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BDS Tag

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 06, 2016 4 Comments
On September 17, 2016, I detailed how anti-Israel groups were organizing to exploit a dispute between the Standing Rock Sioux and an oil company seeking to build a disputed pipeline, BDS Settler Colonial activists exploit Standing Rock Sioux pipeline dispute. In that post, I provided links and images to the efforts to make the Palestinian cause the centerpiece of the Standing Rock protests. It was a classic hijacking of another cause in which expressions "solidarity" are the means to subjugate another cause to the anti-Israel effort. It's part of a pattern I have explored before, BDS is a Settler Colonial Ideology. As I documented, the expressions of solidarity "From Standing Rock to Palestine" put "Palestine" at the center. When the anti-Israel cause comes to town, often in the form of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, it all about them.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 01, 2016 2 Comments
So this is interesting. Students for Justice in Palestine and its related groups are responsible for much if not most of the anti-Israel activity on campuses. We have documented dozens of incidents of intimidation and violence, scroll through our SJP Tag. For additional background, see reports by The Tower Magazine, The ADL, NGO Monitor and AMCHA Initiative. This is one of the milder shout-downs and stage takeovers by SJP:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 31, 2016 9 Comments
We recently wrote about Miko Peled after Jewish Voice for Peace accused him of posting an antisemitic tweet, Jewish Voice for Peace disavows BDS activist Miko Peled: “No place 4 antisemitism in our movement”: https://twitter.com/mikopeled/status/776147480299835392 Peled denied that the tweet was antisemitic, as detailed in the prior post. But the fact that an anti-Israel group like JVP would make this accusation against Peled and would support the cancellation of his speech at Princeton was pretty remarkable.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 29, 2016 7 Comments
Saree Makdisi, professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA, has endorsed and is a vocal advocate for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel, as demanded by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The American Association of University Professors considers systematic academic boycotts, such as the BDS academic boycott of Israel, to be a violation of academic freedom and a threat to the free exchange of ideas necessary for academic and scientific progress. Over 250 university presidents and large university associations have condemned the BDS academic boycott for these reasons. Which means Makdisi wants to violate the academic freedom not only of Israelis, but of those who want to deal with Israelis.  If the academic boycott Makdisi supports succeeded, breakthrough cancer research conducted by and with Israeli universities would have to be boycotted.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 28, 2016 3 Comments
You may recall Hen Mazzig, an Israeli who worked on campuses in the Pacific Northwest several years ago. The hate he experienced from American BDS activists was almost beyond belief,  Israeli soldier shocked to see ugly side of U.S. campus life Hen was scheduled yesterday to speak at University College London. I knew trouble was waiting when Hen send out this tweet before his scheduled speaking appearance:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 21, 2016 3 Comments
One of the foundational myths of the anti-Israel movement, including the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, is that Muslim Arabs are the indigenous people of all of what now is Israel and Judea/Samaria (the "West Bank"). From that foundational myth comes such vile absurdities as UNESCO -- at the instigation of the Palestinian Authority -- excising the Jewish connection to the Temple Mount, which predates Islam itself as well as the Arab conquest of the region. That foundational myth also allows BDS activists misleadingly to claim solidarity with truly indigenous people, such as native peoples in North America, and to hijack indigenous movements and repurpose them for the fight to deny Jews a homeland in the homeland of the Jewish people. An article recently in the Middle East Quarterly examined historical first hand accounts of Arab immigration and migration, Were the Arabs Indigenous to Mandatory Palestine?

Posted by Joel Griffith on October 19, 2016 1 Comment
The U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, recently rebranded as the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian rights, is one of the most virulently anti-Israel activist groups. Legal Insurrection recently covered how the US Campaign’s plan to hold a seminar on Capitol Hill was canceled when it became known just how extremist it was, Report: Pro-BDS event on Capitol Hill canceled after nature of group exposed. Last weekend I attended the U.S. Campaign's Annual Conference. us-campaign-annual-conference-2016-poster

Posted by Joel Griffith on October 16, 2016 3 Comments
The U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation is one of the most virulently anti-Israel activist groups. Legal Insurrection recently covered how the US Campaign's plan to hold a seminar on Capitol Hill was canceled when it became known just how extremist it was, Report: Pro-BDS event on Capitol Hill canceled after nature of group exposed. Perhaps to escape its past, U.S. Campaign is rebranding itself and renaming itself as the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights. This weekend the U.S. Campaign held its Annual Conference in Northern Virginia, attended by about 200 anti-Israel activists. Panelists and experts instructed activists within churches, academia, and community organizing on how to leverage their influence against Israel. I attended the annual meeting. In this first report, I will focus on how plans were unveiled by Kairos USA, an anti-Israel church group, to ramp up the efforts to turn churches against Israel by leveraging concerns about Black Lives Matter within Black Churches, and the rollout of a new crowdsourcing and organizing portal, Palestine Portal.

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.
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