BDS scrambling to find reasons to keep boycotting Sabra Hummus after it is bought completely by PepsiCo

The BDS group CJPME, "Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East," has a fact sheet on why they boycott Sabra Hummus - because it is half owned by an Israeli company Strauss which supports the IDF. 

At the end, they write:

The boycott of Sabra will end once it is no longer owned by the Strauss Group, and thus is no longer complicit in the oppression, violence and war crimes committed by Israel against Palestinians.

Recently, PepsiCo announced that they were buying out Strauss' half of Sabra. The Strauss Group decided to sell Sabra to its partner after losing market share as fallout from the discovery of salmonella in its hummus manufactured in Virginia in 2021, as retailers decided to diversify their hummus suppliers. 

BDS, predictably, is claiming that their campaign worked and they are the reason Strauss is selling Sabra, although that doesn't quite explain why PepsiCo would want to buy it for $244 million. 

Nevertheless, this means that Sabra no longer has anything to do with Israel. It is not manufactured there and no Israeli will profit from it when the sale is complete. So the boycott is over, right?

Ha! BDS is not based on little things like facts. They loved boycotting Sabra brand dips, whichhelped them recruit antisemites, and they aren't going to stop now. They just need to dig up new reasons for the boycott.

The BDS Reddit group started off vague about the reasons: "PepsiCo now owns 100% of Sabra. That means every tub of hummus on shelves still funds oppression."

How, exactly? 

it took ten days, but yesterday, BDS tweeted their new excuses for continuing the boycott. Sabra is still guilty of "blatant cultural appropriation of Arab foods" and Pepsi owns Sodastream, which BDS falsely claims is stealing Bedouin land. 

Of course, if those reasons were valid, then BDS would be calling for the boycott of every hummus brand sold in the world that is not manufactured by Arabs. It would be calling for a general boycott of all Pepsi brands, including Aquafina water, Quaker Oats, Lay's Potato Chips and Cap'n Crunch cereal.

But there is no call by BDS to boycott other brands of hummus nor other Pepsi products (besides Sodastream.)

Right now, BDS cannot find any way that boycotting Sabra will hurt Israel in the least. They cannot find a way that boycotting Sabra will help a single person in Gaza. 

Which is as good a proof as any that BDS has nothing to do with human rights or helping Palestinians or "justice."  It has always been about inciting people to hate proud Jews and Israel. 

Because Sabra is a Hebrew word.

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Open Hillel is dead. Its successor doesn't know why it exists.

Remember Open Hillel?

About ten years ago, a group of students at Harvard became incensed that their Jewish campus Hillel canceled an anti-Israel event when it was revealed that a BDS group was sponsoring it, violating Hillel's guidelines. 

Of course they could hold their event anywhere, but they decided to start a movement called Open Hillel to get other Hillels to drop their affiliation with Hillel. Like so many "progressive" organizations past and future, they are more interested in creating a split within the Jewish community than in building their own. Open Hillel had a conference at Harvard in 2014 and based on the media attention, it looked like it could rupture Hillel International.

It failed.

In the end, only four campuses nationwide defected to "Open Hillel" - Guilford College, Swarthmore College, Vassar College, and Wesleyan University. 

By 2020, none of them were still associated with Open Hillel - and two of them are now affiliated with Hillel International again. 

In short, Open Hillel made a lot of noise but in the end could not attract students who are both interested in Judaism and anti-Zionism. There is a strong negative correlation between the two positions, which pretty much dooms any attempt to fuse them, no matter how many anti-Israel Haggadahs are printed.

So Open Hillel is in a deep coma, and has been for a while, just as the American Council for Judaism - a prominent and equally tiny anti-Zionist group in the 1940s-1960s - also sunk into irrelevance. Both organizations have a couple of people still doing paperwork to maintain their tax exempt status but they have faded away after a lot of publicity early on.

But Open Hillel has one last gambit to stay alive: "Judaism On Our Own Terms," or JOOOT.

They wrote an introductory piece in Mondoweiss on Friday: "Judaism On Our Own Terms is creating a space where young Jews do not have to choose between their Judaism and their sense of justice."

JOOOT is an offshoot, and seemingly successor, of Open Hillel. Since 2020, Open Hillel's Form 990 has included a position for Rakhel Silverman as a "Judaism on our own Terms organizer." getting paid $4600 in 2020 and $2492 in 2021. Silverman describes themself as a "a proud fat trans Disabled Jew."

But JOOOT really doesn't know what to do next. On their website they say they are in the midst of a "restructuring process" where they are asking anyone and everyone to please give them some ideas of what they should be doing. To restructure means they had a structure to begin with, which is not at all clear. 

