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Sunday, July 25, 2021

The Ben and Jerry's Foundation has funded BADIL, a Palestinian NGO that supports terror and promotes antisemitism

Ben and Jerry's controls the Ben and Jerry's Foundation which supports various social justice causes. 

In 2017, the Foundation gave some $80,000 to the Oakland Institute, a think tank whose executive director is Anuradha Mittal, the head of Ben and Jerry's Board of Directors who has shown her antipathy towards Israel and sympathy towards terror groups on multiple occasions. 

Of that amount, thousands were earmarked for the BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, which is dedicated to destroying Israel through the "right of return."


But BADIL is much worse than that.

In December of 2016, before this grant, BADIL issued a report that justified Palestinian terror - and said that Israel doesn't have the right to defend itself from rockets and terrorists.

The right to resist of people under foreign and colonial domination, including armed struggle, and the applicability of these provisions to the Palestinian people has been reaffirmed by many other UNGA resolutions...In its suppression of resistance, Israel has made use of excessive force to stop armed struggle....Equating all forms of resistance with terrorism as a justification for suppression lacks legal basis, as the Palestinian struggle for liberation is legitimate and all actions carried out against Israel for that purpose are therefore lawful.
BADIL allows that there are rare instances where individual Palestinians might have crossed a legal line, but then says that Israel cannot retaliate against entire armed terror groups that sent them on their murderous mission. BADIL says that it is open season on Jews in Israel. 

Before that, and certainly known to the Oakland Institute, BADIL cosponsored the 4th Annual Al-Awda Award in 2010 for posters, papers and caricatures. The second place award for caricatures, with a cash prize, went to this blatantly antisemitic cartoon:


This wasn't the only brush with antisemitism from BADIL. Its director Nidal Al-Azza, wrote in 2007 that it isn't only Zionism that is racist, but Judaism itself:

Racism in the Zionist ideology and later, in the Israel regime, can be identified in… political concepts, ideas and visions inspired by religious thought, provisions of the Talmud, and legends, most importantly, the notions of Jews as “the chosen people of God,” “the pure race” and “the promised land,”… [and] the mentality of segregation, nurtured by life in the ghettos.
All of this was known at the time Ben and Jerry's Foundation decided to grant thousands of dollars to BADIL, through Anuradha Mittal's own foundation.

Is antisemitism and explicit support for murdering Jews in Israel part of the "social justice" that Ben and Jerry's promotes?