How the News We Watch Can Shape The Way We Think: BDSer Jake's BBC Take (video)

The London Times of 25 July 1994 carried an article by the BBC's world affairs editor John Simpson entitled "When reporters act on their consciences".  Unfortunately, I don't have a copy in front of me now, but from memory the springboard for the article was a recent broadcast in which BBC television reporter (later newsreader) George Alagiah abandoned objectivity to advocate for a particular cause, so outraged was he at what he was seeing around him.

Simpson evidently understood and approved, and foreshadowed more instances of the kind.

Nowadays, of course, the intrusion of BBC reporters' own sympathies and prejudices into their reportage has become, if not commonplace, then certainly a matter for concern, as indeed is the case regarding certain broadcasters on the ABC, Australia's answer to the BBC, its Middle East correspondent Sophie McNeill having before her controversial appointment made no secret of the fact that she considers herself an activist as well as a journalist. 

The following 12-minute video dates to 2014.  It features Jake Lynch, the BDS-happy associate professor who heads the so-called Peace and Conflict Centre at the University of Sydney.  In his discussion of his background as a BBC presenter he refers to how "peace journalism" informed his broadcasts, how he steered interviews in order to incorporate it, how the BBC effectively allowed him to take the line he chose, and how useful a tool it is in shaping audience responses to international conflicts.

The video provides an insight into former anti-Apartheid (the real apartheid, in South Africa) activist Lynch's anti-Israel bias and is an indicator of the BBC's leftist bias, and lack of concern for the objectivity incumbent upon it by its Charter and Producers' Guidelines.  (The academic Boycott of Israel, incidentally, raises its ugly head at 9:23).

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33abvpH5L3c)

BDSing Aussie Professor Writes of "Israel's Vampiric History" (updated)

Once upon a time, 2002 to be precise,  two Aussie academics, one of Lebanese Christian background and the other Joo-ish (see my post here) co-sponsored an online anti-Israel petition  A journalist for the Melbourne Age (from the Fairfax stable of Aussie newspapers and thus no great friend to Israel) reported inter alia on 6 June that year:

"Angered at Israel's treatment of Palestinians, the pair last month launched an online petition calling for the boycott. They have collected about 100 signatures but have also provoked a counter-petition that attacks the pair for singling out Israel and failing to request similar boycotts of academic contacts with totalitarian regimes such as China and the Arab states."

The Lebanese-born academic referred to was anthropologist Ghassan Hage, then of the University of Sydney and now of the University of Melbourne (see image at left, dating to 2015).

As I well recall, the online petition he co-sponsored soon became a laughing stock.  How the two co-authors must have exulted at seeing the number of signatures steadily rise, only to realise that swelling the numbers were such monikers as "Adolf Hitler" and "Yasser Arafat" and even, if I recall correctly,  "Ariel Sharon".  Thus adorned with signatures each more preposterous than the last, and teeming with  pro-Israel comments, the flopped petition was in effect put out of its misery when its "add signature" facility was hidden from public view so that no further sport could be had with it.

Here's Professor Hage, who began his academic career as a political scientist and holds the chair of anthropolgy and social theory at Melbourne Uni, talking about racism:

On 6 June 2010 the Electronic Intifada published the following by Professor Hage in response to the Mavi Marmara incident, reprinted here:

Ghassan Hage’s response to some of the outrageously unbelievable Israeli propaganda that spewed forth from the mouths of Israeli political leaders and their spokespersons in the days following Israel’s massacre of civilians in international waters:

I don’t write poems but, in any case, poems are not poems.

Long ago, I was made to understand that Palestine was not Palestine;

I was also informed that Palestinians were not Palestinians;

They also explained to me that ethnic cleansing was not ethnic cleansing.

And when naive old me saw freedom fighters they patiently showed me that they were not freedom fighters, and that resistance was not resistance.

And when, stupidly, I noticed arrogance, oppression and humiliation they benevolently enlightened me so I can see that arrogance was not arrogance, oppression was not oppression, and humiliation was not humiliation.

I saw misery, racism, inhumanity and a concentration camp.

But they told me that they were experts in misery, racism, inhumanity and concentration camps and I have to take their word for it: this was not misery, racism, inhumanity and a concentration camp.

Over the years they’ve taught me so many things: invasion was not invasion, occupation was not occupation, colonialism was not colonialism and apartheid was not apartheid.

They opened my simple mind to even more complex truths that my poor brain could not on its own compute like: “having nuclear weapons” was not “having nuclear weapons,” “not having weapons of mass destruction” was “having weapons of mass destruction.”

And, democracy (in the Gaza Strip) was not democracy.

Having second class citizens (in Israel) was democracy.

So you’ll excuse me if I am not surprised to learn today that there were more things that I thought were evident that are not: peace activists are not peace activists, piracy is not piracy, the massacre of unarmed people is not the massacre of unarmed people.

I have such a limited brain and my ignorance is unlimited.

And they’re so fucking intelligent. Really.
 

 Now, Professor Hage has hit the headlines, so to speak, of the execrable Mondoweiss, for his response to the Anthropological Association of Israel, inviting him to be keynote speaker at its conference.

Not that this refusal should come as much of a surprise to Mondoweiss's readers, for they will have seen here that Professor Hage is a proponent of an academic boycott of Israel!

Professor Hage posted his response to the invitation on Facebook a day or two ago, and it has attracted (when last I looked) 397 likes, 47 comments, and 163 shares there.  It seems all leftist anti-Israel life is exulting, in Australia and overseas (yes, there anti-Israel Israeli-born academics among them).

Dear …

I have spent a bit of time writing this so it is a bit formal. That’s not the intention. It’s more that I want to be as clear as possible about my reasons.

I sincerely appreciate your invitation to give the keynote at the Anthropological Association of Israel. And I accept that it is an invitation made in good faith that emanates from your desire to open up the association to voices that are strongly critical of Israel as it has come to exist in the world today, and that as you say are not heard enough.

I am afraid I have to decline from accepting your invitation. I can’t say I am overjoyed to decline. As I mentioned to you before by temperament I am always inclined and disposed to dialogue, but I have thought hard about what my presence would achieve and I feel that the end result is negative not positive. But in thinking what is positive and what is negative I am thinking of how it impacts on the struggle of the Palestinian people to free themselves of colonialism, not the struggle of Israeli anthropologists to make their society more open minded and receptive. It is a mistake to equate the two even though they might occasionally overlap in terms of interest. You probably don’t want to hear me giving you a full blast of my reasons. And you might even think that you have heard it all before. But I genuinely accept that you want dialogue. And so I want to quickly say why, while I am also all for dialogue, I am not for the dialogue as you are proposing it, even though I am more than flattered about what you say about my work and thankful that you thought of me as a possible keynoter.

Israeli anthropologists face a number of situations that are similar to those we face in other settler colonial environments such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. We are all anthropologists working in a social space that is always already vampirically sucking a native population dry and violently (legally and illegally) blocking its claims to the land. You Israelis have to face the extra situation that your vampiric history is relatively short and new, the population that has been colonised by you is still relatively strong and still making claims of national sovereignty and autonomy over the land. The dominant forces in your society aspire to get to a situation where this will stop being the case. It aims to efface the existence of Palestinians as claimants of sovereignty and it is subjecting them to horrendous inhumane violence of a scale, intensity and permanence that is so beyond acceptable. This is what your own Baruch Kimmerling has beautifully called politicide.

So to me, the beginning of any decolonial anthropology is to be anti-politicidal. It has to be concerned with how to stop this horrendous violence and how to give presence and political and social power to the colonised. It is not about making the anthropologist of the colonising society more liberal and open minded and capable of confronting difference. This I feel is all what me presenting a keynote for your organisation would achieve: some conservatives will be upset. But that’s because they are dumb. Then there will be the intelligent liberals who will leave saying "what a feeling. I have heard a genuinely and authentically anti-Zionist intellectual with really confronting views, and with an Arab background to boot. It was a really enriching experience, I must be so open minded and groovy." This does not and never did help the colonised. There will be a minority however who will fully understand these limitations and who will genuinely want to move towards the territory of decolonising anthropology. Those, I would love to work with, but I don’t believe the AAI is the best frame for this to be done.

I have many ideas of what a dialogue towards establishing a decolonial Israeli anthropology would entail. The first among them would be for Israeli anthropologists to refuse to belong to an organisation that symbolically absences Palestine from its name, or to belong to an organization that accepts anthropologists from the settlements among its ranks. If I was invited to Israel by an organisation that calls itself the Anthropological association of Israel/Palestine, that would be a good beginning. I will see it as indicating an aspiration to confront the mono-national mono-religious and eliminationist tendencies of the state. I would be happy to meet with Israeli anthropologists who aspire for such a decolonial politics. And it would be a delight for me to discuss with them possible strategies. Given that the numbers in the foreseeable future will be small perhaps we can meet in a Palestinian café and invite some local Palestinian anthropologists to participate in a dialogue about radically different non-colonial directions. I would genuinely be happy to take part in something like this.

