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Today’s Top BDS Stories:
1.Israel Apartheid Week to hit US and UK campuses.
If BDS activists cared as much about Palestinians as they do in harming Israel, are there better ways they could spend their time than Israel Apartheid Week? Michael Coetzee thinks so.
Those who are truly interested in seeing life improve for the inhabitants of the Palestinian Territories would do better to focus on the impact groups such as Hamas are having on the prospects for peace, instead of expending energy on the chimaera of Israeli “apartheid”.
Take as just one example the Hamas government in Gaza’s rejection of school textbooks dealing with human rights, submitted for approval by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which runs 245 schools in the Gaza Strip.
The Times of Israel quoted a statement by education ministry spokesman Mu’tasim Al-Minawi, who lamented that the curriculum promoted “peaceful resistance as the only way of achieving freedom and independence” and fostered “negative feelings toward armed resistance”.
Elyon Aslan-Levy looks at the effectiveness of pro-Palestinian stunts like building an “apartheid wall” in urban areas, and offers similar stunts pro-Israel activists can do.
The stunt appeals to people’s emotions, not reason: the wall is presented as the bastard child of East Germany and South Africa, and this mental association makes the case against the wall self-evident. In the minds of Israel’s detractors, Israel built an enormously expensive concrete eyesore for the sake only of a “land grab” of less than a tenth of the West Bank. It is as if the Second Intifada never happened, or else the brutal murder of over one thousand Israelis was minor detail, which could not possibly have been relevant to the reasons for building the wall.
Meanwhile, two Israeli Oxford students wrote an open letter about Israel Apartheid Week, arguing that the Middle East conflict is between moderates and extremists, and BDS is part of the extremist camp.
Read the papers they publish – their focus is not at the occupation of the West Bank. They aim for something much wider: The State of the Jews should not exist on the map. Just like their Jewish extremists partners, so do the organizers of IAW imagine a world where one kind of people enjoys more rights than another. For them, the other is inferior. We do not see any difference between extreme Jews who do not recognize the Palestinians’ right to their own state, and extreme people like the people behind IAW, who do not recognize the Jews’ right to their own state.
Elder of Ziyon’s outstanding series of apartheid posters became the subject of parody, and Elder returned the favor.
2. A taste of her own medicine? Judith Butler drops out of scheduled appearance at New York’s Jewish Museum over opposition to her support for BDS.
“While her political views were not a factor in her participation, the debates about her politics have become a distraction making it impossible to present the conversation about Kafka as intended,” the museum said in a statement.
3. Get BDS training this summer at the “BDS Summer Institute” program, sponsored by the Quaker group, American Friends Service Committee, and Jewish Voice for Peace. So let me get this straight – Hasbara training is manipulation, but this is perfectly fine?
Other BDS-Related Content:
* A BDS advocate was kind enough to put together a comprehensive list of products under boycott. This could be helpful for the next Buycott campaign.
* American Thinker takes an in-depth look at how France is using legislation to fight BDS.
Under normal circumstances and in ordinary times, no one sharing democratic values would favor limits on free speech or expression. However, the world is aware of the abnormality of the German Nazi crimes in implementing their anti-Semitic ideology. In recent years, a number of countries have criminalized hate speech intended to incite violence against particular groups. These criminal laws are based on the London Charter for the Nuremberg Tribunal, in which advocacy and dissemination of anti-Semitism were first defined as crimes against humanity.
* Creative Communities for Peace is circulating a petition calling on Israel’s supporters to show solidarity with artists who refuse to be pressured by the BDS and come to perform in Israel.
See Thursday’s Fighting BDS Roundup.
