I don't know why you keep posting that list when you've already admitted its all bullshit. I challenged you and you couldn't back up a single one.
In the 21st century, anti-Zionism means anti-Semitism
- Thread starter canada-man
- Start date
the only person complaining about the lists is you NOBODY here is objecting to me documenting your terror apologist and anti-jewish posts.
Lists are easy, but boring.
canadaman admits every accusation he makes against me is slander he can't back up by refusing to answer a challenge.
canada-man says 4/5's of the world's countries are antisemites.
canada-man says if you accuse someone of terrorism that means you can kill them.
canada-man supports death squads.
canada-man refuses to acknowledge that Palestinians are humans.
canada-man confirms he supports apartheid.
Canadaman refuses to call out Israel for using snipers to kill 60 civilian children.
Canada Man defends killing an American civilian for protesting for human rights in Gaza.
Canada Man calls supporting the two state solution 'antisemitic'.
Canada Man falsely accuses me of gaslighting.
Canada Man denies the existence of Palestine.
Canada Man denies that Palestinians have the right to self defence.
this week in anti-semitic terrorism (aka pro-palestinian movement)
News reports broke Thursday that the pro-Palestine protester who apparently killed Paul Kessler, an elderly Jewish man participating in a pro-Israel event, is a professor at Moorpark College.
Police arrested Loay Abdelfattah Alnaji on Thursday after an investigation into Kessler’s death. Alnaji apparently struck Kessler on the head, which caused the latter to fall back on the ground and die from his injuries.
What police are charging as manslaughter took place on Nov. 5 in Los Angeles’ Thousand Oaks neighborhood.
ABC News reports that Kessler died from “blunt-force trauma.”
”The Ventura County Medical Examiner’s Office said Kessler suffered from skull fractures and swelling and bruising of the brain and determined his death to be a homicide,” the outlet reports.
Campus Reform | REPORT: Pro-Palestine professor arrested for killing Jewish man
Toronto police are investigating after a bomb threat was made to a Jewish high school Friday.
In a letter to parents, officials said Tanenbaum Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto, located in North York near Finch Avenue and Dufferin Street, received the threat at around 11:15 a.m.
The threat was sent in via email. The email, a screengrab of which has been viewed by CTV News Toronto, says that “multiple bombs” had been placed at the school and that “many Jews will die today.”
Toronto police were immediately notified and roads around the immediate area closed off, the school said.
Police say that while the threat appears not to be substantiated, the school was evacuated as a precaution. A nearby daycare and synagogue was also evacuated.
“We are incredibly grateful for the response of Toronto police to the speed with which they have responded for the speed with which they have assisted us today, as well as over the past number of weeks during this time have increased anti-Semitism and increased signs of hate,” Dr. Jonathan Levy, Head of School, told reporters Friday afternoon.
“All of our students, all staff, all people deserve to live in an environment where they can come to school and go to work free of these kinds of threats.”
Bomb threat made to Toronto Jewish school | CTV News
News reports broke Thursday that the pro-Palestine protester who apparently killed Paul Kessler, an elderly Jewish man participating in a pro-Israel event, is a professor at Moorpark College.
Police arrested Loay Abdelfattah Alnaji on Thursday after an investigation into Kessler’s death. Alnaji apparently struck Kessler on the head, which caused the latter to fall back on the ground and die from his injuries.
What police are charging as manslaughter took place on Nov. 5 in Los Angeles’ Thousand Oaks neighborhood.
ABC News reports that Kessler died from “blunt-force trauma.”
”The Ventura County Medical Examiner’s Office said Kessler suffered from skull fractures and swelling and bruising of the brain and determined his death to be a homicide,” the outlet reports.
Campus Reform | REPORT: Pro-Palestine professor arrested for killing Jewish man
Toronto police are investigating after a bomb threat was made to a Jewish high school Friday.
In a letter to parents, officials said Tanenbaum Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto, located in North York near Finch Avenue and Dufferin Street, received the threat at around 11:15 a.m.