This situation actually reminds me a bit of the politics of positive discrimination. When you are aiming for structural change, your politics can be incommensurate with individual interests and unfair to genuinely nice people. That is, you can be aiming for more women in management and you end up discriminating against a genuinely charming feminist guy. Likewise, I want to participate in dialogues that open up the space for more Palestinian anthropologists to be as subjects and participants in shaping the future of anthropology in Israel/Palestine, even if I have to forgo interacting with excellent, open-minded and charming Israeli anthropologists. [Emphasis added]

 The question might be asked: since Professor Hage's antipathy to Israel is a matter of public record, why did the Anthropological Association of Israel extend their invitation to him in the first place?

Update: 
Ghassan Hage on Facebook (20 Sept.)
 I had initially asked the president of the Israeli Anthropological Association who invited me, Nir Avieli, if he wanted his invitation published. As I didn't get an initial response i assumed he didn't. But he has sent me his considered response to my reply. So here they are both for the records. As you can see both my response and Nir's are polite and even cordial despite the differences, and if people want to comment, I'd rather if people keep the same tone of exchange.

Response to the president of the Israeli Anthropological Association’s invitation to give a keynote at their annual conference and the president’s reply

Dear Nir
I have spent a bit of time writing this so it is a bit formal. That’s not the intention. It’s more that I want to be as clear as possible about my reasons.
I sincerely appreciate your invitation to give the keynote at the Anthropological Association of Israel. And I accept that it is an invitation made in good faith that emanates from your desire to open up the association to voices that are strongly critical of Israel as it has come to exist in the world today, and that as you say are not heard enough.
I am afraid I have to decline from accepting your invitation. I can’t say I am overjoyed to decline. As I mentioned to you before by temperament I am always inclined and disposed to dialogue, but I have thought hard about what my presence would achieve and I feel that the end result is negative not positive. But in thinking what is positive and what is negative I am thinking of how it impacts on the struggle of the Palestinian people to free themselves of colonialism, not the struggle of Israeli anthropologists to make their society more open minded and receptive. It is a mistake to equate the two even though they might occasionally overlap in terms of interest. You probably don’t want to hear me giving you a full blast of my reasons. And you might even think that you have heard it all before. But I genuinely accept that you want dialogue. And so I want to quickly say why, while I am also all for dialogue, I am not for the dialogue as you are proposing it, even though I am more than flattered about what you say about my work and thankful that you thought of me as a possible keynoter.
Israeli anthropologists face a number of situations that are similar to those we face in other settler colonial environments such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. We are all anthropologists working in a social space that is always already vampirically sucking a native population dry and violently (legally and illegally) blocking its claims to the land. You Israelis have to face the extra situation that your vampiric history is relatively short and new, the population that has been colonised by you is still relatively strong and still making claims of national sovereignty and autonomy over the land. The dominant forces in your society aspire to get to a situation where this will stop being the case. It aims to efface the existence of Palestinians as claimants of sovereignty and it is subjecting them to horrendous inhumane violence of a scale, intensity and permanence that is so beyond acceptable. This is what your own Baruch Kimmerling has beautifully called politicide.
So to me, the beginning of any decolonial anthropology is to be anti-politicidal. It has to be concerned with how to stop this horrendous violence and how to give presence and political and social power to the colonised. It is not about making the anthropologist of the colonising society more liberal and open minded and capable of confronting difference. This I feel is all what me presenting a keynote for your organisation would achieve: some conservatives will be upset. But that’s because they are dumb. Then there will be the intelligent liberals who will leave saying "what a feeling. I have heard a genuinely and authentically anti-Zionist intellectual with really confronting views, and with an Arab background to boot. It was a really enriching experience, I must be so open minded and groovy." This does not and never did help the colonised. There will be a minority however who will fully understand these limitations and who will genuinely want to move towards the territory of decolonising anthropology. Those, I would love to work with, but I don’t believe the AAI is the best frame for this to be done.
I have many ideas of what a dialogue towards establishing a decolonial Israeli anthropology would entail. The first among them would be for Israeli anthropologists to refuse to belong to an organisation that symbolically absences Palestine from its name, or to belong to an organization that accepts anthropologists from the settlements among its ranks. If I was invited to Israel by an organisation that calls itself the Anthropological association of Israel/Palestine, that would be a good beginning. I will see it as indicating an aspiration to confront the mono-national mono-religious and eliminationist tendencies of the state. I would be happy to meet with Israeli anthropologists who aspire for such a decolonial politics. And it would be a delight for me to discuss with them possible strategies. Given that the numbers in the foreseeable future will be small perhaps we can meet in a Palestinian café and invite some local Palestinian anthropologists to participate in a dialogue about radically different non-colonial directions. I would genuinely be happy to take part in something like this.
This situation actually reminds me a bit of the politics of positive discrimination. When you are aiming for structural change, your politics can be incommensurate with individual interests and unfair to genuinely nice people. That is, you can be aiming for more women in management and you end up discriminating against a genuinely charming feminist guy. Likewise, I want to participate in dialogues that open up the space for more Palestinian anthropologists to be as subjects and participants in shaping the future of anthropology in Israel/Palestine, even if I have to forgo interacting with excellent, open-minded and charming Israeli anthropologists.
Best wishes,
Ghassan
----------------------------------------------------------
Dear Ghassan
Thank you for your frank mail.
I am disappointed but I am certainly not surprised by your decision to decline my invitation.
Colleagues I consulted in Israel and abroad told me that inviting a Palestinian and/or Middle Eastern anthropologist as a keynote for the Israeli Anthropological Association (IAA) annual meeting would be futile if not foolish: “no self-respecting Palestinian or Arab intellectual would accept such invitation”, they said. “Yes”, they added, “Edward Said came. But that was Said and the visit took place in a very different time”. Previous IAA presidents also confided in me that they made genuine efforts to invite prominent Arab anthropologists in the past: invitations that were declined.
As I wrote in my original email, I do hope my invitation was not too bold, or indeed, insensitive. But because we intend to hold the annual meeting in Kfar Qasim, an Arab town known for its tragic history – I thought this might indicate our serious intentions to create genuine dialogue, rather than simply feature you as a fig-leaf for liberal minded pious anthropologists.
I also felt that not even trying to invite you would be yet another indication of how we in the academic community have succumbed to the ruling regime. Giving up without even trying seems to plague the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is especially the case when we consider the death of the “the Israeli left” over the past decades, whose members once struggled for peace and reconciliation, but have now lost all political power and hope. We now make an invisible, silent few – the academia is perhaps the last bastion.
In this sense, I hope our email exchange was a forgone conclusion, though I respect and understand your decision. To be honest, I don’t think we really disagree on the fundamentals: The IAA has officially condemned the occupation of Palestine and called upon the Israeli government to stop the military control and human and civil rights abuse and engage in peace talks.
And as you convincingly argue:
“Israeli anthropologists face a number of situations that are similar to those we face in other settler colonial environments such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. We are all anthropologists working in a social space that is always already vampirically sucking a native population dry and violently (legally and illegally) blocking its claims to the land”.
Indeed, you and I face similar difficulties and dilemmas (for instance, working in public universities in Israel or Australia). The way I understand it, our privileged position demands that we critically engage in discussing sociopolitical problems, however intractable. I also feel that this is our only way of influencing others (our students or, at least, some of them) and, perhaps, having an impact.
I also agree with you that the main question at hand is what would be the most effective way of assisting the Palestinians in their struggle for freedom and independence. In a week in which the US administration committed 37 BILLION DOLLARS of the US tax payers money in military assistance to Israel, the largest ever sum of money given by the US to any foreign country, it is clear that the occupation of Palestine is an American interest and that the occupation is fueled by American tax payers. It is, of course, also maintained politically by the US and its allies, not least ‘Fortress Australia’: perhaps the most loyal of US allies.
The way I understand it, the most effective way of assisting the Palestinians in their struggle is by demanding that the US and its allies stop supporting the occupation. I realize that anthropologists anywhere have very little political power, but this is probably the only way to help the Palestinians.
Talking to Israeli anthropologists might not be very effective, but I do believe it can generate a productive discussion, to the chagrin of the ruling power.
I could have written now that “I look forward for better times”, but this would be just another self-righteous and meaningless phrase. For lack of better words I’ll just say that I’ll keep on trying…
Sincerely
Nir Avieli
President, The Israeli Anthropological Association

Wayward Women, Warped Worldview

Or perhaps I should say "wayward wimmin".  After all, they are all feminists.

Then again, what kind of feminism is it which would support BDS against the nation in the Middle East that has done more for gender equality than any other, and which was the first in the region (i.e. from its inception in 1948) to give Arab women the vote?
 
What psychosis motivates the extreme leftists who've hijacked the women's movement as they have hijacked certain Protestant churches and imposed upon them that warped worldview that imperils Western society and gives aid and comfort to its enemies?

Here's some of the whacko weirdness:

BDS is a feminist issue

The National Women's Studies Association (NWSA), the largest academic feminist organisation in North America ... November 25 will mark the last day for its members to vote electronically on a resolution urging an endorsement of the 2005 call by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against the state of Israel.

The resolution calls on NWSA to join various academic associations that have adopted similar motions in the past few years, including this week's overwhelming support for a boycott motion from the American Anthropological Association, at the NWSA's annual national conference; the American Studies Association; the Association for Asian American Studies; the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association; and the Critical Ethnic Studies Association.

Specifically, the resolution asks feminist academics in North America to stand against "the injustice and violence, including sexual and gender-based violence, perpetrated against Palestinians and other Arabs in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, within Israel and in the Golan Heights, as well as the colonial displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba".

