A banner at Toronto’s York University in Toronto tells passersby to end their “support for Israeli Apartheid: cut the ties: boycott, divestments, sanctions.”
“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” (Isaiah 5:20)
This Monday, a six-day campaign began across Britain designed to discredit Israel with false accusations of Apartheid and criminal behavior, while also promoting Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israeli businesses and products.
Between February 23 and the end of March, Israel Apartheid Week (IAW) will occur across the world at varying lengths—likely in many of the 200-plus cities that hosted events last year.
This Thursday begins 14 days of IAW activities in the United States. As people gather in the name of hateful and angry ideas, too often these ideas translate into action.
The latest FBI statistics on US hate crimes reports that in 2013, attacks against Jews accounted for 60.3 percent (737 victims) of all religiously motivated hate crimes, while the second most targeted victims were Muslims at 13.7% (167 victims).
In a nation of 319 million people, that’s a low incident rate, and it has been declining over recent years. Although reported anti-Semitic incidents in Britain has declined from 2009 through 2013, it is now higher than it was 10 years ago.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn
It is difficult to estimate anti-Semitic incidents throughout the European Union (EU) because only half of all EU states collect such data, with each using their own collection criteria. (BBC)
Although the actual number of incidents seem relatively low, the brutality of these attacks is on the rise.
The vicious tactics of stone throwing and fire bombings are being replaced with mass killings. We saw this last month in Paris at the Charlie Hebdo offices where 12 were murdered and the kosher supermarket in Paris where four were murdered.
We saw it last year at the Belgium Jewish Museum where four were murdered, at the Jerusalem synagogue where five were murdered, and many more attacks in Israel and around the world.
The brutality of verbal and economic attacks against Jews and the entire state of Israel continue to rise as well, which is evident on most college campuses around the world, especially during IAW and BDS events.
The second week of March, we will see such events in Ireland and Canada. South America has been tagged to conduct IAW events at any point during the month.
An anti-Israel protester holds a sign falsely accusing Israel of genocide and war crimes. The map on the sign reveals the ambition to wipe out Israel and for a Palestinian state to replace it. The sign behind him on the left tells passersby to boycott Israel.
What the BDS Movement Claims
The BDS movement has been preaching to all who will listen a false dichotomy of good and evil—pairing Palestinians with “people of conscience everywhere,” while accusing Israel of committing a “bloody massacre” in Gaza. (BDS Movement)
BDS supporters also claim that Israel occupies Palestinian territory, painting the Jews as European colonialists with little to no historical or present-day rights to the land.
Protests against Israel often ring with echoes of “from the (Jordan) River to the (Mediterranean) Sea, Palestine will be free”—an evil chant that demands that the Jewish People be pushed into either landlessness or extinction.
A map of Israel and the Palestinian controlled territories of Gaza and the West Bank, as well as the Golan Heights and neighbouring countries. Also shown is the United Nations deployment, as of January 2004, in the area.
Of course, not everyone is deceived by this malicious propaganda.
A February 17 statement by US House congresswoman Janice Schakowsky stated that the BDS movement is “an effort to undermine the Jewish state of Israel, holding the country to a different standard than any other country in the Middle East or the world.”
Expressing support for two states for two peoples, including Israel as “a secure Jewish and democratic state,” Schakowsky said that the BDS movement “undermines collaborative efforts to create such a solution and takes us in the wrong direction.”
“This movement has chosen to single out Israel, the world’s only Jewish state, for alleged human rights abuses. … I am deeply committed to academic freedom and human rights, but the BDS movement is not a human rights campaign,” Schakowsky stated.
Prayer at the Western (Wailing) Wall in Jerusalem
While most BDS advocates say their campaign is “against Israel, not Jews,” Scholars for Peace in the Middle East President Richard L. Cravatts, author of Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel & Jews, claims this defense has “fallen away of late, revealing some caustic and base anti-Semitism.”
In an Arutz Sheva Op-Ed titled “Moral Madness in the Campus War Against Israel,” Cravatts states that “Jews now are being indicted in colleges not just for supporting Israel, but merely for being Jewish.”
Cravatts names the University of California in Los Angeles as a repeat offender in breeding anti-Jewish behavior, citing the omission of Rachel Beyda from the Undergraduate Students Association Council (USAC) Judicial Board.
