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BDS Tag

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 06, 2016 6 Comments
The controversy over the disinvitation of Shimon Dotan, an Israeli filmmaker and NYU professor whose film was to appear at a conference next year at Syracuse University, continues to reverberate and grow. The background is set forth in prior posts: Syracuse Symposium Place of Religion in Film w border

Posted by Mary Chastain on September 06, 2016 2 Comments
Former UCLA law student and Graduate Student Association (GSA) president Milan Chatterjee has left the school after constant harassment from the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and anti-Israel hate. All because he decided to remain NEUTRAL. The Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has led numerous smear campaigns against Chatterjee, even bringing in the ACLU and Palestine Legal (PL) to bring him down. Chatterjee has had enough, especially since UCLA administrators have done nothing to help him.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 05, 2016 5 Comments
One of the foundational claims of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is that Israel is a settler colonial project without legitimacy. It is a claim repeated in mindless rote fashion, as if repeating it ten times in every discussion is a litmus test for being truly anti-Zionist. The claim is that Jews have no historical claim to the land of Israel, that they are outsiders imposed upon the region by colonial powers upon the indigenous Arab (mostly Muslim) population. The point of this post is not to address all the lies and distortions build into the settler colonial claim, which is an inversion of history. In fact, the Muslim conquerors who replaced the indigenous Jewish and other populations are the settlers who colonized the area. Zionism is the liberation movement of the indigenous People of the region. That many centuries have passed since Arabs from Arabia and northern Africa settled the area through force does not change the fact that they are not the indigenous Peoples. But that's an argument for another time. This post is about how BDS itself has become a settler colonial ideology, which imposes itself on other peoples and other struggles, conquers, and subjugates the goals of others, particularly people of color, to the anti-Israel agenda.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 03, 2016 3 Comments
The academic boycott movement against Israel has achieved very little so far, though it has poisoned the campus atmosphere with its anti-academic freedom message. There is no university or college in that United State that I'm aware of even considering the academic boycott of Israel. The academic boycott resolutions at faculty organizations have had limited success, limited to the humanities and social sciences, and even there the only significant sized group to adopt the boycott was the American Studies Association in December 2013. The move to hijack faculty groups continues, and we can expect more boycott resolutions this annual meeting season in the fall and winter. The information spread against Israel by these faculty members is consistently false and misleading, and always one-sided. It is a critical part of the international effort to delegitimize and dehumanize Israeli Jews, and needs to be fought for that reason regardless of the relative lack of success. Lacking institutional success, the BDS war on campus has devolved into trench warfare at a very personal level.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 02, 2016 5 Comments
Shimon Dotan, a prominent Israeli filmmaker who also is on the faculty of New York University, was disinvited from a conference on "The Place of Religion in Film" to be held at Syracuse University next year. The conference is co-sponsored by the University of Nebraska, which extended an invitation to Dotan to show his film, "The Settlers," at the conference. The invitation was nixed in an email from Syracuse University Professor Gail Hamner. You can read the full email in our prior post, Israeli filmmaker disinvited at Syracuse U: “BDS faction on campus will make matters very unpleasant”. Here is the key wording for the email (emphasis added):
I now am embarrassed to share that my SU colleagues, on hearing about my attempt to secure your presentation, have warned me that the BDS faction on campus will make matters very unpleasant for you and for me if you come. In particular my film colleague in English who granted me affiliated faculty in the film and screen studies program and who supported my proposal to the Humanities Council for this conference told me point blank that if I have not myself seen your film and cannot myself vouch for it to the Council, I will lose credibility with a number of film and Women/Gender studies colleagues. Sadly, I have not had the chance to see your film and can only vouch for it through my friend and through published reviews.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 01, 2016 10 Comments