Drawing on feminist commitments to anticolonial solidarity struggles against historical and ongoing forms of injustice, the resolution rests on a simple and yet powerful claim: that to remain silent in the face of the myriad indignities, injustices and violence that Palestinians are subjected to at the hands of the Israeli occupation is to side with the oppressor.

It thus makes it clear that the boycott of the colonising Israeli state - a state that targets Palestinians, curtails their life opportunities and choices, and orchestrates their incarceration and death - is an act of solidarity shaped by a politics and praxis central to all decolonial feminist projects....

 Read more here The wimmin, on the other hand, should read this
 And they should see this:

 Bet they blame all that too on da Joos.

Good Onya, Guys! JHRW confronts BDS

Remember my post here about a great new initiative in the UK?

Well, Jewish Human Rights Watch has been doing much sterling and necessary work.

See this, for instance:

Most recently, it had a rejoinder, in Friday's Guardian, to the abhorrent pro-academic boycott call signed some days earlier by at least 343 scholars (see here).

This is the rejoinder:

 Its text reads:

"Starting in April 1933, German academics actively colluded in the dismissal of their own Jewish colleagues, under the Nazi Law for the Re-Establishment of the Professional Civil Service.

So did the activists of the National Socialist Students’ League which, long before the Nazis came to power, organised boycotts of, and disturbances in, lectures given by Jewish academics.

In many universities, up to one third of the faculty were purged in this way.

Those responsible included philosophers of worldwide renown such as Martin Heidegger at Heidelberg University, and also many junior scholars who spotted opportunities to advance their own careers.

In light of this background, it is disturbing that 350 British academics would support attempts to boycott all academic institutions in the Jewish State.

Those institutions are not responsible for government policies, any more than Cambridge, Oxford, LSE [London School of Economics] or UCL [University College London] are responsible for the policies of David Cameron.

Few of these academics have called for boycotts of the institutions of other nations either: their relentless focus is on the institutions of the Jewish State.

Therefore we call upon British universities to show responsibility and immediately disassociate themselves from this deplorable gesture, which damages their institutions and goes against the fundamental idea that universities should be promoting: Learning – free from antisemitic boycotts."

 More here

 Meanwhile, it's great to see Dame Helen Mirren speaking warmly of Israel and disparaging the cultural boycott.

In Britain, A Scholarly Roll of Shame

343 UK scholars have declared support for an academic boycott of Israel, taking out a full page ad in that rag of iniquity The Guardian today.

Here's the roll of shame:

No need to rush to Specsavers or search for a magnifying glass: read more on this here

Declares Joy Wolfe, the redoubtable chairperson of StandWithUs UK:

' StandWithUs UK strongly condemns the call from British academics to boycott Israel. This move does nothing to help the Palestiians and potentially damages the long standing mutually beneficial links that are so important to both the UK and Israel. We welcome the strong statement from British Ambassador David Quarrey condemning the boycott call and reaffirming the UK's anti boycott commitment. Ambassador Quarrey reiterated the importance of the significant and fruitful relationship shared by Israel and the United Kingdom.

 "The British Government firmly opposes calls to boycott Israel. We are deeply committed to promoting the UK’s academic and scientific ties with Israel, as part the flourishing partnership between the two countries," he said in a statement.

 "The reality is one of rapidly strengthening trade and tech links between Britain and Israel. As David Cameron has said, the UK Government will never allow those who want to boycott Israel to shut down 60 years worth of vibrant exchange and partnership that does so much to make both our countries stronger," he added.

 Israeli academics should look closely at the names of those signing the boycott letter and ensure they do not further the double standards of the boycotters wishing to continue personal links'.

The well-known left-leaning Zionist academic David Hirsh of Goldsmith's College, London University, who runs the Engage website, had this to say when a Guardian journalist contacted him for comment:

"The campaign to single out Israelis for exclusion from the global academic community is highly menacing.

It seeks to punish Israeli scholars for the crimes, both real and imagined, of their government in a way that is quite inconsistent with our usual attitude to fellow scholars and with our own relationships to our own governments.

We have learnt that the drive to punish Israelis brings in its wake antisemitic exclusions and antisemitic ways of thinking here on UK campuses. We have seen Jews who don't support the boycott denounced as Nazis and racists.

The boycott campaign sets up a presumption that Jewish academics are in some sense collaborators, a presumption which pressurises Jewish colleagues to keep quiet, to put on displays of political cleanliness or to stand in the dock for Israel.

The boycott campaign rejects the politics of peace, a politics in which Israeli academics have always been central. Instead it embraces the politics of silencing, the politics of war by other means, the politics of waving one national flag against the other. We ought to build links between UK universities and Palestinian and Israeli ones, not try to smash them; we ought to communicate more, not less; we ought to be for peace not for war.

We ought to support Israelis and Palestinians who stand up against racism and antisemitism, not throw them to the wolves of Hamas and the Israeli settler right.

My fear for what will happen on campus is heightened by the fact that the current Labour leader supports this kind of exclusionary politics. This will heighten the sense that many Jewish academics have, that the culture on our campuses is still deteriorating."

 Maybe it's worth revisiting Edgar Davidson's spoof on academic Israel-haters here

One ardent British Zionist comments on social media,

"An openly pro-Israel British Jewish student would surely not want any contact with these teachers."

 It's hard to disagree.

Professor William Jacobson Speaks About The Academic Boycott (video)

This informative video is six months old but if you haven't seen it and want an expert's view of the BDS movement, particularly the academic boycott in the United States, it's a must listen-to (I say "listen-to" because since the professor is in effect a "talking head' speaking from a lectern you don't need to be glued to the screen to appreciate its insights).

For background on the lecture, and the footage which Professor Jacobson refers to at the beginning of his talk (regarding student BDSers on campus), see here

Wicked Way Won: BRISMES & BDS

In my previous post I wondered whether the Israel-haters demanding that BDS be placed on the agenda of the BRISMES conference this week at the London School of Economics would get their wicked way.

Guess what?  They have.

Here's the lowdown:

Panel 6e. BDS and Political Mobilization

Chair: Paul Kelemen

[For his take on the Left and Zionism, in a talk to the Modern History Group at the University of Sheffield, see the video here; the first few minutes of this 58 minute footage will probably suffice for most people]

 The BDS Movement and the Question of Radical Democracy
John Chalcraft, LSE

This paper focuses on the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights. The movement arose in Israel/Palestine in the wake of the failure of the Oslo Process in the early 2000s and has since attracted increasing support and publicity translocally. It has been characterized by its critics as an “anti-Semitic poison pill” (Brackman). By contrast, this inter-disciplinary paper, drawing on desk-based research, activist archives, and extensive participant observation, explores the radically democratic characteristics of the movement. Treating the movement as an instance of contentious mobilisation, the paper compares BDS activism with other networked, horizontalist, diverse, de-centralized and translocal movements that have emerged in and out of the region since the 1990s in a period of globalisation. The primary goal is ontological: how can we best characterise this mobilising project, with its identities, principles, and goals on the one hand, and its repertoires of contention (organization, strategies and tactics) on the other? The aim is to compare and contrast this mobilising project with both democratic-diverse and anti-democratic-essentialist forms of activism. The paper argues that the radically democratic characteristics of the BDS movement deserve recognition, while maintaining, against the conventional wisdom, that even in highly-networked and seemingly horizontal activism, leadership, strategic interventions, structure, coordination, mobilisation, and well-defined ends play important roles. The paper also draws out homologies between the BDS movement and other democratic movements of recent origin in the region. The paper contributes to debates about what it means to speak of anti-doctrinal and anti-hierarchical forms of contemporary organizing, while developing our understanding of a movement that is playing an increasingly important role on the regional and international scene.

BDS and the Politics of Academic Research
Lori Allen, SOAS, University of London

In her essay “Lying and Politics,” Hannah Arendt proclaimed that the truth-teller necessarily forfeits his position and the validity of what he has to say if he tries to interfere directly in political affairs. In this paper I will argue that such a balancing scale, in which any weight on the politics side lightens the gravitas on the truth side, must be questioned. Much of the world wants their scholarship courteous, their scholars impartial, independent, objective, and a-political. Many people tend to mistakenly equate those things. This is tantamount to asking scholars to renounce their citizenship at the door of the ivory tower. The expectation that scholars and scholarship should be free of politics as a pre-requisite for research validity is itself a political imposition. In this paper I reflect on the various ways in which these kinds of arguments about the necessarily a-political nature of “valid” scholarship are mobilized by those seeking to thwart the BDS campaign for Palestinian rights. Ultimately, this paper argues that research on Palestinian society and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is political, can be political, and should be political. The challenge is to maintain the wider credibility and authority of our scholarship, which is really the only way of ensuring its political, public relevance.

Comparing the Academic Boycott of Israel in Britain and the United States
Suzanne Morrison, LSE [who won this prize]

The Palestinian call for an academic boycott of Israel asks academics and cultural workers around the world to boycott Israeli academic and cultural institutions in support of the Palestinian struggle. This paper critically investigates the conditions under which academic boycotts of Israel have taken shape in Britain and the United States. In particular, this paper compares how debates and motions passed in British academic unions have been instrumental to the development of an academic boycott in Britain, whereas in the US, academic associations have played a key role. This comparative case study seeks to illustrate two examples of organizing for academic boycotts against Israel to determine how the movement has developed across borders. This paper argues that context-specific political environments and activist organizational dynamics have required differing strategies for achieving campaign goals, thereby contributing to the broader movement’s capacity for organizational flexibility and hybridity. In considering academic boycotts of Israel in Britain and the United States, this paper sheds light on the movement’s organizational structure and processes, and supplements existing literature on the contemporary dynamics of border-crossing social movements.