The threat was sent in via email. The email, a screengrab of which has been viewed by CTV News Toronto, says that “multiple bombs” had been placed at the school and that “many Jews will die today.”
Toronto police were immediately notified and roads around the immediate area closed off, the school said.
Police say that while the threat appears not to be substantiated, the school was evacuated as a precaution. A nearby daycare and synagogue was also evacuated.
“We are incredibly grateful for the response of Toronto police to the speed with which they have responded for the speed with which they have assisted us today, as well as over the past number of weeks during this time have increased anti-Semitism and increased signs of hate,” Dr. Jonathan Levy, Head of School, told reporters Friday afternoon.
“All of our students, all staff, all people deserve to live in an environment where they can come to school and go to work free of these kinds of threats.”
Bomb threat made to Toronto Jewish school | CTV News
This week in the baby killer party:
While anti zionist Jews work for peace
franky refusal to condemed the anti-semitic crimes here in Toronto that includes the bomb threats at a toronto jewish school
and resort to post hamas propaganda
and resort to post hamas propaganda
Bullshit, CM.
I denounced attacks on both Jewish, Muslim and TDSB schools in another thread.
So stop with crap.
If you want to back genocide because you hate Palestinians go ahead, but don't lie about what I post.
Note that you just refused to denounce Netanyahu's statement of intent to commit the genocide he's now committing, which means you are supporting his genocide.
And don't do the stupid copy and paste list, its so childish.
Just try to argue your claims for once.
Not true.
In a CNN poll today of over 26,000, 74% of respondents approve of IDF entering the hospital.
Last edited:
Post it, I think you're bullshitting.
I did, stop lying.
You just refused to call out genocide and apartheid.
That wins hands down.
You gonna call this guy out too?
Yes, Israel's actions have once again turned Zionism into a word that means racism and hate.
In 1975 UN Resolution 3379 declared Zionism is racism, that was repealed in 1991.
Now Zionism is a dirty word again.
Now the real campaign starts.
Apartheid South Africa reached a tipping point, Israel will, too
White South Africans realised their apartheid project was unsustainable; Israelis will, too.
Yes, Israel's actions have once again turned Zionism into a word that means racism and hate.
In 1975 UN Resolution 3379 declared Zionism is racism, that was repealed in 1991.
Now Zionism is a dirty word again.
Now the real campaign starts.
Apartheid South Africa reached a tipping point, Israel will, too
White South Africans realised their apartheid project was unsustainable; Israelis will, too.
Anti-Zionism & American Jewish History
Jewish leaders a century ago had complicated feelings about Israel
By Daniel Schulman
November 19, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. EST
Jacob Schiff, a wealthy financier and arguably the most prominent Jewish leader in the United States at the time, appears at a 1915 hearing of the federal Commission on Industrial Relations at the New York city hall. (Bain News Service/Library of Congress)
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This article is adapted from “The Money Kings: The Epic Story of the Jewish Immigrants Who Transformed Wall Street and Shaped Modern America,” published on Nov. 14 by Knopf.
In June 1916, Jacob Schiff was on the verge of tears as he addressed a convention of fellow Jewish leaders. For more than three decades, the Frankfurt-born investment banker and philanthropist, who had amassed a fortune financing the nation’s railroads and rivaled J.P. Morgan as one of the most prominent tycoons of the Gilded Age, had been the de facto head of American Jewry.
He had poured millions of dollars into Jewish causes, pressured successive presidential administrations to rebuke the Russian empire for its brutal treatment of his coreligionists, and fended off harsh immigration restrictions designed to keep out Jews and others who nativists feared would dilute the nation’s Anglo-Saxon pedigree.
But lately he had come under attack by members of his own community, clashing bitterly with supporters of the ascendant Zionist movement, whose push for a Jewish homeland Schiff and many American Jews strongly opposed. “I have been hurt to the core,” Schiff declared, his voice trembling, “and hereafter Zionism, nationalism … and Jewish politics in whatever form they may come up will be a sealed book to me.”
