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BDS Tag

As regular readers doubtlessly know, the 2018 midterm elections presented Americans with a new phenomenon in the form of the congressional "Squad": several avowedly anti-Israel (and often Islamist-allied) first-term U.S. Representatives. Now, as the smoke from #Election2020 begins to dissipate, it seems that (spoiler alert) The Squad's congressional anti-Zionist cabal is about to get a little bigger.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—darling of the far-left and heroine of the anti-Israel lobby—recently canceled an appearance sponsored by far left 'pro-Israel' groups, and reportedly is avoiding meeting with mainstream Jewish groups. In this post, I go over the background of how we got here.

Amid growing concern over antisemitic violence on German streets and anti-Israel activism on the country's campuses, the U.S.-based policy research institute Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) has published a detailed report looking at the activities of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in Germany. 

We have seen this movie before. Whenever there is a high-profile death of a Black person in the U.S. at the hands of local police, anti-Israel activists try to hijack the anger and redirect it at Israel. The death of George Floyd in the custody of Minneapolis police is another example. We demonstrate below the background of the incitement and how it predictably has resulted in the targeting of synagogues and Jewish businesses.

Ilana Feldman, a professor of anthropology at George Washington University (GWU), recently was appointed Interim Dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs at GWU. There was an immediate firestorm of controversy, since Feldman is a supporter of and longtime activist leader of the academic boycott of Israel, which is part of the larger Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign.

In April 2020, we published an in-depth investigation: How Anti-Israel Activists Are Hijacking The Coronavirus Crisis And Turning It Against Israel. Our research demonstrated how proponents of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel have exploited the COVID-19 pandemic: namely, blaming the Jewish state and its supporters for as many aspects of the outbreak as possible. Now, we've taken a closer look at how international Arab, Muslim, and especially Palestinian sources have rhetorically weaponized the virus against Israel. And it's clear that the BDS campaign's appropriation of COVID-19 is only part of a larger effort to fold the pandemic into pre-existing anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish ideology.

A (now former) Gaza-based "consultant" with the 'human rights' behemoth Amnesty International has suddenly found herself in hot water after she allegedly sold out out fellow Palestinians in Gaza to the terrorist group Hamas. Self-styled "journalist" Hind Khoudary took to Facebook last week to alert three Hamas officials that a group of her fellow Gazans had had held an online chat with Israelis about the coronavirus crisis.

We have written a lot about how anti-Israel activists routinely hijack causes, events, and crises unrelated to Israel, using "intersectional" theory to turn those issues against the Jewish state. That phenomenon is playing out again with the coronavirus pandemic, providing the 'usual suspects' with yet another issue to exploit.

From March 1-3, 2020, I attended the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Annual Policy Conference in Washington, D.C. on a press pass. As part of my coverage of the conference, I spent nearly four hours interviewing, taping, and photographing anti-Israel protesters who had gathered outside the venue. Though their chants of "Judaism, yes! Zionism, no!" might have been meant to convey a rejection of anti-Semitism, the protesters' statements and behavior both during and after the rally shows how deeply and often anti-Jewish hatred informs anti-Israel worldviews.