I was aware of this situation of faculty supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement getting an Israeli filmmaker removed from a campus conference at Syracuse University, but had to wait for The Atlantic to report on it. It's one of the most outrageous examples I have seen of how the BDS movement has poisoned academia. It also proves that BDS is lying when it says it only boycotts institutions not individuals. It also reflects the so-called "silent boycott" where Israelis face discrimination below the radar even when contrary to university policy. It involved Israeli filmmaker Shimon Dotan, who was going to screen his film "The Settlers," which had been shown at the Sundance Festival, at a joint U. Nebraska - Syracuse University conference next March, “The Place of Religion in Film” (pdf.) Dotan also teaches at NY University.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 31, 2016 20 Comments
Rasmea Odeh is the Palestinian terrorist group member convicted of the 1969 supermarket bombing in Jerusalem that killed two Hebrew University students, Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner. [caption id="attachment_130186" align="alignnone" width="600"][Graves of Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner, Jerusalem] [Graves of Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner Jerusalem][Photo by William Jacobson][/caption]Rasmea was released in a prisoner exchange in 1979 for an Israeli soldier captured in Lebanon. Rasmea eventually made her way to the U.S., where she lied on both her visa and naturalization applications, by falsely stating that she never was convicted of a crime or served time in prison. She told other lies as well, such as not disclosing the time she spent in Lebanon after release from Israeli prison, or that she was a military member of the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Rasmea became a U.S. citizen in 2004 on the basis of those lies.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 27, 2016 19 Comments
Marc Lamont Hill is a professor at Morehouse College, frequent cable news commentator, and host of his own shows on BET and VH1. Lamont Hill has voiced support for "revolutionary struggle" against Israel, which he recorded on a video for a Dream Defenders trip to express solidarity with Palestinians against Israel: Lamont Hill also is a supporter of the anti-Israel Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement, specifically the academic boycott of Israel. This spring Lamont Hill announced that he was voting in favor of a resolution at the American Anthropological Association to boycott Israeli academia under the expansive guidelines of the BDS movement. The boycott failed to pass by a very slim margin.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on August 26, 2016 1 Comment
A few days ago, we covered how in early August 2016 the Student Council at Leipzig University in Germany passed a resolution taking a strong stand against calls to boycott Israel, declaring them to be anti-Semitic, READ: German university student council resolution declaring BDS anti-Semitic:
The Student Council condemns anti-Semitic boycott campaigns such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions [BDS] and stands against the execution, participation in, and promotion of such campaigns and events at the University of Leipzig. Therefore, the Student Council will not support BDS Campaign or settings (events, exhibitions, demonstrations etc.) in which BDS Movement is involved. We consider international cooperation vital for the Academics. As a Student Council we stand against anti-Semitic measures such as disinviting of Israeli academicians from conferences in the context of the boycott campaign, and [council will] publicise whenever it happens — thereby contributing to the clarification of the matter and preventing such an occurrence.
The student council has produced a chronicle of its rejection of BDS (pdf.) which includes a citation to my translation of the resolution:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 25, 2016 2 Comments
In January 2016, we addressed the rising tide of aggressive and sometimes violent conduct by anti-Israel protesters who disrupt appearances by Israeli and pro-Israel speakers, Anti-Israel protest at Kings College turns violent:
For several years we have been documenting the increasingly aggressive tactics of anti-Israel protesters on campus. Recently, an Israeli professor’s guest lecture was disrupted at the University of Minnesota Law School, and the Palestine Solidarity Committee at UT-Austin (led by law student Mohammed Nabulsi) disrupted an Israeli Studies event....