Jews have wrangled over Israel since long before the modern state came into existence. The current Gaza war has opened new fissures, especially within America’s Jewish community, over Israel and its role in the broader Jewish world, and some critiques of the nation have drawn accusations of antisemitism.
But fierce disagreements over Zionism — the pursuit of a Jewish nation — have played out from the movement’s inception among Jews who cared deeply about the future of their people.
A 1903 pogrom sparked calls for a Jewish state — to prevent attacks like this one
In those early skirmishes was something elemental about the Jewish experience — a diverse people tethered by a common religion and a sorrowful history of displacement, trying to find their place in an often-hostile world.
That world of more than a century ago today feels closer than ever. And the recent explosion of antisemitism, including footage of a mob in Dagestan overrunning a Russian airport in search of Jewish passengers, has troubling echoes of the persecution that prompted the push for a Jewish state.
In the late-19th century, mob violence and oppression in Russia and Eastern Europe sent wave upon wave of Jewish immigrants to the United States, one of the few nations that would accept them. The deteriorating conditions fueling this mass migration also led to the rise of Zionism, an initially quixotic movement founded in Europe by the Hungarian activist Theodor Herzl.
American Jewish institutions at that time were largely dominated by Schiff and a wealthy, well-established and highly assimilated German-Jewish elite who had settled in the nation decades earlier.
Despite having little in common with the impoverished new arrivals, they understood that perceptions of one group of Jews could easily shape opinions of Jews as a whole. So they shouldered a weighty obligation to take care of their own, founding and funding a dizzying network of social welfare organizations that not only anticipated the immediate needs of the new immigrants — jobs, English lessons, schools, hospitals — but paved the way for their rapid “Americanization.”
To Schiff and his allies, America represented a promised land. Unlike Germany, where for generations Jews had been shunted into ghettos and treated as a permanent underclass, there they could live, work and worship freely. Because of this, they felt a deep sense of devotion to the United States. Summing up the sentiment of many in their community, the lawyer and diplomat Henry Morgenthau once declared, “We Jews of America have found America to be our Zion.”
Before the U.S. recognized Israel, a president’s friend pushed the cause
As Zionism slowly took hold in the United States, often imported by immigrants, Schiff and American Jewish leaders began to view the movement as a threat.
Jewish nationalism alarmed Schiff because it risked lending credence to the age-old canard that had marginalized Jews for centuries: Their people possessed dual loyalties and thus could never be true or trustworthy citizens of any nation. “Political Zionism places a lien upon citizenship,” Schiff said, arguing that the establishment of a Jewish state “creates a separateness which is fatal.”
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He contended that Zionists “by their very movement are furnishing the antisemites one of the strongest arguments for their nefarious attacks upon our race.” Far from an outlier, Schiff represented the position of many American Jews.
Schiff, known for his occasionally hot temper, never followed through on his vow to withdraw from Jewish politics. The stakes were too high, as World War I sparked yet another crisis for millions of Jews living in the conflict zone.
The war — and the 1917 Balfour Declaration, voicing British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine — marked a foundational shift in the debate over Zionism. Grappling with how to contend with millions of Jewish war refugees, Schiff gradually softened his position on the movement and eventually entered negotiations to officially join the Zionist Organization of America, the leading U.S. organization advocating for a Jewish homeland.
But while he came to support Jewish settlement in Palestine for cultural and religious purposes, he could not abide Jewish statehood. “I shall have to continue to remain on the threshold,” Schiff ultimately informed the Zionist Organization president.
When Schiff died in 1920, his mantle of leadership fell to his son-in-law, Felix Warburg, who in the 1920s and ’30s grew closely involved with Jewish affairs in Palestine, pouring millions of dollars into the development of the Jewish community there. But he, too, was no Zionist.
