But when you trace back the resolution, you see that it is all obfuscation to hide the real purpose of delegitimizing the Jewish state.
The resolution doesn't mention Israel or Palestinians or Gaza at all. Here is the operative part:
NOW THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, that the Board of Aldermen of the City of St. Louis calls on the Board of Trustees of the Employees Retirement System of the City of St. Louis, to ensure that all of the city resources entrusted to their stewardship, including stock holdings, bond investments, and pension funds are not invested in companies that are complicit in perpetuating violence against people within our city or abroad according to the guidelines established by the American Friends Service Committee.The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) is the Quakers, who have been obsessed with Israel and support BDS. They position their investment policy as being generally against war altogether, but it is centered on their "Investigate" database - which was built specifically against Israel, as its webpage still happily admits:
About 80-90% of the 286 companies on the AFSC list are linked to Israel. Perhaps to avoid accusations of being only anti-Israel they added a few other companies involved in US prisons or police. This way they position their divestment list as being comprehensive when in fact it is focused on Israel. And that is how the St. Louis aldermen can pretend that their resolution has nothing to do with Israel specifically.
But that is not the only way facts get laundered.
The AFSC, in turn, doesn't claim to have made its own investigations into Israeli "genocide" or "apartheid." It relies on reports by UN committees or Amnesty International to pretend that those accusations are undisputed.
And of course the UN and NGOs use their own definitions of those terms that only apply to Israel.
Which makes them antisemitic.
And there's more fact laundering. The St. Louis resolution was based on a campaign called "Not Another Nickel" which cloaks its anti-Israel goals by saying that the 1% of the investments in the St. Louis Retirement System that is invested in companies listed in the AFSC database is somehow taking away the city's access to clean water and air.
One more layer: the resolution is non-binding but it is being reported as "St. Louis Just Became the Largest City in the US to Ban Investments in Companies/Countries Involved in Human Rights Abuses." No, it didn't, but these lies make people think that this is an unstoppable wave and makes the next antisemitic resolution more likely.
This is the insidious way modern antisemitism works: there has been a conscious plan to build a framework of false accusations against Israel that gets supported by major players, then referenced in secondary sources as factual, and those secondary sources add their own lies but pretend to be neutral and more general, and then they can be referred to in turn by resolutions that are plainly meant to be anti-Israel but they have ideological cover.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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