Who?

The Meaning of BDS in the History of Palestinian Struggle
Gilbert Achcar, SOAS [who will need no introduction to readers of Richard Millett's blog]

This paper will explore the meaning of BDS in the history of Palestinian liberation strategies. The post-1948 period of reliance on Arab states for the recovery of Palestinian territory by war came to an abrupt end with the Arab defeat in June 1967. The changing strategic conditions of the Arab-Israeli conflict meant that the prospect of a victory over Israel in a military confrontation with Arab states became obsolete. Far from disproving this fact, the October 1973 war fully confirmed it. The 1967 Arab defeat was followed by an illusory strategy of Palestinian “people’s liberation war” that took Algeria as its model. In turn, this strategy was dealt a mortal blow with the defeat of the Palestinian armed movement in Jordan in 1970, only to open the door gradually to a strategy of diplomatic pressure on Israel led by Arab oil monarchies. The latter was no less illusory. The Palestinian Intifada of 1988 showed the possibility and efficiency of another much more realistic strategy, one in which the Palestinians would counter Israel’s crushing military superiority by appropriate means of popular struggle. However, it lacked then an accompaniment on the strategically indispensable level of international pressure. The Intifada was thus co-opted by the PLO for its diplomatic strategy, the failure of which is more blatant than ever nowadays. BDS is the accompaniment that was missing in 1988. It now needs to link up again with a popular Intifada on the model of that of 1988.

Source here
Hat tip: E.B.

Meanwhile, more mischief from the PSC:

BRISMES & BDS: The desperate cry of the broken-hearted

Remember Frances Guy (pictured left, head covered dhimmi-style, with the extremist sheikh she admired)?  If not, my posts here and here and here and here should refresh your memory.

The former FCO diplomat is now head of  Middle East region at Christian Aid as well as president of BRISMES (the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies).  To quote the latter's self-description:

'Founded in 1973, BRISMES is the UK’s premier higher education umbrella organisation for MENA [Middle East and North Africa] studies, embracing all the top universities in the UK to promote the study of all aspects of the region.

Sponsorship and corporate and individual membership of BRISMES has long facilitated access and exposure to the best academics, emerging scholars and substantive research in the field.

This is, if anything, even more important in today’s world than it has been historically. The MENA region remains one of the most complex and volatile parts of the world – as well as being of major strategic and economic importance to the United Kingdom. A better understanding of the dynamics and tensions underlying its political and economic situation is essential not only in its own right but also to the analysis and understanding of wider global questions.'

This week (24-26 June), BRISMES is holding a conference at the London School of Economics on the theme "Liberation".  The Conference program and list of speakers is available here.

It would appear that BDS in the form of the Academic Boycott  is off the agenda at the conference, and certain individuals are distinctly unhappy, to judge from what anti-Israel activists (for instance here) have been posting on Facebook:

 I wonder whether the desperados will get their wicked way.

(Update next post)

From Hage Docker To Hage Soccer

"It was always going to be a sensitive topic, but a proposal by two university lecturers   –  one a Jew,* the other a Lebanese-born Christian  –  that Australian academics boycott their Israeli counterparts has unleashed a storm of protest," went a report under the byline Geoff Strong in the Melbourne Age on 6 June 2002.

"Angered at Israel's treatment of Palestinians, the pair last month launched an online petition calling for the boycott. They have collected about 100 signatures but have also provoked a counter-petition that attacks the pair for singling out Israel and failing to request similar boycotts of academic contacts with totalitarian regimes such as China and the Arab states.

John Docker, a fellow of the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, and Sydney University anthropology lecturer Ghassan Hage, launched their petition after similar petitions were published in Europe and the US...."

 [* Read this, from Strong's report:

'Dr Docker said yesterday that he was offended by Israel's actions against the Palestinians. "I was brought up in a left-wing Jewish family and part of that upbringing was a concern for human rights, but Australian Jews seem absorbed by Zionism."

 And compare it with this, by Paul Bogdanor:

'Docker grew up in the Sydney suburb of Bondi. His parents were both active in the Communist Party, his father Irish and his mother of East End Jewish background....

Docker was brought up without any religious beliefs, and didn't think of himself as Jewish during his childhood....' ]

I well remember the online Hage/Docker petition: pro-Zionists had sport with it, adding such signatories as "Adolf Hitler" and "Yasser Arafat" and even, if I'm not mistaken,  "Ariel Sharon".  Thus bestrewn with signatures each more preposterous than the last, and choc-a-bloc with  pro-Israel comments, the petition became a laughing stock, a notable floparoo, and if I recall correctly its originators ultimately hid the "add signature" facility from public view so that no further sport could be had.


 Now, I see, Ghassan Hage has tried to make sport of his own with that by now rather famous video of the Palestinian the Yishuv soccer team playing in Australia in 1939.


Rather more on the ball that those poor deluded anti-Israel propagandists who have triumphantly posted the video in the conviction that it showed a team of Arabs playing for their nation "Palestine" (see here and here), Hage has nevertheless made some strange, unfathomable comments:

 Meanwhile, in Sydney, from Lynch, Riemer and assorted academic buddies, more BDS nonsense.

From Dr Philip Mendes of Monash University, a  new article in which, inter alia, Hage is mentioned.

And from Dr Dvir Abramovich, of Melbourne University, some recent pertinent words relating to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions/demonisation of Israel mania mania:

'There is a well-funded and powerful cottage industry of NGOs, journalists, academics and activists who are crystal clear about their unabashed anti-Israel ideology. The goal of their openly declared war is to damage Israel’s standing in the court of world opinion and to bring about its collapse.

This fire-hot, unbridled hatred is obsessive and irrational, based on a methodical marshalling of lies that paint Israel as immoral and genocidal....

Facts and truth-telling are out.

This relentless, pernicious global crusade makes Israel’s existence the source of all troubles in the Mid-east and an ever-present threat to lasting peace, much more than Iran or ISIS.

Forget the dictatorships. Israel is the embodiment of evil, just like Nazi Germany. By that warped logic, fascist Israel is not just worthy of punishment and isolation through the BDS and UN censure, it is a country guilty of ethnic cleansing and oppression, that has no right to exist....

A world without Israel is the new anti-Semitism....'

Read all of Dvir Abramovich's article here

London's SOAS Votes For Academic BDS

It was predictable really, given the fact that the School of Oriental and Asian Studies at London University has the reputation as the most toxic of all British campuses for Jewish and non-Jewish supporters of Israel.

Yes, it was announced late on Friday that SOAS has voted in favour of the academic boycott of Israel.

The photo at left shows a number of the Israel-haters whooping it up earlier in the week, and as we saw earlier this month, a sophisticated video was part of the propaganda against Israel that formed part of the campaign that ended in "triumph" yesterday.

A recent SOAS stunt for "Israel Apartheid Week"

To quote an anti-Israel source:

"SOAS students and staff have endorsed an academic boycott of Israel, after the results of a week-long referendum were released Friday evening.

The vote, open to students, academics, and all other staff and management, finished with 73% for the 'Yes' campaign and 27% for the 'No' campaign.

The referendum asked members whether they think SOAS should fully join the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) campaign, and implement academic boycott following the guidelines of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).

Earlier this week, PACBI and Palestinian student and academic unions expressed their support for the 'Yes' campaign, and applauded efforts of pro-boycott campaigners.

The SOAS Students' Union has supported the BDS campaign since 2005. In October 2014, the Students' Union passed a motion that called on the Union "to take the BDS campaign to the University", through a school-wide referendum.

Along with Palestinians at SOAS, the boycott campaign received support from "the Justice for Cleaners campaign, the LGBTQIA+ Society, the Kashmir Solidarity Movement, Tamil Society, and the SOAS Student Union itself."

(Hat tip for bottom photograph: Seymour Alexander)

From A Toxic Campus: Pro-BDSers at SOAS call for academic boycott

The haters at the School of Oriental and African Studies, an institution that's notorious as a toxic environment for Jewish and pro-Israel students, attempt to justify their hate (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL9GFMr_1ck):

The American Academic Boycott That Failed

This is a guest blog by Professor William D. Rubinstein.

He writes:

Recently, an academic body in the United States, the American Studies Association (ASA), voted to boycott Israeli universities. The vote received wide publicity, and what occurred is unusually interesting, with ramifications for the worldwide BDS campaign.

The American Studies Association is composed of university academics who study American society and culture. It is similar to many other academic bodies concerned with particular fields of interest. Normally these bodies publish a journal and hold an annual conference.

The most controversial discussion at these conferences is, usually, the menu at the conference dinner and who is going to have the chore of organising the next conference, while their respective AGMs are invariably taken up with lamenting the dire state of the body’s finances. Nearly all of these bodies are pluralistic and non-political. In contrast, the ASA is overwhelmingly composed of ultra-leftist academics, who have turned it into an extremist advocacy group.