Felix Warburg, Jacob Schiff's son-in-law and successor as a de facto leader of American Jews, was deeply involved in building Palestine's Jewish community but was skeptical of Zionism. (Bain News Service/Library of Congress)
In July 1937, the year after an Arab uprising against Jewish settlers and British troops had begun, the British Peel Commission recommended partitioning Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab territories.
The following month, Warburg, who had lamented that Palestine might become a “shooting gallery,” traveled to Zurich to attend a meeting of the Jewish Council for Palestine, where he pushed a resolution to seek a peaceful coexistence with the Arabs without dividing the country. “No lasting peace in Palestine can be obtained until the parties directly affected ... have been given a full opportunity to endeavor to arrive at a peaceful understanding,” he said at the time. He and other non-Zionists feared that only more violence could result from carving out a Jewish state.
Warburg died two months after the Zurich conference and before the outbreak of World War II, when much of the world, including the United States, closed its doors to Jews fleeing the Holocaust. Six-million murdered Jews — there was no more compelling argument to support the Zionist case for a refuge where Jews controlled their own defense and immigration policy.
Israeli operations uprooted Palestinians in 1948. Many fear a repeat.
If Zionists foresaw that only through self-determination could Jews secure and safeguard their future, Schiff, Warburg and their supporters also predicted something inescapable. The establishment of a Jewish state in 1948 did perpetuate tropes about Jewish allegiances, and it stirred up anti-Jewish feeling, especially in the Arab world. Moreover, the region has been the zone of unending conflict.
Like the paradigm-altering world wars, the Hamas-Israel conflict has formed a new inflection point for Zionism. The barbarity of the terrorist attack has engendered widespread sympathy for Israel. But the war is also focusing attention, in a new and sustained way, on the humanitarian crisis facing Palestinian civilians and on the factors driving extremism.
As Schiff and many American Jews realized in the early-1900s, the world would not distinguish between the inhabitants of a Jewish state and the Jewish people in general. Israel’s existence is no longer theoretical. While the terms of the conversation have shifted, the debate over Zionism that began during Schiff’s era never ended. It remains as relevant — and divisive — as ever.
Daniel Schulman is the deputy D.C. bureau chief of Mother Jones. His new book is “The Money Kings: The Epic Story of the Jewish Immigrants Who Transformed Wall Street and Shaped Modern America.”
your constant whataboutism does not change the fact that you are the biggest anti-semite on this board and an anti-black racist
There are security cameras throughout UBC.
They will find out who put them up.
PACBI and Its Co-founder
A subdivision of the global BDS movement is the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), which calls on “academics and intellectuals…in the international community to comprehensively and consistently boycott all Israeli academic and cultural institutions as a contribution to the struggle to end Israel‘s occupation, colonization and system of apartheid…”
PACBI’s global efforts have resulted in few tangible results. A 2005 vote by the British Association of University Teachers (AUT) to sever all academic and cultural links with Bar Ilan and Haifa universities was rescinded just a month later and there have been no academic boycotts of an Israeli university since. Perhaps this is because of the rank hypocrisy embodied by the movement and its leaders: The notion of scholars boycotting academic institutions runs counter to the very essence of intellectual and academic life, where exposure to diversity and freedom to challenge, debate and engage is the cornerstone of acquiring knowledge. Moreover, Israeli universities play a major role in educating numerous Israeli-Arabs and Palestinians.
In fact, Omar Barghouti, a PACBI co-founder—who travels from campus to campus denouncing Israel as an apartheid state and opposing Palestinian-Israeli collaboration as “providing a fig leaf covering up Israel’s …crimes against the Palestinian people”—is himself enrolled as a graduate student in philosophy (ethics) at Tel Aviv University.
When challenged about this blatant double standard, Barghouti dismisses it as irrelevant. “My studies at Tel-Aviv University are a personal matter and I have no interest in commenting,” he answered a Maariv reporter who questioned him about it. “Oppressed people don’t have a choice of where they go to school,” he responded to a student during a recent Q&A session at Loyola Law School.
