The BDS movement presents itself as the voice of the people. Its founding myth, which it repeats again and again, is about how it was launched in response to a call from Palestinian NGOs in 2005. Actually, it’s a product of the noxious 2001 Durban Conference, where Israel was branded a racist state that deserved to be isolated from the rest of the world.
In the effort to present itself as a grassroots movement, BDS puts a lot of stock in student government measures to divest from Israel. These symbolic measures – which have yet to push any university to actually divest from Israel – appear to come from the students themselves and seemingly capture the will of the student body.
That seemed to be the case at a recent vote at Loyola University in Chicago, where the student government passed a divestment resolution, which was subsequently overturned by the Student Government President.
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But recent developments have shown that Loyola students are not getting what they think they are getting. According to Max Samarov, a researcher at StandWithUS, the legislation was not written by a student but rather by a veteran activist with the BDS movement:
On Tuesday, April 1st, Students for Justice in Palestine presented the Loyola student government with an anti-Israel divestment resolution. But what they neglected to mention was that they didn’t write the legislation themselves. It turned out that the real author was Dalit Baum, a major leader in the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. Baum is not a student or faculty member of Loyola or any North American university. She is a paid operative working to co-opt student governments into following the BDS Movement’s malicious, anti-Israel agenda. And if she is writing resolutions for one school, it is likely that she is writing them for others as well.
The revelation that students were not necessarily the real sponsors of the resolution is another example of the duplicity of the BDS movement, which is eager to claim a victory at any cost.
As delegitimization expert Tal Becker recently said, “Part of the approach of the delegitimizers is to have many little lies and then it builds up into a big lie and a narrative.”
