The Unmasking of BDS
Congress will need to do much more.
by ZIVA DAHL
August 19, 2019, 12:02 AM
After 14 years of being lulled by propagandists into believing that their boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign (BDS) is a human rights movement, we’re finally waking up to the deception.
The U.S. House last month overwhelmingly passed a bill opposing BDS efforts to target and delegitimize the State of Israel. Last February, the Senate passed a bill, never taken up by the House, legalizing the right of state governments and employee benefit plans to refuse to do business with companies boycotting Israel, thereby protecting the 27 states with anti-BDS legislation. Concerned about BDS similarity to Nazi boycotts and incitement of anti-Semitism becoming “the breeding ground for escalations to violence,” the German parliament recently passed a resolution declaring BDS anti-Semitic.
The Western world is acting, albeit slowly, to unmask BDS for what it is — a dangerous 21st-century iteration of the age-old scourge of Jew-hatred. Anti-Semitism is a mutating cancer, evolving and adapting, intent on destroying Jews in their host communities. Our State Department definition of modern-day anti-Semitism identifies expressions of hatred, including when disguised as Israel-bashing and anti-Zionism, the hallmarks of BDS.
The BDS movement was founded by left-wing socialists and Marxists in 2001 explicitly to undermine Israel’s sovereignty, skillfully exploiting the language of peace, justice, and human rights to appeal to Western audiences. Adopted by Palestinian extremists in 2005, BDS misleads civic and cultural organizations, governments, and individuals into believing that its goal is merely to establish a Palestinian state living peacefully beside a Jewish state. Using sophisticated subterfuge to hide its linkage to Palestinian terror groups, it obscures its extremist endgame — the destruction of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people and the creation of yet another Arab-majority state.
People who should know better have bought into this “Big Lie,” conforming to their ideological predisposition and antipathies toward Israel, Jews, and the West. BDS founder Omar Barghouti calls for the destruction of Israel. He explained that a Jewish state “contravene[s] the basic rights of the land’s indigenous Palestinian population.… Ending the occupation doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t mean upending the Jewish state itself.”
BDS is the latest version of a history of boycotting European Jews. Arabs boycotted Jews in the British Mandate of Palestine. The Arab League formalized this policy in 1945, three years before Israeli statehood.
By delegitimizing and demonizing Israel, BDS flagrantly crosses the line into pure anti-Semitism. Its supporters equate Israel with Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa. By advocating the right of return of millions of Palestinians, it attacks the Jewish people’s right to self-determination. It targets Jewish students, intimidating, harassing, and physically threatening them.
New York Times writer Roger Cohen, a liberal critic of Israel, realizes that “Mellifluous talk of democracy and rights and justice masks the BDS objective that is nothing other than the end of the Jewish state.”
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Originally Posted by Kathianne
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