But Barghouti is hardly an “oppressed” Palestinian with no choices. Born in Qatar, he grew up in Egypt and attended Columbia University in New York before moving to Ramallah as an adult. He could have continued his studies in Qatar, Egypt, or New York, or he could have attended either Bir Zeit University or Al Quds University near his home and thus support a Palestinian academy. Instead, he chose to take advantage of the educational opportunities at an Israeli institution (which he presumably supports through fees) – one which he demands everyone else shun.
Barghouti does not merely call for sanctions against supposed racist policies; his professed goal in calling for boycott, like that of other BDS supporters, is to permanently end Jewish autonomy in the region. He advocates for a Palestinian state to replace a Jewish one within all of historic Palestine.
His charges of Israeli racial apartheid are supported with distortions and outright canards. For example, he claims that Israel uses water as “a tool of apartheid and a means of ethnic cleansing” by stealing Palestinian resources. In fact, the opposite is true. Since 1967, when Israel began to administer the territories, the Palestinians have received far more fresh water than ever before. Under Israel’s administration, Palestinians’ share of water from aquifers that extend across both sides of the Green Line has risen while Israel’s own share of water from these aquifiers has decreased. In addition, and despite water shortages of its own, Israel transfers more than 40 million cubic meters of water per year to Palestinian water providers from aquifiers inside pre-1967 Israel—which is the principal source of Israel’s water.
Barghouti also accuses Israel of perpetrating “an act of genocide” against Palestinians in Gaza through a “hermetic siege of Gaza, designed to kill, cause serious bodily and mental harm, and deliberately inflicts conditions of life calculated to bring about partial and gradual physical destruction.” Of course, Israel does not and can not “hermetically” besiege Gaza, which shares a border not only with Israel but also with Egypt, which has likewise imposed sanctions on the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. As for the Israeli closures, Israel allows humanitarian aid through border crossings. In addition, Hamas, which is sworn to Israel’s destruction, uses its vast tunnel system to import all types of goods from Egypt, from food to weapons, and to dispatch terrorists to Israel. Israel’s control of its border with Gaza is determined by its ongoing security assessments. No country is obligated to freely open its borders to those who are committed to its destruction. The fact that Israel does not is not “an act of genocide” but an act of self-preservation.
Barghouti’s many unscholarly lies and deceptions are easily refuted. But perhaps what best belies Barghouti’s apartheid charge is Tel Aviv University Rector Zvi Galil’s measured response to petitions (bearing tens of thousands of signatures) demanding the expulsion of the radical student:
A university campus should be a place that encourages and tolerates free speech, no matter how offensive the expressed opinions may be to the majority of students and faculty at that institution, or indeed to the public at large. Our university has adopted a similar policy also in previous occasions….The University cannot and will not expel this student based on his political views or actions. He will be assessed only on the basis of his academic achievements and excellence…
In other words, even Barghouti—who seeks not only the boycott of the very institution he attends, but also the destruction of the Jewish state – is not discriminated against on any level, not racial, not national, and not political.
Unsurprisingly, Barghouti was less than thrilled with Galil’s response. Scrambling to undo the damage caused to his boycott campaign, he stated:
The anti-boycott lobby will now jump to use this as a weapon in their increasingly desperate attempts to fend off the growing threat of academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions, arguing that these institutions respect the academic freedom “even” of boycott advocates. Other than the evident trivialization of academic freedom implied in such a claim, it misses the point completely on why PACBI, BRICUP (British Committee for Universities for Palestine), USACBI (U.S. Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel), among many other small academic boycott groups in France, Spain, Belgium, Norway, Australia, South Africa, etc., have called for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions..The well documented complicity of Israel’s academic institutions in the state’s colonial and racist policies remains THE main factor standing behind the boycott call. Whether TAU expels me or not, this compelling factor remains true. Expelling me would have added just a bit more fuel to an already blazing fire!”
