[sc:graybox ]The following guest post is written by Elijah Granet, HonestReporting’s Blankfeld Award winner for 2014. Elijah is currently majoring in Political Science and Talmud at Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City.
It is an odd day when I find myself congratulating followers of the BDS movement.
It has been, for too long, painfully obvious that the BDS movement was singling out Israel for attack. It appeared that to the BDS movement, there was some quality about Israel that made it worse than all other countries, facts be damned. I shall leave it to the educated readers of HonestReporting to decide for themselves what about the Jewish state is so objectionable to the BDS movement (hint: it isn’t the “state” part).
As Ari Lesser so eloquently put it, if the BDS movement wanted to have any pretense of intellectual or moral honesty, they had to boycott the rest of the world before they could even begin to launch any sanctions against Israel, whose alleged systematic violations of human rights (emphasis on alleged), even if true (they’re not), would be smaller in both magnitude and criminality than scores of other nations. Even the most extreme allegations lies of Israel haters – think IDF soldiers harvesting Palestinian organs – put it fairly far down the league table of human rights violators.
As any student advocate could tell you, arguing with BDS advocates over this (or any other issue) is pointless. BDS employs the Gish Gallop, a favored technique of those without facts on their side. BDS will make a hundred claims against Israel in the span of minutes, and when a pro-Israel advocate attempts to respond, and inevitably fails to address every spurious claim, BDS claims a victory. This is a nice rhetorical spin, but it makes it virtually impossible to confront the hypocrisy of BDS. Meanwhile, the employment of false balance by various news organizations leads many otherwise reasonable people to believe that BDS actually made several valid points.
Rather fortuitously for people who care about things like facts or reason, a group of BDS activists have recently decided to, in a shocking development, at once display both intellectual consistency and the ludicrousness of their position. The activists, members of the University of California Students association (representing the various schools of the University of California), passed two resolutions at a recent meeting of the aforementioned association.
The first resolution, which calls for divestment from some companies in Israel and was introduced in November by Students for Justice in Palestine members, had been tabled for months because board members wanted more time to talk with their constituents.
The second resolution calls for the UC to divest from foreign governments such as Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Russia, Turkey, Sri Lanka and Mexico, and the U.S., who some say have violated the right to “life, liberty, security of person, to education, to privacy, family (and) home, to own property and (not to) be arbitrarily deprived of property.
No, the fine journalists at the Daily Bruin didn’t make an error – some students of the University of California are seriously proposing to divest from the United States government (which incidentally, funds a non-negligible part of the UC’s budget). One imagines that BDS activists receiving Pell grants and other federal subsidies for education will quickly divest their educational funding of such tainted money.
In all seriousness, this new development from the UC system (often a staging ground for BDS ridiculousness) represents a new and exciting paradigm in the effort to illustrate the perpetual poverty of plausibility within the movement. The way to defeat BDS is not to argue with them (arguing with people who don’t adhere to logic is rarely productive), but to point out to reasonable people (and importantly, to demonstrate to the media) that this is not a movement to be taken seriously. Yes, the hypocrisy of BDS is evidence enough of this, but it is difficult to demonstrate without being distracted by spurious claims.
On the other hand, dealing with open fanatics hell-bent on divesting from everything that is remotely bad is a far more welcoming proposition. It is much easier to demonstrate to Americans who lack knowledge of the Middle East (BDS’s target demographic) that the BDS case for divesting from America is nonsense. From there, there is a clear path to demonstrating that the situation with Israel, a fellow member of the democratic club of nations, is much the same.
So yes, I would like to give a hearty mazel tov to BDS, for openly demonstrating precisely how ridiculous divestment campaigns being waged at universities throughout the country are. Let us hope that the movement will continue to aid reasonable people in illustrating its own silliness!
