of Faculty in light of the sweeping nature of the academic boycott guidelines:

Posted by Occam's Razor on May 18, 2017 3 Comments
We have previously covered the never-ending saga at the anti-Israel obsession of some members of Modern Language Association (MLA). Those members have engaged in a years-long attempt to get MLA, the largest academic society in the humanities, to boycott Israel and to officially join the “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” (BDS) movement. After the radicals’ massive defeat at the MLA business meeting at the annual convention in Philadelphia in January, they are on the defensive: not only was their resolution to boycott Israel (2017-2) defeated by the Delegate Assembly, but a counter-resolution (2017-1), calling on MLA to reject academic boycott, was approved and placed before the general membership.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on May 15, 2017 14 Comments
Rasmea Odeh recently pleaded guilty to immigration fraud, for failing to disclose on her immigration applications her 1970 conviction and imprisonment in Israel for a 1969 supermarket bombing that killed two Hebrew University students, Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner. Rasmea concocted a defense that she falsely answered the questions because she was suffering from PTSD, which made her “filter” the plain wording. At multiple levels that defense was as big a lie as her lies on her immigration forms, and in the plea agreement she admitted her false statements were not the result of PTSD or any other mental condition. But if you need a refresher on the case, and Rasmea’s other nonsense claims, see our coverage of the guilty plea, Rasmea Odeh pleads guilty to immigration fraud, and follow up post, VIDEO: Terror victim’s brother says Rasmea Odeh supporters “have to eat their words”. Rasmea has been treated as a hero by anti-Israel groups, including Jewish Voice for Peace and various chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).
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