The antisemitic BDS war on celebrities
The BDS movement has been a total failure. It has not damaged Israel’s economy, it has not turned Israel into a pariah, it has not changed Israeli policy, and it has not destroyed the Jewish state. The BDS movement has tried to create the image of winning by claiming phony victories. It has also capitalized by convincing a handful of mostly B- and C-list celebrities to shun Israel. The fight to achieve these symbolic “victories” is the subject of Lana Melman’s well-researched book, Artists Under Fire: The BDS War Against Celebrities, Jews, and Israel.Why is Avi Shlaim recycling the ‘Baghdad bombings’ theory?
Melman is an industry insider who has been on the frontline of the fight to educate celebrities and try to insulate them from the global assault waged against them by BDS advocates through relentless social-media campaigns, threats and disinformation. She does not mince words in defining antisemitism as “demonizing Israel.” The BDS campaign, she writes, “seeks to use the celebrity of artists a tool to destroy Israel and stir up hate against Jews worldwide.”
“Artists are public figures who need audience support to succeed, making them particularly vulnerable to attacks on their character,” Melman explains. “Artists are afraid that “false charges against them will stick like chewing gum on the bottom of one’s shoe” and ruin their reputations.
It’s more than reputations at stake. Sometimes, the threats are more serious, as when Paul McCartney was threatened by Islamic activist Omar Bakri Muhammad: “‘If he values his life Mr. McCartney will not come to Israel.” McCartney ignored the threat and played in front of 50,000 people in Tel Aviv in 2008. He told an Israeli journalist: “I was approached by different groups and political bodies who asked me not to come here. I refused. I do what I think, and I have many friends who support Israel.”
McCartney is by no means the only A-list celebrity (or Beatle) who has defied the boycotters to appear in Israel. Others include Ringo Starr, Rhianna (twice), Alicia Keys, Lady Gaga, Kanye West, Mariah Carey, Art Garfunkel, Chick Corea, Julio Iglesias, Herbie Hancock, Madonna, Bon Jovi (three times), 50 Cent (twice), Andrea Bocelli and Guns N’Roses (three times, most recently on June 5).
The A-listers can usually withstand the pressure and not worry about their careers being affected. Others are more sensitive and are bombarded with petitions, statements, open letters, criticism on social media and Photoshopped images “associating Israel and the artist with destruction, racism, apartheid, the murder of children and worse.” Demonstrators protest outside venues. Artists’ representatives are overwhelmed by malicious emails and calls.
It is a mystery why "the Zionists" might have thought it necessary to bomb the synagogue when, by late 1950 a backlog of 80,000 Jews, who had already registered to leave for Israel, were stranded in Iraq. Indeed, the Iraqi government toyed with the idea of dumping these Jews on Israel’s border with Jordan or in the Kuwaiti desert because Israel was not shipping them out fast enough.Examining Islamic Group’s Ties to Hamas
All the evidence for the bombings points to the nationalist Istiqlal party as the culprit. An Istiqlal member confessed to an Iraqi historian, Shamel Abdul Kader, that he planted the first bomb in April 1950. The Israeli new historian Tom Segev produced evidence blaming the synagogue bombing on Iraqi nationalists.
Iraqi Jews already had reason enough to seek a haven in Israel – rising pro-Nazi sentiment, the memory of a vicious Baghdad pogrom in 1941, the execution of the wealthy non-Zionist Shafik Ades in 1948, arrests, extortion, racist laws persecuting and dispossessing them. A vibrant community of 150,000 is now reduced to three Jews.
But Shlaim claims there was no antisemitism in Iraq until the Iraqis ‘turned on the Jews’ for their alleged complicity with the British invasion of 1941 and the foundation of Israel.
It is a travesty that Shlaim should not only fail to blame Arab regimes for the mass ethnic cleansing of their Jewish citizens, but that his reputation as an Oxford academic should lend ‘exceptional authority’ and respectability to these highly controversial claims,
What lies behind Shlaim’s anti-Zionism? In reviewing ‘Israel and Palestine’ Benny Morris pronounced himself puzzled.
“Many intellectuals, in Israel as in the West, have been moved by the Palestinians’ history and their plight, but at the same time they have remained sympathetic to Israel’s predicament…. In Israel and Palestine, by contrast, there is no sign of any such complex sympathy.
"For Shlaim, Israel and its leaders can do no right. It all begins to seem very personal. What is the source of this bias and this resentment? ‘
It appears that Shlaim’s memoir holds the answer. Israel is responsible for his unhappy childhood, his family’s impoverishment and his broken home.
CAIR emerged out of the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), an organization that served as a propaganda arm of a now-defunct Hamas-support network called the “Palestine Committee.” The Committee was created by the Muslim Brotherhood to help Hamas politically and financially in the United States. As the committee’s propaganda outlet, the IAP organized “annual conventions and meetings, which were regularly addressed by members of Hamas brought from the Middle East.” The outlet published magazines with articles supporting the terrorist group. It also “published the Hamas charter in English and distributed Hamas communiques.”
Founded in 1994, CAIR was incorporated by three IAP leaders — Nihad Awad, Omar Ahmad, and Rafeeq Jaber. Mousa Abu Marzook, a member of the Hamas Politburo, “served as a member of IAP’s advisory board and served as its chairman in 1988-90.” He also provided IAP with $490,000. IAP, which is now defunct, was long a central player in Hamas’ US support network.
In August 2002, a Federal judge ruled that there was evidence that “the Islamic Association for Palestine (“IAP”), has acted in support of Hamas.” In November 2004, a Federal magistrate judge held IAP civilly liable for $156 million in damages in the 1996 shooting of an American teenager by a Hamas member in the West Bank.
And evidence from the Dallas trial charging the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) and its officers with providing material support for Hamas shows that the IAP played a central role in the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee.
According to the Committee’s 1994 meeting agenda and a 1991 organizational chart introduced into evidence, the IAP, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, and a Virginia think-tank that Marzook founded were the committee’s primary components.
A November 1991 committee status report approved by the Shura Council explained that the Ikhwan, or Brotherhood, created IAP “to serve the cause of Palestine on the political and media fronts. The Association’s work has developed a great deal since its inception, particularly with the formation of the Palestine Committee, the beginning of the Intifada at the end of 1987 and the proclamation of the Hamas Movement.”