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 21, 2016 23 Comments
The "Movement for Black Lives," a coalition of approximately 50 Black Lives Matter groups, recently issued a policy platform which raised issues such as mass incarceration, policing, and other issues of importance. Yet in that platform were included deranged libelous accusations against one and only one foreign country - Israel. That section of the platform was not surprising to anyone who has been paying attention to our coverage of how anti-Israel activists methodically and deliberately set out years ago to stoke racial tension against Israel by falsely accusing Israel of being responsible for local police shootings of blacks in the U.S. That effort went into overdrive during the Ferguson riots after the Michael Brown shooting in the summer of 2014. Since then, redirecting the U.S. Black Lives Matters movement to turn it as a weapon against Israel has been a top priority for anti-Israel activists, including those working under the banner of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Bassem Masri Ferguson Resistance is in our blood The platform language against Israel was a milestone in that effort, putting the Black Lives Matter movement in the position of accusing Israel of the Crimes Against Humanity of Genocide and Apartheid. But in order to do that, those terms had to be redefined in ways that are applied to no one else.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on August 21, 2016 3 Comments
Students at Germany’s leading academic institution, the University of Leipzig, have passed a resolution rejecting the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and calling it anti-Semitic. According to a copy of the resolution obtained by the Legal Insurrection from the Facebook pages of student groups, Leipzig University’s Student Council declared the BDS movement as being blatantly anti-Semitic, saying “even the basic aim of the BDS movement, the complete boycott of the State of Israel, fits seamlessly with the anti-Semitic campaigns of past centuries, and explicitly with that of the National Socialism; Nazi slogan “Don’t Buy From the Jews” is once again being expressed here.” [lines 109-112] The resolution passed by the Leipzig University’s Student Council earlier this month declares [author's translation]:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 16, 2016 3 Comments
I have been searching for evidence that supporters of the academic boycott of Israel will now launch an academic boycott of Turkey in light of the widespread purge of Turkish academia after the failed coup, destruction of civil society including the judiciary and media, suppression of Kurdish self-determination, and complicity in the Syrian civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands, among other offenses. But so far, no luck in my search, just some hot air by American academics expressing outrage: That purge now has passed 5,300 employees of Turkish higher ed, as reported by Inside Higher Ed:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 16, 2016 3 Comments
We have thoroughly documented how anti-Israel activists have been falsely blaming Israel for U.S. police shootings of blacks in order to stoke and exploit racial tensions, Exposed: Years-long effort to blame Israel for U.S. police shootings of blacks. That effort went into overdrive during the Ferguson riots over the shooting death of Michael Brown, Intifada Missouri – Anti-Israel activists may push Ferguson over the edge:
As much tension as there is, an underreported story is the active role of “pro-Palestinian” activists who have exploited the Ferguson riots and tension this summer and fall to push their anti-Israel agenda. That anti-Israeli agenda, which involves encouraging confrontation with police in solidarity with Palestinians, is helping provide the accelerant to an already volatile situation.
Ferguson Palestine contingent We were among the first to call attention to this development, which was largely ignored by the the Jewish and pro-Israel communities which support many of the issues raised by the Black Lives Matter movement. Ferguson was a turning point, as leading anti-Israel U.S. professor Robin Kelley recently acknowledged:

Posted by Occam's Razor on August 12, 2016 5 Comments
We wrote recently about the Black Lives matter platform statement (under the name MB4L: Movement for Black Lives) and, in particular the “Invest-Divest section,” which attacks Israel and accuses Israel of ‘genocide’ and being an ‘apartheid state’. As reported, the statement was condemned by the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) of Boston, and the Anti-Defamation League. Subsequent condemnations were issued by the American Jewish Committee, the Union for Reform Judaism, as well as the more left-wing J-Street (the liberal “pro-Israel, pro-Peace” lobby group), and T’ruah: the rabbinic call for human rights.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 10, 2016 5 Comments
While it is not new, there is an intensifying push in progressive circles, particularly among leftist Jews, to blame everything wrong in the Israeli-Arab conflict on the "occupation" of Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank) by Israel. If only Israel would withdraw, then all would be good, it is claimed. Never mind that there is no evidence the result would be anything other than another launching pad to attack as happened when Israel left Gaza in 2005; or that Muslims will accept any Jewish national entity, regardless of shape, to occupy any portion of what now is Israel. Such facts don't get in the way of the narrative, which assesses terrorism as a result of the "occupation" and plays fast and loose with concepts of international law. (See, The Legal Case for Israel  and The Legal Case for Israel’s ‘Settlements’, as to why the "occupation" is not illegal, nor are the settlements.) This inverted assessment of terrorism is on full display in an Op-Ed in The Providence Journal by Nina Tannenwald, Director of the International Relations Program, and Senior Lecturer in Political Science, at The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University .
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