This mirrors the self-destruction of IfNotNow, but at least IfNotNow managed to grab some headlines before its inevitable collapse. 

In the end, even children know that "Judaism On Our Own Terms" is an oxymoron. People don't look at religion or community to do whatever they want - they want to be part of a whole where everyone shares basic beliefs and standards. If anyone can do whatever they want and call it Judaism, then Judaism has no meaning. The anti-Zionists only have one belief - hating Israel - and that is not enough to keep a core group of enthusiastic members nor is it enough to attract more. 

There will still be plenty of anti-Zionist Jews. But their interest in identifying as Jews is ephemeral. Which is why these groups are all doomed, but also why there will always be new ones who think they came up with the idea. 

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Real human rights and fake human rights

The Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights just released its report of human rights violations by Palestinian authorities in the West Bank and Gaza in 2022 (it has not yet been released in English.)

Its section on violations against Palestinian human rights activists is summarized:

Concerning human rights defenders, the independent commission said: Human rights defenders are exposed to a number of violations and harassment committed by official bodies or other unofficial parties. It may lead to murder, kidnapping, arrest, torture, threats, harm to the family and defamation. Defenders of women's rights are subjected to various harassments by social movements and religious and political parties, who see their defense of women as a contradiction with religion and in line with the goals of the West and a denial of Arab values, customs and traditions.   

Those stories, about real abuse against real human rights activists, is rarely covered by the media - because it doesn't fit the narrative that Israel is the human rights violator of Palestinians and, of course, also one of the biggest human rights abusers in the world. (Apparently Israel is surrounded by an oasis of liberal progressive protectors of humanity.)

So the reality gets buried in reports no one reads while the media exaggerates and fabricates Israeli crimes. 

There are real Palestinian human rights defenders - and no one hears about them.

But there are also fake human rights defenders that get lot of coverage. Here's a story that is getting play in Arabic news sites today:

Human rights organizations have called for a boycott of Israeli companies specialized in the field of water and agriculture, prior to their participation in the United Nations Climate Summit (COP 28) scheduled for the end of next November in the UAE.

These companies work to improve their image in front of the world in light of their theft of Palestinian rights to water and the destruction of the Palestinian environment through toxic agricultural pesticides.

The companies (Mekorot, Netafim, Haifa Chemicals, and Adama) seek to present themselves during the summit with their ability to achieve sustainable solutions regarding the environment around the world, at a time when these companies steal Palestinian resources and direct them towards illegal Israeli settlements according to international law.

Human rights organizations are working to reveal the true face of these Israeli companies, and to defend Palestinian rights against climate colonialism.   

Notice anything strange?

The stories do not mention a single "human rights" organization that is calling for this boycott.

The only group I can find talking about this is, of course, BDS. They probably pretend to be a human rights organization. Yet it would not be a surprise if HRW or Amnesty indeed does call for a boycott of Israeli companies at COP28. Because "human rights" is now nothing more than a slogan, with no relationship with real human rights. 

And the real contributions that Israeli technology make to help the world conserve water are considered not as important as the political boycott of any Jewish-owned company in the Middle East. 

And real humans will be deprived of water in the name of "human rights."

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Google launches program to actually help Palestinians more than all the NGOs combined

What does it mean to be "pro-Palestinian?"

To most people who define themselves that way, it means to be anti-Israel. 

Even though NGOs spend tens of millions of dollars in their anti-Israel efforts, writing yet another report finding yet another way Israel is supposedly the worst abuser in the world doesn't help Palestinians one bit. 

Google just announced an initiative that will help more Palestinians improve their lives than anything Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, B'Tselem, the UN and the EU does  - combined.

Apply to Palestine Launchpad with Google

Future-proof your skills for the digital economy 

In our dynamic world, time and technology are vital. The digital and gig economies transcend borders, leveling opportunities for talent and ideas. The Palestine Launchpad with Google equips you with the skills, knowledge, and network to enter the global tech talent pool and become a top earner.

• Fully funded scholarship for a Nanodegree Programme

• Line-by-line code review with personalised project feedback

• Flexible self-paced learning schedule

• Live virtual sessions with top-tier mentors

• Career workshops (resume building, interview preparations, etc.)

• Exposure to freelancing and career growth opportunities

• Networking with local and international employers

💻 Become a Web Developer

🤖 Become an AI Engineer

📊 Become a Data Analyst

You are eligible for this programme if you are

• Currently residing in Palestine

• Looking to be part of tomorrow’s tech-powered economy

• Recently graduated from a computer science related field (or are in your final years of study)

• Want to upskill, reskill, or specialise in the various fields shaping this economy, this programme is your springboard.

They are offering free scholarships for 6,000 Palestinians to learn cutting edge skills where they can make money working for companies worldwide without leaving home.