According to the student paper, Beyda’s candidacy was measured “on the fact that she was Jewish and how her ‘affiliation with Jewish organizations at UCLA … might affect her ability to rule fairly.'”
UCLA (Wikimedia photo by Josh Lee)
According to Cravatts, the paper went so far as to name Beyda’s Judaism as problematic when it came to ruling on matters connected to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“She failed to pass the political litmus test that so-called progressive students see as their default position: namely, being pro-Palestinian,” Cravatts writes.
Representatives of UCLA’s Students for Justice in Palestine also looked to bar Jewish candidates from student council membership “if they had taken trips to Israel subsidized by the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, or other organizations” that stand against BDS, a move Cravatts said tries “to stack the deck against the pro-Israel argument.”
“This grotesque and inequitable proposal took as a given that anyone not committed to the anti-Israel Palestinian cause was by default not to be trusted, morally compromised, and unworthy of even having pro-Israel opinions,” Cravatts added. (Arutz Sheva)
Although Beyda was originally denied a position on UCLA’s judicial council because of her Jewish background, further discussion and a revote saw her garner a position on the council.
“I believe our community is more generous, thoughtful and inclusive than this particular incident would suggest,” said a statement released by UCLA’s Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs, Janina Montero.
BDS protesters in Melbourne erringly equate Zionism with racism.
Anti-Semitic views on campus are exemplified by recent student senate declarations.
Last Tuesday, the Stanford University student senate passed a vote for BDS against Israeli companies that the senate claims maintain “the illegal infrastructure of the Israeli occupation, in particular settlements and separation wall …, facilitating Israel and Egypt’s collective punishment of Palestinian civilians … and facilitating state repression against Palestinians.” (Forward)
Two days later, Northwestern University’s Student Government also passed a BDS ruling calling the university to divest from six companies the resolution sponsors say are involved in the “occupation of Palestinian lands.” (Daily Northwestern)
People of many ethnicities on a street in Acre, Israel
Some, however, are courageously opposing the BDS campaign.
The university’s Northwestern Coalition for Peace, comprising 20 students who are seeking an end to the BDS campaign against Israel and who support a plan for two states for two peoples, recognized Israel “as a Jewish and democratic state.”
In standing up to the pressure of the widespread BDS movement, this new student group received support by public officials and students, such as Ariel Roitman, who do not see “one side of the conflict as absolute evil and the other one as absolute victim.”
Referring to the BDS call for transparency in university investments, Roitman said, “A call for increased transparency must also be based in a transparent campaign that does not carry hidden agendas. … BDS will only make it harder for a two-state solution to be achieved.” (Daily Northwestern)
An Arab child and a Jewish child walk arm in arm. (YouTube capture)
BDS Supporters Demand Their Own Apartheid
In South Africa, at Durban University of Technology (DUT), the Student Representative Council (SRC) and the Progressive Youth Alliance (PYA) recently decided to oust Jews while trying to stand upon a defense of pro-Palestinianism.
“We took the decision that Jewish students, especially those who do not support the Palestinian struggle, should deregister,” reads the expulsion demand of SRC secretary Mqondisi Duma.
On his Facebook page, Duma clarified the council’s view that all students, not just Jewish, who support Zionism should deregister, adding, “Once more we repeat our position, Israel is an Apartheid State that should be fully isolated; on this point we will not concede. We are against all forms of racism including Zionism and anti-Semitism.” (Facebook, February 12, 2015)
“I think we need to be examining the vile ideology that’s causing these events to be commonplace, and accepted. Calls for Jews to be stripped of their rights, such as the right to an education,” Ariel Drouault, who will be making Aliyah to Israel from the US wrote in a Times of Israel piece entitled “The Sham of ‘Anti-Zionism.'”
“I’m sure all readers would—and rightly so—find the concept of targeting all Muslims as a result of ISIS’s barbarism, truly abhorrent and revolting. Why is it okay then, to attack members of one of the most persecuted groups in the world, over the actions of a sovereign political state?” he asked.
That vile ideology comes from the deep-seated hatred of God’s people, which originates with the enemy of God Himself. This truth is graphically expressed on Duma’s Facebook page, which displays an image of Satan in his favorite music list.
A Palestinian woman walks past the Old City walls of Jerusalem, between the New and Jaffa Gates.
