Monday, November 26, 2018
Elder of Ziyon
BDS Newsbytes
Another BDSer Runs
Amok
By now, many of you have probably seen this
video of a “prominent” human-right BDS activist Simone
O’Broin going nuts on an Air India flight when the flight attendants refused to
give her more alcohol than the huge amount she had already clearly consumed.
Her tirade, including expletives and racial slurs directed
at those denying her booze, was also wrapped in a drunken version of the sort
of self-righteous outrage O’Broin and her ilk tend to serve up to anyone who
challenges their demand to be given the moral high ground immediately and
unconditionally.
This is just the latest example of boycotter misbehavior we
have seen in recent years. Just a couple
of years ago, for example, Husam El-Qoulaq (who played a central role in
organizing student government divestment votes as an undergraduate) won
Internet fame as the Harvard Law School student who told Israeli political
leader Tzipi Livni that she
smelled. Despite best efforts
by El-Qoulaq and the school to erase this misbehavior from personal and public
records, and best efforts by apologists to put his infantile comments “into
context,” El-Qoulaq now stands alongside O’Broin as exemplars of what is really
going on in the mind of the BDSer.
Keep that in mind the next time they try to feign
reasonableness before an audience they are trying to sucker.
AirBnB
Speaking of suckers, the decision by the online travel firm
AirBnB to delist properties in the disputed territories (but only the ones
owned by Jews) can be seen as the latest attempt by political activists to go
around the political process by targeting the Internet firms that control
access to goods, services, news and interpersonal communication.
Given how much time I and others have spent debunking BDS
hoaxes, it is in our interest to admin when the BDSers score a rare win, if
only as a point of contrast. But it
should also be acknowledged that this win, which came at the end of a two-year
bullying campaign supported by wealthy and high-profile organizations like the
increasingly contaminated Human Rights Watch, ended not with the crippling of
the Jewish state’s economy but rather with a few dozen houses no longer being
included in one of many online travel sites.
This story can also be seen in light of the traditional BDS
tactic of demanding someone else take action with no concern for the
consequences that someone else will have to bear. Already, AirBnB has faced stiff criticism for
their hypocrisy, given how many human rights abusers – including genuine
occupiers of other people’s territory – they continue to include in their
listings. The inevitable lawsuits are
beginning to kick in, and it’s just a matter of time before the company is
asked to explain why their decision should not trigger action by the many, many
US states that have anti-boycott legislation on the books.
As those consequences gel, I suspect that the many
compliments AirBnB received for caving to BDS pressure will not translate to a
scintilla of support for a company that must now bear the brunt of a choice
forced on them by others. Freiers.
University of Leeds
Having just mentioned a BDS win, it’s worth noting that the boycotters
are still trying to pull fast ones on the public when they announce their
latest “victory” on a BDS web sites or in some breathless press releases.
Most recently, we’ve seen the Hampshire Strategy
play out in the UK where the decision by the University of
Leeds to change its investment strategy based on issues related to
climate change was transformed into their joining the BDS “movement.”
How did this come about?
Well, as at Hampshire, Leeds has been targeted for years by anti-Israel
activists demanding investments in several large and prominent companies pulled
from the school’s portfolio. And, like
every other similarly targeted university on the planet, they have refused to
do so. But given the scale and diversity
activity of their portfolio, it was just a matter of time before some of those
investments got moved in and out, either for purely financial reasons (like the
stock not doing well) or for political reasons having nothing to do with the
Middle East.
As I’ve noted before, divestment is a political act which
means taking a financial step without announcing publicly that you are doing so
for a clearly stated reason means political divestment has not occurred. In the
case of Leeds, as at Hampshire, the school has actually stated explicitly that
they did not do what the BDSers say they did, making it even more clear that
divestment has not occurred.
Given that Hampshire is still trotted out as a BDS “win”
nearly ten years after this ur-BDS hoax was exposed, don’t expect Leeds to get
dropped from Omar Barghouti’s slide deck anytime soon.
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