From what I can piece together about the ASA, about one-third of its leaders appear to be unreconstructed Stalinists, still sitting shiva for Uncle Joe and the gulags, while about two-thirds are "post-colonialist" leftists who think that Israel is a colonising power.

Before proceeding, it might be worth considering the sheer hypocrisy of the American post-colonialists' stance. Every leader of the ASA – every man-jack among them – lives on land which was stolen from the local American Indian tribe.  Surely these thieves should put their money where their mouth is, and give it back, without delay.

Many of the ASA's leaders are, rather strangely, at New York University, on Manhattan Island.  The Dutch "bought" Manhattan Island from the local Indians for $24, and surely these NYU faculty members should lobby the New York City government to hand it back, in exchange for $24 (plus interest).

But we digress.

The ASA voted to boycott Israeli universities. Not those in North Korea, China, Iran, or (needless to say) China. Not those of Saudi Arabia, whose state is ruled by an ideology from the Dark Ages, or the Ukraine, or Egypt, which has had two violent coups in three years, or any of the forty Third World hellholes whose local dictators have sequestered their countries' wealth in their Swiss bank accounts.

To condemn Israel while deliberately and utterly ignoring human rights violations, often a thousand times worse, in other countries is antisemitism in the nastiest, most odious, most deplorable sense of that term, and is strong evidence of how the Far Left has now inherited the legacy of the pre-1945 Far Right.

It is also a complete non sequitur, since Israel’s universities have no control whatever on policy in the West Bank. It is as if a foreign group which doesn’t like the way Aborigines are treated in Australia's Northern Territory decided to boycott the academics in Melbourne or Sydney.

Moreover, as in all Western countries the academics at Israel’s universities consist overwhelmingly of wall-to-wall liberals and leftists, who almost certainly vote for the Israel Labor Party and parties to its left. The ASA has bizarrely targeted these people, not the West Bank religious settlers.

When the ASA passed its anti-Israel revolution, Mondoweiss, the anti-Zionist website, claimed that the vote represented a "tipping point" in the BDS movement. It was, but in a rather different sense from what the ASA hoped. In fact, significantly and unsurprisingly, the "tipping" occurred against the BDS movement, burying it under tons of rubble; the lessons to be drawn from this debacle (for them) are highly instructive.

Almost immediately, a tidal wave of non-compliance with the ASA resolution literally swept America’s universities. Over 225 university presidents have explicitly disassociated their respective institutions from the resolution, including every heavyweight, internationally-known school – Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Berkeley, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Chicago, MIT, and dozens of similarly renowned universities.

Many of these have reputations as bastions of the left, but have drawn the line at boycotting Israel, with that boycott’s clear smell of antisemitism. Twenty universities have left the ASA as a result of the boycott resolution, and the resolution has been condemned by a range of academic and professional bodies, including the American Council on Education (with 1700 colleges as members), the Association of American Universities, and the American Association of University Professors (with 48,000 members).

Professor William Jacobson of Cornell University, who has been leading the attacks on ASA (and whose Legal Insurrection website is a key source of information) is also seeking to have the ASA’s tax exempt status removed, since boycotting Israel is in clear violation of the stated aims of the ASA. Many other examples of the total rejection of the ASA’s antisemitism could also be cited.

The utter failure of the BDS movement in the the university sphere has its recent parallel in the US Congress.  Earlier this month, the US House of Representatives voted by 410:1 to approve the US-Israel Strategic Partnership Act, which designates Israel as a "major strategic partner" and allows Israelis to travel to the US without a visa.  The lone dissenting voice came from a neo-isolationist "libertarian" Republican (Thomas Massie, of Kentucky), not from a left-wing Democrat.

In all seriousness, a resolution praising George Washington would be unlikely to pass the US House of Representatives by a 410:1 vote, and is clear evidence that the BDS gang has no traction or salience outside of the Looney Left and, of course, of Arab and Islamic sources which are mistrusted – to put it mildly – by most Americans.  What the future holds cannot be predicted, but for the present, in the USA at least, BDS is a non-starter.

Bigotry With An Irish Brogue (includes video)

In this video uploaded to YouTube by the praiseworthy group Irish4Israel, a hate-filled BDS bully, cheered on by similar bigots, directs an expletive-ridden tirade at Professor Alan Johnson during the latter's address against BDS at the University of Northern Ireland, Galway on 5 March.

Despite the best efforts of honourable individuals such as the professor, the following motion was passed the following day by 1,954 votes to 1054, which means that NUIG Students' Union is the first students' union in the Emerald Isle to uphold the odious BDS campaign:

“That NUI Galway Students’ Union actively supports the campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against the State of Israel.”

Watch the results being announced and the jubilation of the bigots, with references to "reactionary fascists", "apartheid", and other canards; those who've watched other videos featuring anti-Israel activity in Ireland will recognise a familiar voice towards the end:

Needless to say, Israel's arch-critics within and without Ireland are similarly cock-a-hoop. 

Martin O'Quigley, who chairs the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC), widely seen as one of the most vicious of such organisations, is quoted thus:

"This is an historic victory for those who stand in solidarity with Palestinians living under the heel of Israel’s racist, apartheid system of occupation and colonisation. The IPSC salutes all those students who stood with the oppressed on the right side of history and endorsed this measure, despite a stream of venomous anti-Palestinian propaganda and dirty tricks being injected into the debate from off-campus forces, including the Israeli Embassy in Ireland’s failed attempts at using social media to influence the outcome.Particular credit is due to the NUIG Palestine Solidarity Society whose hard work lay behind the tabling and passing of the motion. We hope other universities and ITs in Ireland will now follow suit in establishing such Palestine solidarity societies and seeking to table similar motions. We cannot think of a better way to round off this year’s Israeli Apartheid Week in Ireland."

 Crows a representative the NUIG PSS:

"This is a landmark victory in Ireland for the growing international campaign to boycott Israel until it complies with international law and ends its illegal occupation of Palestine, and no doubt NUIG SU is just the first of many SUs in Ireland to endorse such a campaign.

NUIG Students decided that, in the footsteps of the successful international boycott campaign against South Africa’s apartheid regime in the past, we will not be silent towards international racism and colonialism in our own time. Alongside promoting awareness of the BDS movement more broadly, NUI Galway SU will now stand unambiguously against instances of institutional collusion between NUI Galway and Israeli oppression ..."

 Read (and see) more here 

BDSer Jake Lynch Deserves A "Red Card" Targeted Israeli Academic Tells Newspaper

Good onya, Aussies!

It was reported  in yesterday's Higher Education pages of The Australian newspaper that Israeli political scientist Professor Dan Avnon, who has just taken up a Sir Zelman Cowen scholarship at Sydney University’s Institute for Democracy and Human Rights, has scathingly criticised the Centre's head, BDSer Professor Jake Lynch, who had earlier attempted to deny a fellowship to Avnon on the grounds of his Israeli nationality.

In the course of an exclusive interview with the newspaper, Avnon said

'he believed Professor Lynch deserves a “red card” for refusing to sponsor him because the Sydney academic supported the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel. “The fact that academics at the University of Sydney have rallied to my cause doesn’t diminish the severity of Lynch’s attempt to boycott me as a Jewish Israeli academic,” Professor Avnon said....

He said Professor Lynch deserved to be sanctioned for boycotting him, describing it as against the principles of academic freedom and exchange, and ignoring the work he had done to try to achieve a degree of understanding between young Jews and Arabs.'

Avnon noted the

'warm welcome by Sydney University academics appalled at Professor Lynch’s actions, along with ordinary Australians who had written emails of support.

“The Australians have been a light unto the nations,” Professor Avnon said, using the classical expression from the Book of Isaiah....'

The full report (entitled, if you're googling, "Boycotted Israeli embraced by other fellows") is behind a paywall here

He Said, She Said: The good, the bad, & the perplexing of the year that was

As we enter the UN-declared Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, here's a brief round-up in snippet form of some items  I didn't have time to mention before.

Some are good, some bad, and two of the latter type are perplexing.

I list them under the names of the chief actors,  in alphabetical order, naturellement.

***********************************************************************************
Woody Allen, publicly getting it at long last:

"I do feel there are many people that disguise their negative feelings toward Jews, disguise it as anti-Israel criticism, political criticism, when in fact what they really mean is that they don’t like Jews."

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Bill Anderson, non-Jewish Aussie academic, in a letter to The Australian (20 December 2013) concerning anti-Israel Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon:

'.... Rhiannon and other extremists in the Greens have frequently indulged in intemperate and ill-informed attacks on Israel. The NSW Greens conference in 2011 passed a proposal to "boycott Israeli goods, trading and military arrangements, and sporting, cultural and economic events as a contribution to the struggle to end Israel's occupation and colonisation of Palestinian territory, the siege of Gaza and the imprisonment of 1.5 million people and Israel's institution of a system of apartheid".

This radical anti-Israel policy is at odds with the policies of both main parties in Australia and the majority of the Australians. It is also at odds with the federal Greens, which voted against a similarly worded proposal.

The NSW Greens policy is so one-sided and extreme that it could have been written by Hamas. Given that Hamas is recognised and listed by most democratic governments as a terrorist organisation, one can hardly be surprised that this position of the NSW Greens would cause concern.'