A public statement by PACBI furiously lashed out at those who publicly condemned Barghouti’s contradictory situation. It declared such criticisim “underhanded,” a “witch hunt,” a “McCarthyist campaign” and a “smear campaign.” PACBI weakly attempts to justify Barghouti’s hypocrisy by alleging that “successive Israeli governments, committed to suppressing Palestinian national identity in their pursuit of maintaining Israel’s character as a racist state, have made every effort possible to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian university inside Israel. The only choice left to Palestinian students and academics in Israel, then, is to go to an Israeli university or leave their homeland to pursue their studies or academic careers abroad, often not possible due to financial or other compelling reasons…”
Indeed, the argument that Israel does not establish a “Palestinian university” within the Jewish state, as opposed to accomodating Arab students within Israeli universities, which Israel presently does, just underscores PACBI’s underlying goal of erasing Jewish/Israeli nationalism and replacing the Jewish state with a Palestinian one. After all, Palestinian students and academics do have “another choice” other then “attending an Israeli university” or “leaving their homeland.”– and that is attending a Palestinian university in the West Bank or Gaza – which is what many Palestinians do. The most recent Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistic figures available online indicate that as of 2006-7, 158,132 Palestinian students were enrolled in a total of 40 higher academic institutions in the Palestinian territories – eight universities, three colleges and 16 community colleges in the West Bank and six universities, three colleges and four community colleges in the Gaza Strip. Most of these universities were established or expanded after1967 under Israeli administration. That PACBI rejects this choice and condemns the fact that Palestinian universities are not available within Israel’s pre-1967 borders is evidence of their true agenda.
It is no wonder, given all the fabrications, distortions and hypocrisy by members of PACBI, that most academicians have not joined its mission. The movement has suffered one failure after another, the latest being the overwhelming rejection by the board of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology to adopt the recommendations of a PACBI-inspired petition to boycott.
Fabricated Successes
Successes, in fact, have been so scarce that proponents of academic boycott have been reduced to inventing accomplishments. For example, in February 2009, PACBI’s Web site triumphantly blared that “as a direct result of a two-year intensive campaign by the campus group, Students for Justice in Palestine,” Hampshire College had become the “first college in U.S. to divest from Israeli Occupation!” Shortly afterward, however, a joint public statement of clarification by Hampshire College’s President, Vice President, and Board of Trustees Chair explained that “the investment committee’s decision [to transfer assets held in a State Street fund to another fund] …did not pertain to a political movement and it was not made in reference to Israel.“
The only tangible success PACBI can boast of in the academic world, so far, is the University of Sussex’s student union decision not to stock Israeli goods in their campus stores.
Recent cultural boycott attempts by PACBI have not fared much better. For example, PACBI endeavored to have the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto cancel its exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, falsely alleging that the scrolls were “illegally stolen” from “East Jerusalem during Israel’s 1967 military invasion and occupation of the Palestinian West Bank.” The Canadian exhibition went ahead and was a record-breaking success, drawing the largest crowds for any single exhibit in almost a decade.
Similarly, highly publicized efforts to convince renowned singer Leonard Cohen to cancel his September concert in Tel Aviv failed, as did efforts to convince fans to boycott that concert. PACBI, however, did announce that it “received confirmation from the Palestinian Prisoners‘ Club Society that they will not be hosting Leonard Cohen in Ramallah.” The Tel Aviv concert, entitled “A Concert for Reconciliation, Tolerance and Peace” played to a sold-out audience of 47,000 and the $2 million dollar profit was donated to organizations promoting Israeli- Palestinian co-existence.
More recently, a letter invoking a PACBI call to boycott the June 2010 Tel Aviv International Student Film Festival was sent to film schools by two BDS activists—York University film professor John Greyson and filmmaker Kathy Wazana. The letter listed two signatories—director James Cameron and actress Jane Fonda. But upon learning of this, both Cameron and Fonda denied ever having signed or having known about the letter, and rejected its contents.