BDS Damages Israelis and Palestinians
“The clans of Judah will say in their hearts, ‘The people of Jerusalem are strong, because the Lord Almighty is their God.'” (Zechariah 12:5)
According to BDS Movement, last year, the anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian voices succeeded in stopping possible environmental and infrastructural products from entering Israel, foiling international partnerships, and blocking the purchase of Jewish products created in Judea and Samaria where many employees of Israeli companies are Palestinians.
These Palestinians work side by side with Jewish employees and report that their Jewish employers provide them better working conditions and higher pay than alternatives available to them in territories under the Palestinian Authority.
These BDS movement victories are won as a result of bold-faced lies.
A Hassidic teenager glances toward an Arab grilled-meat stand in Jerusalem.
Israel is not Apartheid. It is a state where 1.6 million Arabs enjoy full citizenship and rights.
Arabs and Druze serve as
- members of the Israeli parliament (Knesset);
- judges in even the highest court in the land;
- soldiers in the military (by choice);
- teachers of Jewish children;
- doctors and hospital administrators; and
- business owners, homeowners, students, and employees in Israeli companies throughout Israel and Judea and Samaria.
President of the African Christian Democratic Party Reverend Kenneth Meshoe addresses Parliament during the State of the Nation Address in June, 2014.
Despite this, BDS supporters will be loudly declaring to the world over the next few weeks that “Israel is an Apartheid State” and that “Zionism is Racism.”
“The charge that Israel is an Apartheid state is a lie about the real Israel, and it is a lie about the real Apartheid [in South Africa],” Kenneth Meshoe, a member of the South African parliament, said in a Prager University Foundation YouTube video.
Justin B. Hayet, a recent graduate of Binghamton University (BU) in New York and a CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle Eastern Reporting in America) Fellow pointed out the imbalance in the boycott movement in a 2014 Jerusalem Post Op-Ed entitled “My university won’t stand up for Israel.”
“There’s no boycott resolution by the ASA regarding Syria, after over 100,000 dead and 8 million displaced by President Bashar Assad’s murderous regime. And beyond the Middle East, there is no boycott of China’s academic institutions, despite China’s blatant disregard of anything that favors democracy or human rights. There is no boycott of Russian institutions, despite Russia mounting anti-gay laws and President Vladimir Putin’s heinous weekly statements regarding such issues,” he wrote.
“Most shocking of all, there’s no resolution against the eight Palestinian universities, all built by Israel with Israeli taxpayer money, despite the Palestinian Authority’s (PA’s) praise of suicide bombers or the PA’s treatment of women and homosexuals.”
While 200 American universities have opposed the American Studies Association (ASA) resolution by last December to boycott Israeli higher education institutions, some have remained silent, including Hayet’s former university, Binghamton.
“The BU community has made no attempt at an uproar condemning the boycott. Will you too opt to continue to remain silent?” Hayet challenged readers.
Two Arab men enjoy a game of Backgammon at a Jerusalem cafe.
Countering the Lies with Truth
“Then I turned my thoughts to consider wisdom, and also madness and folly. … I saw that wisdom is better than folly, just as light is better than darkness. The wise have eyes in their heads, while the fool walks in the darkness.” (Ecclesiastes 2:12–14)
In every war against truth, the truth is replaced with lies.
The war against the right of return for the Jewish People to their homeland in Israel (known as Zionism) is no different.
Pictures are worth a thousand words of truth; one way to expose the lies of BDS is to show the true Apartheid and human rights violations occurring in the Muslim world in contrast to the freedoms Israel offers them in terms of employment, healthcare, and education for Arabs, women, and homosexuals.
Priests and Arab schoolgirls in Jerusalem
We can also share videos on Facebook and email, such as Prager University’s “BDS: The Attempt to Strangle Israel,” which reveals how BDS leaders exploit the naiveté of college students and the public.
Supporters of BDS actually believe the Palestinians want two states—and if only Israel would leave them alone and get out of Judea and Samaria, then they could have two states.
In reality, Palestinian leaders and the founders of the BDS movement want one state that reaches from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea—with no Jews in it.
They want to wipe the state of Israel off the map. That is the true motive of the movement, and that is what all BDS proponents are actually promoting across college campuses around the world—the annihilation of the Jewish State.