I have been mystified that the EU and USAID have not prioritized this sort of training - training that would actually help Palestinians more than their other initiatives. The average Palestinian salary is now about $20,000 a year - imagine the impact from thousands making Western high tech salaries quintuple that.

The supreme irony is that while Google is doing more to help Palestinians than any other organization in the world, it is being targeted by BDS because it also does work with Israel. 

We've shown that BDS actually opposed Cisco doing a similar program to promote high tech jobs among Palestinians. 

Israel doesn't mind Palestinians getting high paid tech jobs. But "pro-Palestinian activists" do!

Which again goes to prove that the anti-Israel crowd really doesn't give a damn about helping Palestinians. 

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BDSers are proud of using violence to stifle free speech

From JTA last week:

Pro-Palestinian protesters injured a university employee while demonstrating against a lecture speaker who heads the Brazilian chapter of a pro-Israel advocacy group.

Andre Lajst, the director of StandWithUs Brazil, was speaking about ways that Israeli technologies could help develop the Amazon region at the Federal University of Amazonas in Manaus on Thursday when protesters clashed with security and other university employees outside the lecture auditorium.

According to news reports, the advisor to the university’s rector left the scene with a broken nose after attempting to safeguard her daughter. Several students entering the lecture were also harassed, and police officers escorted Lajst into and out of the venue. One protester was reportedly arrested for pushing a police officer but later released.  

Here's video at the scene:

Andre Lajst completed his lecture and had to be escorted out by police for his safety from the violent mob.

But BDS-aligned media are bragging (and lying) that they managed to shut down his speech with their thuggish mob!

Pro-Palestine Brazilians demonstrated at a university in the Brazilian city of Manaus against the organization of a pro-Israeli-occupation event on campus.

Despite the high-security measures against them, the protesters managed to stop the meeting in support of the Israeli occupation, which is entitled “Cooperation with Israel”.

André Lajst, director of the Brazilian branch of StandWithUs, a pro-Israeli-occupation group in Brazil, spoke at the event about supporting the occupation and normalization with it.

Video clips showed the large number of anti-Israel-occupation demonstrators, known as BDS Mob, who confronted the Brazilian police and attempted to shut down the event by force, forcing Lajst and his companions to leave the place quickly.

These protests are a part of the international BDS activities against all forms of normalization with the Israeli occupation, especially educational normalization.

Among themselves, BDSers don't even pretend to be "non-violent." They are happy and proud to threaten and attack people.

And then they claim in mainstream media  articles that they are doing it in the name of "academic freedom."

 

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The first paragraph of the American Anthropological Association's BDS resolution refers to a fictional Palestinian organization (update)

This week, the American Anthropological Association voted to boycott all Israeli academic institutions. 

The resolution that they approved is antisemitic. It says that Israel's very existence is "apartheid", not "settlements" or "occupation", saying that "from the onset of the Nakba, the catastrophic events of 1948 that led to the mass expulsion and displacement of Palestinians from their homes, Palestinians—including activists, artists, intellectuals, human rights organizations, and others—have documented and circulated knowledge of the Israeli state’s apartheid system and ethnic cleansing."

The first paragraph of the resolution is all the proof you need that there was no research or academic rigor that went into this decision. 

Whereas, in 2005, 175 Palestinian civil society organizations, including the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE), issued a call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against the Israeli state, in support of the Palestinian struggle for human and political rights, including the basic right of freedom;

The very first paragraph invokes the antisemitic BDS movement as justification for the boycott, blindly accepting whatever accusations it makes against Israel. The following paragraphs are all essentially cut and pasted from BDS materials. No one at AAA did any fact checks on the assertions in the rest of the resolution.

But what about the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees? Their support for a boycott is considered the linchpin from which the entire resolution gets is legitimacy. Who are they?

The PFUUPE does not exist in any real sense.

It has no webpage. It has no Facebook account. It has no Twitter account. 

It does have a phone number, which is also the main phone number of Palestine Polytechnic University and the office number of that university's president, Dr. Amjad Barham  

He is the president of the PFUUPE according to his CV.

Is it not strange that the president of a federation of unions is also the president of a university that those unions would naturally make demands of for better benefits and working conditions? There appears to be a conflict of interest there.

But not if the PFUUPE is fictional. 

There is no evidence that the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees has a single member outside Dr. Barham. It apparently does not have bylaws, or membership fees, or benefits, or recruitment materials, or a board, or committees, or elections, or a vice president.

It is one person named Amjad, a man who lists being able to use a PC and the Internet on his resume,  and who issues regular press releases in the name of all Palestinian academics. Nearly all of those are about boycotting Israel. He even managed to parlay his one man organization into a Guardian op-ed - again, advocating boycotting Israel, which appears to be the only purpose of this purported federation.