************************************************************************************
Association of American Universities (quoted here) regarding the reprehensible Academic Boycott:

 "The Executive Committee of the Association of American Universities strongly opposes a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.... Any such boycott of academic institutions directly violates academic freedom, which is a fundamental principle of AAU universities and of American higher education in general.

Academic freedom is the freedom of university faculty responsibly to produce and disseminate knowledge through research, teaching, and service, without undue constraint. It is a principle that should not be abridged by political considerations. American colleges and universities, as well as like institutions elsewhere, must stand as the first line of defense against attacks on academic freedom.

Efforts to address political issues, or to address restrictions on academic freedom, should not themselves infringe upon academic freedom. Restrictions imposed on the ability of scholars of any particular country to work with their fellow academics in other countries, participate in meetings and organizations, or otherwise carry out their scholarly activities violate academic freedom. The boycott of Israeli academic institutions therefore clearly violates the academic freedom not only of Israeli scholars but also of American scholars who might be pressured to comply with it. We urge American scholars and scholars around the world who believe in academic freedom to oppose this and other such academic boycotts."

************************************************************************************

Frank Baigel, who sits on the Jewish Leadership Council as president of the Manchester Jewish Representative Council, responding here to JLC chairman Mick Davis's latest cheap shot at Israel, an article in Haaretz here:

“As Israel continues to be under continuous existential threat, I always — as all diaspora Jews should — support Israel, whichever party is in power. Until I go to live in Israel myself, I will not publicly express any reservations about the government’s policies.”

(Image at right: a cheap shot from Mick in 2010)
***********************************************************************************
Martin Bright, the Jewish Chronicle's first non-Jewish political editor, on leaving the paper to take up another appointment:

"I have learnt much over the past few years. I have begun to understand the umbilical relationship between many British Jews and Israel, and their visceral reaction when it is attacked. I have grown to appreciate the many subtle and ingenious ways that antisemitism can express itself."

***********************************************************************************
Pat Condell, with a chilling warning about the astonishing state-sponsored appeasement of Islamism in Sweden and all it portends for Jews (and for women); this video has had many thousands of hits, so chances are you've already seen it:

***********************************************************************************
Paul Charney, chairman of the Zionist Federation, commenting here on Mick Davis's latest cheap shot at Israel:

“While everyone has the right to criticise Israel, the ZF believes that the primary role of community organisations should be to counter the falsehood that Israel doesn’t want peace, rather than inadvertently promoting it.”

**********************************************************************************
Nick Cohen, British columnist, on the skewed preoccupations of the liberal-left:

As things stand, the world remains upside down. The left rather than the right defends reactionary religion, as long as the reactionaries do not have a white skin. You should never tire of pointing out that they are complicit in an enormous betrayal of progressive principles. Women, gays, secularists, liberals and socialists from ethnic minorities ought to be able to turn to British liberals and leftists for support against the patriarchal men, who seek to control them. Rather than fraternal greetings, they find indifference and hostility. The mainstream of liberal-left opinion in the universities, media, civil service, and Labour and Liberal Democrat parties has convinced itself that it is culturally imperialist to demand that members of minorities should enjoy the same freedoms as the rest of us.

This is why there has not been one prosecution for female genital mutilation. This is why, when 15-year-old white schoolgirl runs off to France with a teacher, the story leads the news, but when the parents of a Pakistani girl pull their daughter from class and force her to marry an old man —that is, when they organise her abduction and rape— liberal society stays silent. I should not need to add that multiculturalists who deny rights to people on the grounds of their ethnicity are every bit as racist as the white supremacists they profess to oppose.'

*********************************************************************************
Finian Cunningham, Irish political activist and Press TV hack, with the refrain to his song for Palestine:

"Someday, brother, we're go-nah come"

(What's that all about, then? A hope-springs-eternal chant for gentlemen with erectile difficulties?)
 **********************************************************************************

Edgar Davidson, British pro-Israel blogger, making a fundamental point in model fashion in reply to a letter from his MP:

'I note you said you were "a supporter of Israel's right to exist". This is a statement used by many MPs, which has always struck me as rather curious and I know many Israelis are offended by it.  To have one's very existence even considered as open to debate is something that is applied to no other country in the world (many of which were created AFTER the modern day state of Israel,  and many of which were the result of either war, arbitrary colonial land demarcations or a mixture of both).' 

(To his credit, the unnamed MP replied:

'I take your point. I should have probably said that I believe in Israel's right to defend itself rather than its right to exist. The reason behind using the phrase I did was that sometimes I get the impression some criticism which is supposedly directed at the Israeli government - any government should be subject to criticism - is actually a cover for deep-rooted anti-semitism which of course is completely unacceptable, or should be.') 

************************************************************************************
Chris Doyle, director of CAABU (Council for Arab-British Understanding), cheerleading for an increased Arab political presence in the UK; see  here and here:

'One of the things that sometimes holds Arab communities back from lobbying is actually the belief in some of the conspiracy theories that somehow the Israel lobby is all-powerful, never makes any mistakes, and you can’t challenge it… This is not true....

The crucial thing is, in the United States, in Britain, in France, in these other countries, that those citizens of Arab origin in one way or another, have the faith and the belief to get more politically active. In Britain we have never had, despite having quite a large British-Arab community, we've never had a Member of Parliament elected, there's never been an Arab member of the House of Lords, or even a British-Arab Member of the European Parliament. They are not joining political parties, etcetera. Then from within that framework, if they were to do so, and I'm sure they will; a new generation is coming forward, lots of talent and brilliant people, then they can start making a difference and also become that strategic bridge to the Arab world where the British-Arab community becomes the point of call for Arab government to use, to connect with in order to effect decision making in London and Brussels and Washington....'

**********************************************************************************
 Dr Oscar Embon, director of the Sieff Hospital in Tzfat on treating patients from Syria:

"Some beautiful relationships have started between the staff at the hospital and the people that we treat. Most of them express their gratitude and their wish for peace between the two countries ....

I don't expect them to become lovers of Israel and ambassadors for what we do here, but in the interim I expect they will reflect on what was their experience here and that they will reflect differently on what the regime tells them about Israelis and Syrians being enemies." (Kudos to Kevin Connolly of the BBC for reporting on what the BBC, like the rest of the leftist media, usually ignores.)

***********************************************************************************
Jonathan Freedland, well-known British journalist, here:

'....So much as mention antisemitism and someone will pop up to tell you that Arabs are semites too so why do Jews insist on hogging, as it were, all the antisemitism for themselves. But the word was not a Jewish invention. It was popularised by a 19th-century German Jew-hater called Wilhelm Marr, keen to put his loathing on a pseudo-scientific basis: he used "semites" to mean Jews and, partly because "anti-Jewish racism" is a mouthful, the word has stuck.

Despite the name, it is not a phenomenon safely buried in the past. Just because hatred of Jews reached a murderous climax in the 1940s does not mean it ended with the war in 1945. It is alive and well even in 2013. Whether it's on Twitter or in the cartoons that routinely appear in much of today's Middle Eastern press, crude slurs and hideous caricatures of Jews – hook-nosed and money-grabbing – endure.

Move away from the gutter, however, and antisemitism is rarely so obvious. It is communicated through nods and winks, hinted at rather than spoken. In Britain especially, prejudice against Jews has long been of the latent, rather than overt, variety. Even the words Jew or Jewish are often avoided: spotting the euphemisms – "flamboyant North London businessman" – is a pastime in its own right....

Instead, there are familiar tunes, some centuries old, which are played again and again. An especially hoary trope is the notion of divided allegiances or plain disloyalty, as if, whatever their outward pretence, Jews really serve another master besides their country. Under Stalin, Jews, especially Jewish intellectuals, were condemned as "rootless cosmopolitans" (another euphemism) lacking in sufficient patriotism....

In the antisemitic imagination, Jews are constantly working for some other, hidden goal. In this, antisemitism stands apart from other racisms, which tend to view the hated as straightforwardly inferior. Antisemitism is instead a conspiracy theory of power, believing that the Jews – always operating as a collective – are bent on some grand plan of world domination. Which is why images of Jews as puppet masters, or of having the world in their "financial grips", as Baroness Jenny Tonge so memorably put it, always hit a nerve.

In the last century, antisemites of left and right diverged on exactly how the Jews planned to enslave the human race. Jew-haters of the left believed capitalism was the preferred method, while antisemites of the right reckoned communism was the Jews' chosen tool, with Marx and Trotsky the fathers of an imagined "Judeo-Bolshevism"....

And always on hand for the antisemite is some reference to Jews' religious practice, real or imagined. For centuries, those who hate Jews would throw the phrase "chosen people" back in their faces, falsely interpreting it as a mandate for Jewish supremacism. Others would claim that Jews feasted on the blood of Christian children as part of their Passover ritual, the lethal "blood libel" that prompted anti-Jewish pogroms and cost Jewish lives for centuries. It might be a reminder that Jews were still chained to the Old Testament alone, unenlightened by the gentler, more forgiving teachings of Jesus....'

***********************************************************************************
Alan Hart, risible ex-BBC broadcaster reduced to appearances on Iran's Press TV (in an article for which he called Zionists "The New Nazis), a 9/11 truther, here:

'As I write I am recalling what former President Carter said to my wife and I when we met with him and Rosalyn, words I quote in my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews and which bear repeating. “Any American president has only two windows of opportunity to take on the Zionist lobby – in the first nine months of his first term and the last year of his second term if he has one.”....

