Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.
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London, February 10 - Leaders of the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement targeting Israel over what they consider the Jewish State's occupation of Palestinian land announced today that as Moscow prepares to increase its hold on areas that belong to Kiev under international law, the movement will maintain its exclusive focus on Israel, and not acknowledge the greater loss of life, suffering, human rights violations, and other monumental injustices elsewhere in the world that dwarf those against which they claim to fight.
Prominent advocates of BDS stressed Thursday the importance of riveting their attention to what they allege Israel does, and not to let the atrocities and egregious policies of some of the most murderous regimes in history distract them from the singular goal of righting a supposed wrong that barely registers in the annals of human suffering, in the process of which they foment and encourage further suffering, much of it self-inflicted by Palestinians.
"We have never let other crises divert us from the central issue, which is Palestine," affirmed Omar Barghouti, who holds a Master's degree from Tel Aviv University. "China's occupation and cultural genocide in Tibet; its extermination of Uighurs in Xinjiang; its suppression of dissent in Hong Kong; Russian occupation of South Ossetia and large chunks of Ukraine; Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus - all of these and other large-scale crimes lie outside of our moral purview. Despite their accounting for tens of millions of casualties, and hundreds of millions of devastated lives over vast swaths of land, not to mention the erasure of indigenous identity and culture in those lands, whereas the Palestine conflict accounts for perhaps fifty thousand lives and territory the size of New Jersey, we maintain that righting the injustices facing Palestine demands more urgency. Some of us, in fact, dismiss that any of those other conflicts involve injustices at all. But don't you dare try to question the Nakba!"
"I've always said our movement, which is all about universal justice, always focuses only on Jewish occupation because you have to start somewhere," explained Ariel Gold, of Code Pink. "If anyone wants to start a BDS targeting Ethiopia over Tigray, or Myanmar over the Rohingya, or Morocco over Western Sahara, or... you get the idea, I'd be hear all day if I had to go through all the ones affecting more people than Israel-Palestine does - if anyone wants to do the same thing in other places, they can. No one's stopping them. I mean, good luck generating interest when Jews aren't involved, but they're welcome to it."