Many other of the "175 Palestinian civil society organizations" that signed the BDS "call" for boycotts appear to be equally fictional, tiny one-person operations created just for the purpose of appearing to be part of a greater whole. Many of them are not even based in the borders of British Mandate Palestine - these "Palestinian civil society" organizations are in Syria and Lebanon and Canada - but they are presented as "Palestinian" to promote the myth that the BDS movement was initiated by Palestinians. 

The American Anthropological Association didn't check out whether the PFUUPE that they refer to in their very first paragraph is a real organization. They have no intellectual honesty at all. And any academic who remains a member of an organization that cannot be trusted to check the facts in its own resolutions is not interested in truth either. 

UPDATE: GnasherJew did find a Facebook page for this union. 

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So @AmnestyUK loves boycotts. But only boycotts of Jews.

Amnesty UK tweeted:

The [UK Anti-Boycott] bill gives special status to Israel, making it the only country in the world which cannot be excluded from its provisions, and treats Israel and territories it occupies in the same way, contrary to the UK’s long-established policy and international law.

The bill is intended to stifle principled opposition to Israel’s illegal settlements and the Israeli authorities' racist system of apartheid against Palestinians.

Boycotts, divestment & sanctions are forms of peaceful protest that have been used to press for human rights change.

Think:

✊The Anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa

🚌The Montgomery Bus Boycott

🛢️The BP oil spill

In the 1890s, merchants in Butte, Montana boycotted Chinese and other Asian businesses, tried to stop customers from entering them, and threatened anyone who hired Chinese people.

No doubt they felt that they were upholding human rights - of non-Asian people. Even this flyer talks about "morals."

What, exactly, is the difference?

More the to point, Jews have been boycotted many, many times in our history. I once gave a brief list of Arab boycotts:

1891: Arabs request the Ottoman Empire not sell land to Jews.

February 1909: "In Hebron, where out of a total population of 18,000 about 2000 are Jews, the Arabs decide to boycott Jewish merchants."

January 1915: The American Jewish Yearbook reports "At Hebron, Jewish storekeepers are boycotted

by Mohammedan women."

April 2, 1920, AJC: "Rosh Pinah: Thirty Arabs attack Arab workmen in fields belonging to Jewish inhabitants in endeavor to bring about boycott by Arabs against Jews."

June 4, 1921: "Haifa: Arabs issue proclamation urging the populace to boycott the Jews and drive them out of their villages."

1922: Arab Congress calls on Arabs to boycott Jewish businesses in Palestine.

1924: MUSLIM-CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION voted to authorize the Executive Committee to promulgate an economic boycott against the Jews. The economic boycott, however, was later abandoned.

1929: Arab Congress vows to compel Arabs to boycott Jewish merchandise. Syria prohibits import of merchandise produced by Jewish businesses in Palestine. 

1931: World Islamic Congress passes resolution requesting Muslim countries to boycott trade with Jewish businesses in Palestine. Arab Labor Federation pickets Jewish businesses in Palestine. 

1945: Arab League Council adopts Resolution 70, recommending that all Arab states establish national boycott offices. 

There was also a major boycott in Poland of Jewish businesses (accompanied by pogroms) in the 1910s.

And of course the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses (accompanied by pogroms) in the 1930s.

But the boycotts of Jews didn't end there. In the 1950s, Saudi Arabia refused to do business with any company owned by Jews or with Jews in important positions. In 1960, it weas revealed that tourist companies would not allow Jews to visit Gulf countries because they adhered to the Arab boycott, and Aramco refused to hire Jews in its New York office. In 1975, the Arab world still refused to work with Jewish bankers. 

This was all at the time of the "Zionism is Racism" UN resolution, proving that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are the same thing. 

The BDS boycott is a direct continuation of the Arab League boycotts of Jews.  Don't take my word for it: this document on the BDS Movement website gives a history of BDS, and it prominently features the Arab boycott of Jews (pretending that they were only boycotting "Zionists:") It praises the explicitly antisemitic Arab League boycott successes and mourns when it weakened in the 1980s and 90s.  It even looks at the Arab League boycott of Jewish businesses to learn lessons for BDS today. The document, written in 2007, is saddened that at that point in time, only Syria and Lebanon were still adhering to the Arab League boycott - you know, those two human rights powerhouses.

There is another reason that BDS is provably antisemitic. They do not boycott Israeli Arab businesses - only the businesses owned by Israeli Jews. 

This antisemitism is what Amnesty-UK is supporting. And it has exactly as much to do with "human rights" as the Arab League boycott - or the Butte boycott of Chinese people - did.

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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