Also in my mind as I write are the words of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu when he was denouncing and rejecting the interim agreement with Iran. “Today the world became a much more dangerous place because the most dangerous regime in the world has made a significant step in obtaining the most dangerous weapons in the world.” This, about a country which does not possess nuclear weapons and doesn’t want them, from the man whose state possesses hundreds of nuclear warheads and tactical battlefield nuclear weapons. No, Mr. Netanyahu, while it is led by you and/or your kind, Israel has the most dangerous regime in the world.

I remain puzzled by what Netanyahu really is. Does he believe all the nonsense he talks about Iranian and Arab and other Muslim military threats to Israel’s existence, in which case he has become the victim of his own propaganda and is deluded to the point of clinical madness; or does he know he is spouting propaganda nonsense every time he opens his mouth? (When making a judgement keep in mind the Mossad’s motto – “By way of deception thou shall do war.”)

In any event, if there was a Nobel Prize for Nonsense, it would have to be awarded to Netanyahu. He’s light years ahead of any other contender. If Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, was still alive, I imagine he’d say in private, “Netanyahu makes me look like an amateur.”....'

**********************************************************************************
Samuel Hayek, Chairman of JNF UK, commenting here about Mick Davis's latest cheap shot at Israel: 

“Pointing fingers and accusing the leaders of Israel for their peace negotiations approach, particularly when Israel has made many concessions to enable peace to take place — including the recent release of murderers who were heralded as heroes by the Palestinian Authority — is uninspired and certainly absurd. This is not a representative view of our community, who wholeheartedly supports Israel’s efforts to achieve peace.”

***********************************************************************************
Sarah Honig, blogging here (with photos) about antisemitism and anti-Zionism in Ireland, on an encounter in the little town of Cahersiveen:

'One would assume that there, near ["The Liberator" Daniel] O’Connell’s birthplace, we’d find sympathy for a far more ancient nation that won its independence from Britain, after a struggle no less bitter. Moreover, our underground fighters – foremost the IZL (the Irgun), whose leadership included Tzipi’s own father, Eitan Livni – patterned itself openly and proudly on the Irish Republican Army. The late prime minister Yitzhak Shamir’s nom de guerre in the LHI underground (a.k.a. the Stern Group) was Michael, his homage to Michael Collins – the revolutionary Fine Gael leader, who headed Ireland’s provisional government in 1922.

.... There were no hints of affection there for us. On the town’s main thoroughfare, Church Street, I was buttonholed by three boisterous teenagers in Santa hats, carrying a collection box and big signs reading “Free Palestine.” They solicited my contribution.

 I asked: “Free Palestine from whom?”

The cheery trio’s swift answer was unambiguous: “The Jews.”

I pressed on: “Do you know where your money would go? “

The boys: “To plant olive trees.”

“Are you sure,” I continued, as kindly-looking little old ladies generously opened their purses and dropped coins and bills in the collection box, “that this money wouldn’t fund terrorists and murderers?” Their retort threw me for a loop: “What do you have against Palestinians? What have they done to you? They are only against Jews. Jews are evil.”

I pried more. I asked what they know about the conflict. It was nothing except that Israel is the horrid ogre and the oppressed Palestinians are unquestionably worthy of compassion. Indeed the boys never stopped to question any of this.

I inquired who gave them these ideas and who sent them out to seek contributions in the town center. It turned out that it was a school-organized affair and that their teacher brought them all out, as a group, on a school day, during school hours, to do a pre-Christmas Christian good deed by “collecting donations for Palestine.”....

The teacher, who unsuspectingly volunteered his name to me, said he took out his pupils, all from the town’s single secondary school, as part of a class project “to further a humanitarian goal.” The goal was to collect money to enable the Palestinians to replace olive trees because “Jews stole their lands.”

All around him the cheery kids hoisted “Save Palestine” placards. There was a lot of hilarity. It was a lark. A good time was had. Outdoor frolic on a mild winter’s morning sure beats lessons in a dreary classroom.

I asked if this was a sanctioned school event and was solemnly assured that it was, all part of inculcating in the children a commitment to charitable work. I wondered aloud if something else wasn’t being inculcated. The teacher remained remarkably unperturbed when I repeated to him what the three boys said earlier about Jews “always being villains,” along with one youngster’s aside that “they crucified our Lord.” In fact, the teacher nodded in agreement, without a solitary word of objection.

“Isn’t there another side to this story?” I asked. I was shown a handwritten poster that boasted the Palestinian flag and proclaimed: “There’s a conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians that began in the early 20th century.” That was the one simplistic token to seeming objectivity.But it was meaningless and ended there. Another homemade placard read: “Together we’ll get rights for Palestine.”....'

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A Jewish Chronicle editorial (22 November) regarding the unconscionable leniency of the Lib Dems towards antisemitism in the party, following another whiff of judeophobia by yet another of its parliamentarians, David Ward:

'....The real issue here is not his antisemitism. It is his party’s reaction to it. To say the LibDems have a track record of excusing antisemitism barely comes close to the reality. It took years for the party to remove Baroness Tonge, despite her form of antisemitic Tourette’s. But its treatment of Mr Ward takes its acquiescence in race hate to another level.

When the LibDems finally decided to act against the Bradford East MP they suspended him over the summer recess, then swiftly readmitted him in time for the party conference. It was a ‘non-punishment punishment’ and implied the party did not believe any serious action was really necessary. That impression has now been confirmed by the LibDems’ refusal to utter even a word of criticism against Mr Ward for his latest outpouring of hate, despite it being a clear restatement of the most basic antisemitic theme of all — that wealthy Jews buy up power.'

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Jill,  the indefatigable poster-wielding heroine from Sussex Friends of Israel, in her customary sock-it-to-'em-with-a-smile pose:

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Sir Tom Jones, on completing a concert tour of Israel (where he memorably sang "My Yiddishe Momma"):

“I was in Israel ... where a lot of singers won’t go. I don’t agree with that. I think entertainers should enter­tain. They should go wherever – there shouldn’t be any restrictions. I did two shows in Tel Aviv, and it was fantastic....

I wanted to go, because the Israeli people asked me. They would like me to sing, and I don’t see any problem in doing that. I don’t see why anyone would mix up the two things – entertainment and politics.”

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Isi Leibler, inveighing against the reckless Israeli leftist newpaper Haaretz, which in addition to its other despicable acts such as lending its columns to propagation of the most-Jews-are-Khazars myth has stooped so low as to print a contemptible article by Eli Gat belittling and vilifying the heroes and heroines of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising:

Against all odds: three doomed heroines

".... Haaretz’ unprofessionalism is simply inexcusable. In its zeal to undermine the core principles of Zionism, it has done irrevocable damage. The distortion of facts and outright lies have aided our enemies and confused our friends, including Jews living in the Diaspora with limited understanding of Jewish or Israeli history. The Gat article demonstrates to what depths Haaretz will sink, twisting the facts – even of Holocaust history – in order to provoke its readers and disallow them even the smallest measure of Jewish pride.

Freedom of the press allows Haaretz, like any newspaper in Israel, the right to publish what it deems fit. However, newspapers are dependent on readers and the rapidly diminishing number of Haaretz subscribers should do what is necessary and take the most effective steps to influence the publisher and editor to prevent the paper from serving as a launching pad for enemies of Israel and the Jewish people."

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Ego Leonard, Dutch "anonymous guerrilla artist and painter," with this extraordinarily misleading exhibit (deliberate propaganda or plain ignorance?) at the "Other Art Fair" in London's Brick Lane, showing Muslims as victims of Nazi concentration camps along with Jews and gays. (Edgar Davidson exposed this ultimate-in-Muslim-victimhood myth; see here ):

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Antony Loewenstein, l'enfant terrible of Australian Jewry, had not one, but two bloopers that The Guardian felt compelled to remove from a piece in that Israel-demonising rag!

CiFWatch reported the delicious facts here and here

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Jake Lynch, University of Sydney associate professor and committed BDSer, embroiled in controversy regarding an unsuccessful application for a research grant:

'Academic Jake Lynch has instigated a union investigation into whether his support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel influenced the Australian Research Council to reject a grant....

Professor Lynch's support for BDS became headline news last year when he boycotted Israeli academic Dan Avnon, refusing to help the Hebrew University academic with his application for a Sir Zelman Cowen fellowship.

This year Professor Lynch submitted an application to the federally funded ARC for $290,000 to study the work of journalists in South Africa, Nepal, Australia and Britain....

The ARC recently rejected his application....

Labor MP Michael Danby, a fierce opponent of BDS, said he found it ironic Professor Lynch was whinging about not getting a research grant when he had refused to help Professor Avnon get one. Rather than being the result of a "political conspiracy", Mr Danby said, the ARC would have made its decision based on academic rigour. "Jake Lynch is not a very highly regarded academic, he's just basically an ex-BBC journalist," he said....'

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Curtiz Marez, president of the BDS-supporting American Studies Association, on being asked why the Jewish State (not Cuba, North Korea or China) was singled out for a boycott: 

"One has to start somewhere."

