Shmuley's Viral Ad ... & a BDS Win

"America's Rabbi" (as he describes himself) Shmuley Boteach has never, to put it mildly, shied away from publicity, and if you look at his Facebook page you'll see that he's been getting very excited each time a news outlet reports on this ad, which he's taken out in the Washington Post.

The ad does make excellent points regarding Lorde's decision to cancel her June gig in Tel Aviv (about which the great David Collier posted so very eloquently here).

The antisemites are, of course, out in force, attacking the rabbi and da Joos Khazars in intemperate terms.  But many supporters of Israel are questioning whether taking out this ad was wise, arguing, inter alia, that it has given inordinate publicity to a Kiwi performer who's not been exactly a household name and that Boteach's stunt will backfire, being interpreted as bullying, and making as many converts to the odious  BDS cause as it would hope to allay.

As the antipodean J-Wire service reports:  

'.... A spokesperson for the New Zealand Jewish Council said:  “The advertisement funded by The World Values Network does not promote understanding or engagement. The New Zealand Jewish Council is committed to dialogue and tolerance and distances itself from the inflammatory and aggressive material that stoops to the level of BDS rather than rising above it ....'

The huge kerfuffle over Lorde has, incidentally, tended to obscure a victory for the BDS movement in November that has been the subject of this triumphalist video featuring the plummy-voiced London-based Sandra Watfa from Inminds.

It concerns hip hop artist Rag'n'Bone Man's (Rory Charles Graham's) decision to cancel his gig in Tel Aviv scheduled for next May, and we see the decision played out in real time, as it were, with his manager liaising with anti-Israel protesters outside his concert in Brixton, South London demanding that he do so, and telling them that their demo has convinced Rag'n'Bone man not to go ahead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noDAqijyAx8

All very well thought out, huh?

No Israel Please, We're Jewish Students

With nasty chants such as these on college campuses it's no wonder Jewish and pro-Israel students feel intimidated:

(The venue: Hunter College in New York; the chants: "Zionists out of CUNY!" and "Long live the Intifada!")

Even so, US-based Rabbi Shmuley Boteach was ill-prepared for the craven response of Jewish students across the herring pond a few days ago when he mentioned the "I" word:

'What shook my confidence in British Jewry today was my experience at King’s College [London] where I was invited to address the Jewish Society. I focused my remarks on Israeli democracy and the ways in which it could be a model for the autocratic Arab states of the region. Israel is the great hope for the spread of human rights throughout the Middle East.

As I spoke, I could see my hosts growing restless and the discomfiture on their faces surprised me. I was in for a bigger shock, however, when my hosts stopped me mid-lecture and said that they were opening the floor for questions. I am always happy to respond to questions, friendly or hostile, but I have rarely been interrupted so abruptly by the people who invited me to speak. (The talk was video taped on a phone.)

When I asked for an explanation, I was told by the president of the organization, a young man wearing a yarmulke, that the Jewish Society has a policy against speaking about Israel. The group, he said was non-political and focused on “Jewish subjects.”

Israel not a Jewish subject? I was dumbfounded. It was as if Israel had become the Voldemort of nations, the country that dare not be named.

When I recovered from the shock, I asked if I should speak about lox and bagels, klezmer music or Manischewitz wine. My sarcasm seemed to go right over my hosts’ heads. For them, Israel and Judaism were unrelated. I asked if the murder of Israeli citizens in countless terror attacks over the past month was likewise a “political issue,” or one of human rights. I was told by one of the students that these things needs not be put in boxes. Worse, I sensed that these students, who had enough pride in their heritage, and commitment to their faith, to wear their yarmulkes in public, had become so cowed by the omnipresent hostility and bullying on and off British campuses that they were afraid to engage in a dialogue about Israel.

The talk was video taped on a phone and the discomfort of the students discussing, let alone defending, Israel is deeply jarring....' 

 Read more here

See this by Boteach too

Roger Waters: A meeting of minds

In the course of a must-read article here, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach observes of the Pink Floyd frontman's recent despicable comparison of Israel to Nazi Germany:

'Roger Waters’ balderdash about rabbis believing that non-Jews are subhumans is the dirtiest of blood libels and contradicts the core teachings of the Torah which states in its very first chapter, Genesis 1, that every human being is created equally in the image of God.

And surely, even someone with as rancid a heart as Mr. Waters, is familiar with what Christians call Jesus’s Golden rule, but which is actually found much earlier, in the Hebrew Bible, the commandment to “Love your fellow man as yourself” (Leviticus 19.17), which Hillel, in the Talmud, interpreted to mean, “That which you hate do not do unto others.”

Perhaps Mr. Waters should take Hillel’s advice. Stop maligning a people who have paid a terrible price for the kind of abominable lies that people like Roger Waters unjustly hurl.'

There's been more lambasting of Waters' remarks, as reported here

Waters' vile analogy has been criticised even by that inveterate knocker of Israel, the Reverend Stephen Sizer: on Facebook (hat tip: reader P) some of Sizer's followers are overtly aghast at this unexpected observation of his:

Meanwhile, as seen in this report, there seems to be a paralysing split, regarding goals, between Palestinian Islamists and secular nationalists, and there's a triumphalist article by Omar Barghouti, daddy of the BDS movement, about recent triumphs for BDS here