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Tuesday, July 03, 2012

PCUSA may boycott HP. Excellent.

The Presbyterian Church-USA seems to be on the verge of approving divestment from Caterpillar, Motorola Solutions and Hewlett-Packard:

The country’s largest Presbyterian church has agreed to vote by week’s end on divesting its portfolio from three companies that it is says has resisted the request to stop providing services that aid Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

The Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly’s Middle East Committee voted 36 to 11 with one abstention in favoring of divesting its portfolio from Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola Solutions. The Committee said the company’s [sic] helped “Israel’s use of their products in violations of Palestinian human rights.”
The reasons are the usual idiocy. As described in an email I received:
Hewlett-Packard is rated one of the top socially responsible investment companies, but that was never mentioned. Motorola Solutions is a new corporation, having been spun off from its parent company in 2011 - but its unresponsiveness to MRTI entreaties was explained only as indifference to the suffering of Palestinians. The main focus, though, was Caterpillar. No attention was given to the fact that the equipment in question was sold to the U.S. government in the same form as any other bulldozer. Or that the modifications to the equipment that occur after market do not bring the company any profit. Or that the MRTI engagement was done alongside groups that interrupt Caterpillar annual meetings - not groups that a company would recognize as interested in dialogue or engagement.
But facts and logic are not on the radar of the divestment crowd, and this time it looks like they have enough followers who are swayed by emotional one-sided stories of Jewish brutality to win.

However, since BDS likes to claim that anything that happens on the planet is a victory for them, even when it has nothing to do with anything they did,  I'm going to do the same.

You see, Hewlett Packard is one of the few major US companies that routinely refer to the Palestinian territories as "occupied," meaning that they have swallowed the Palestinian Arab narrative that Palestinian Arabs live under "occupation."

(Briefly, for those late to the game, the legal definition of "occupation" comes from the Hague convention of 1907, and under that definition the people who are in Areas A and probably B - over 97% of Palestinian Arabs - are not living in "occupied territory" since Israel does not have the ability to replace the local PA government. Area C is disputed, not occupied, but under humanitarian law the people should be treated with the same rules as those under belligerent occupation, and they are.)

On HP's website they have dozens of drop-down boxes that look like this:


So if PCUSA divests from HP, that means that they are listening to my call to boycott Hewlett Packard for following a false narrative. As well as being anti-alphabetization, which may also be a crime against humanity according to some expert I can find if I need to.

I feel a victory coming!