(To quote Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University, here:
'....The ASA has not gone on record against universities in any other country: not against those that enforce laws against homosexuality, not against those that have rejected freedom of speech, not against those that systematically restrict access to higher education by race, religion or gender. No, the ASA listens to civil society only when it speaks against Israel. As its scholarly president declared, "One has to start somewhere." Not in North Korea, not in Russia or Zimbabwe or China — one has to start with Israel. Really?....')

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Rupert Murdoch, owner of such pro-Israel newspapers as The Times and The Australian, reiterating his pro-Israeli position in November:

“[A]s Israel goes, so goes [...] our morality and our very existence as freedom loving citizens of the world.

This beleaguered nation and its people are beacons of hope and justice ...their enemies are our enemies, glorifiers of death, seeking to impose their bloody doctrine through violence.”

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Melanie Phillips, telling Canadian broadcaster Michael Coren of how her "unconventional wisdom" that involves "saying the unsayable" has cost her dear in a Britain dominated by a culture that has demonised the political centre by dubbing it "the Right," has gone to absurd lengths to abase itself before Islam, and by a complicit media which "starts with a conclusion and wrenches the evidence to fit":

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 Denis Prager, Middle East commentator, castigating  the Church of Scotland's odious report "The Inheritance of Abraham? A Report on the ‘Promised Land'" (issued in May):

'The essence of the report is that according to the Bible, Jews have no more attachment to the land of Israel than anyone else. Hence “promised land” is in quotation marks in the report’s title – because there is no promised land....

Even during the worst excesses of Christian anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages, it is doubtful that any normative Christian body declared that “Israel,” “the temple,” “Jerusalem” and “the land” no longer meant or were ever intended to mean what those words represent.

This claim is not only profoundly anti-Semitic. It is an act of theological forgery; it makes a mockery of the Bible as a coherent document and renders Christianity inherently anti-Semitic....

I have never equated criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. But the Church of Scotland report is not about criticism of Israel; it is about invalidating the Jewish people and invalidating the Jews’ historically incontestable claims to the land upon which the only independent states that ever existed were Jewish.

 It asserts that justice and the existence of a Jewish state are mutually exclusive: “There is a direct conflict of interest between wanting human rights and justice for all and retaining the right to the land.”

It asserts that the Jews’ return to Israel has no biblical basis.

It asserts that the notion that the Jews have or ever had a special relationship with God – one of the most oft repeated ideas in the Hebrew Bible – is negated in that very same Bible: “That exclusivist tradition implied Jews had a special, privileged position in relation to God. But the prophetic tradition stood against this.” The Chosen People is not chosen, in other words.

 It asserts that God’s promise of the land to Abraham has nothing to do with the Jews; it is only about Jesus: “The promise to Abraham about land is fulfilled through the impact of Jesus, not by restoration of land to the Jewish people.”

 It asserts that even Jesus – that proud, religious Jew – did not believe in any special relationship between God and the Jews: “Jesus offered a radical critique of Jewish specialness. … “

At the same time, this truly immoral document does not devote a word to why there were Palestinian refugees: While the Jews accepted the 1947-48 partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, all the neighboring Arab states rejected the partition and invaded the Jews in order to annihilate Israel at birth.

Nor does the report devote a single sentence to how Israel’s occupation of the West Bank came about: In 1967, Israel’s neighbors sought to exterminate Israel just as Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and most Palestinians and other Muslims in the Middle East wish to now. And that only because of that war, won by Israel, did Israel come to occupy the West Bank of Jordan.

Nor is a word devoted to Palestinian national honoring of their numerous terrorists, or to the exterminationist and anti-Semitic propaganda that saturates Middle East media or to the widespread Palestinian support for terrorism (according to the just-released Pew Forum poll of Muslims, 40 percent of Palestinians support suicide terror).

And the Church of Scotland did not think it important to even hint at what happened in Gaza after the Israelis gave the whole of Gaza to the Palestinians: The Palestinians converted it into a terror-state that regularly launches rockets into Israel to kill as many Israelis as possible.

And, most vile of all, the Church of Scotland never once notes, let alone condemns, the Muslim countries and organizations that seek to annihilate Israel, an existential threat that no other country or people in the world face....

.... The report is a combination of medieval Christian anti-Judaism and contemporary leftist anti-Zionism. For Jews and Israel, that’s a lethal combination.'

(Another fine indictment of the Church of Scotland here)

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Jonathan S. Tobin in a powerful indictment here of the the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association's backing of the despicable Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel:

'.... That another group of campus radicals with doctorates in subjects that are geared toward furthering left-wing theories would join the boycott of Israel is no surprise. That they don’t boycott China in sympathy with Tibet or any number of Arab and Muslim countries for their oppression of minorities is just the usual hypocrisy to be found on campus these days....

Academics in the West Bank are not suppressed. Quite the contrary, they work, publish, and pontificate in public while working in the many Palestinian institutions of higher education that were all founded after Israel took control of the area in 1967. Far from censoring activity at those schools, Israel has no input or ability to influence them whatsoever. All Palestinian colleges exist as hotbeds of support for terror and the delegitimization of Israel. The Palestinian media, especially that run by the Palestinian Authority which governs the daily lives of Palestinians in almost all of the West Bank, is similarly unrestrained by Israel and, as Palestine Media Watch reports on a regular basis, is a steady source of incitement to hatred against Israel and Jews. Nor are there any restrictions on the right of assembly for academics as the kerfuffle over the student body-supported Islamic Jihad fascist-style military parade at Al Quds University in Jerusalem proved. As for freedom of movement, it is true that Palestinians must deal with some Israeli army checkpoints that make travel difficult at times. But that doesn’t prevent them from moving about as they please .... 

By attempting to portray the Palestinians as the “indigenous people” of the territory on which the State of Israel and the administered territories exist and the Jews as the colonial settlers, they are perpetrating the big lie of Palestinian history. Jews are not foreigners in Israel as Europeans were in Africa. They happen to be the indigenous people of their ancient homeland and efforts to deny this isn’t scholarship. Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people and those who would deny them the same rights accorded other peoples are practicing bias, not scholarship. As with Palestinian attempts to deny the Jewish connection with the country or with Jerusalem and ancient Jewish holy sites such as the Temple Mount or the Western Wall, attempts to cast the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one between foreign occupiers and natives is revisionist myth recast as left-wing politicized scholarship.

There can be honest disagreement and debate about Israel’s policies in the territories, settlements, and borders. But by extending their argument to all of pre-1967 Israel as well as by smearing the Jews as colonists in their own country, the Native American studies group forfeits its credibility. Rather than being seen as the cutting edge of enlightened opinion, their support for BDS should mark them as a pack of incorrigible haters who should be treated with the same disdain and isolation that they would like to dish out to Israelis.'

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Simon Schama, the historian, speaking recently in London:

 'Zionism is a complicated thing. It’s richly inculcated with fine Jewish values. My Zionism is a two-state Zionism, it always has been. It’s a Zionism of the necessity of refuge....

You don’t have to approve of every new settlement that’s stuck in the middle of the West Bank — God knows I don’t — in order to say "I’m an unapologetic Zionist".'

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 The [Curious Case of the] Vacillating Vicar:

First, our old chum the Anglican anti-Zionism crusader posted this:

j

A day or two later, to the dismay of certain followers, this:

A few days later, to the acclaim of certain followers, this:

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Elie Wiesel in an ad produced by This World: The Values Network (LOGO); Executive Director, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach; sponsored by Michael Steinhardt, Board of Governors, This World: The Values Network; co-founder Birthright Israel:

'Iran Must Not Be Allowed to Remain Nuclear

If there is one lesson I hope the world has learned from the past it is that regimes rooted in brutality must never be trusted. And the words and actions of the leadership of Iran leave no doubt as to their intentions.

Should the civilized nations of the world trust a regime whose supreme leader said yet again last month that Israel is “doomed to annihilation,” and referred to my fellow Jewish Zionists as “rabid dogs?”

Should we who believe in human rights, trust a regime which in the 21st century stones women and hangs homosexuals?

Should we who believe in freedom trust a regime which murdered its own citizens in the streets of Tehran when the people protested a stolen election in the Green Revolution of Summer, 2009?

Should we who believe in the United States trust a regime whose parliament last month erupted in “Death to America” chants as they commemorated the 34th anniversary of the storming of our Embassy in Tehran?

Should we who believe in life trust a regime whom our own State Department lists as one of the world’s foremost sponsors of terrorism?

America, too, defines itself by its words and actions. America adopted me, as it did so many others, and gave me a home after my people were exterminated in the camps of Europe. And from the time of the founding fathers America has always stood up to tyrants. Our nation is morally compromised when it contemplates allowing a country calling for the destruction of the State of Israel to remain within reach of nuclear weapons.

Sanctions have come at a terrible economic cost for the people of Iran. But, unfortunately, sanctions are what have brought the Iranian regime to the negotiating table.

 I appeal to President Obama and Congress to demand, as a condition of continued talks, the total dismantling of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and the regime’s public and complete repudiation of all genocidal intent against Israel. And I appeal to the leaders of the United States Senate to go forward with their vote to strengthen sanctions against Iran until these conditions have been met.

I once wrote that history has taught us to trust the threats of our enemies more than the promises of our friends. Our enemies are making serious threats. It is time to take them seriously. It is time for our friends to keep their promises.'

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Geert Wilders speaking in Melbourne to the Q Society of Australia in February: newly uploaded video of the event here