Clearly those interested in genuine Israeli-Palestinian peace and co-existence do not sign on to the BDS mission. And informed and educated scholars and students recognize the movement’s falsehoods. Nevertheless, even outright lies repeated often enough are eventually accepted as truths, and the BDS movement is intensifying its campaign of dishonest apartheid allegations against Israel. Those who believe in honesty and truth must recognize the underlying goal of BDS is to dismantle the Jewish state and stand against this hypocritical and dishonest movement.
BDS, Academic/Cultural Boycott of Israel, and Omar Barghouti
As anti-Israel extremists prepare to bring their propaganda campaign to campuses across North America under the rubric of 'Israeli Apartheid Week,' CAMERA analyzes the
www.camera.org
camera.org?PACBI and Its Co-founder
A subdivision of the global BDS movement is the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), which calls on “academics and intellectuals…in the international community to comprehensively and consistently boycott all Israeli academic and cultural institutions as a contribution to the struggle to end Israel‘s occupation, colonization and system of apartheid…”
PACBI’s global efforts have resulted in few tangible results. A 2005 vote by the British Association of University Teachers (AUT) to sever all academic and cultural links with Bar Ilan and Haifa universities was rescinded just a month later and there have been no academic boycotts of an Israeli university since. Perhaps this is because of the rank hypocrisy embodied by the movement and its leaders: The notion of scholars boycotting academic institutions runs counter to the very essence of intellectual and academic life, where exposure to diversity and freedom to challenge, debate and engage is the cornerstone of acquiring knowledge. Moreover, Israeli universities play a major role in educating numerous Israeli-Arabs and Palestinians.
In fact, Omar Barghouti, a PACBI co-founder—who travels from campus to campus denouncing Israel as an apartheid state and opposing Palestinian-Israeli collaboration as “providing a fig leaf covering up Israel’s …crimes against the Palestinian people”—is himself enrolled as a graduate student in philosophy (ethics) at Tel Aviv University.
When challenged about this blatant double standard, Barghouti dismisses it as irrelevant. “My studies at Tel-Aviv University are a personal matter and I have no interest in commenting,” he answered a Maariv reporter who questioned him about it. “Oppressed people don’t have a choice of where they go to school,” he responded to a student during a recent Q&A session at Loyola Law School.
But Barghouti is hardly an “oppressed” Palestinian with no choices. Born in Qatar, he grew up in Egypt and attended Columbia University in New York before moving to Ramallah as an adult. He could have continued his studies in Qatar, Egypt, or New York, or he could have attended either Bir Zeit University or Al Quds University near his home and thus support a Palestinian academy. Instead, he chose to take advantage of the educational opportunities at an Israeli institution (which he presumably supports through fees) – one which he demands everyone else shun.
Barghouti does not merely call for sanctions against supposed racist policies; his professed goal in calling for boycott, like that of other BDS supporters, is to permanently end Jewish autonomy in the region. He advocates for a Palestinian state to replace a Jewish one within all of historic Palestine.
His charges of Israeli racial apartheid are supported with distortions and outright canards. For example, he claims that Israel uses water as “a tool of apartheid and a means of ethnic cleansing” by stealing Palestinian resources. In fact, the opposite is true. Since 1967, when Israel began to administer the territories, the Palestinians have received far more fresh water than ever before. Under Israel’s administration, Palestinians’ share of water from aquifers that extend across both sides of the Green Line has risen while Israel’s own share of water from these aquifiers has decreased. In addition, and despite water shortages of its own, Israel transfers more than 40 million cubic meters of water per year to Palestinian water providers from aquifiers inside pre-1967 Israel—which is the principal source of Israel’s water.
Barghouti also accuses Israel of perpetrating “an act of genocide” against Palestinians in Gaza through a “hermetic siege of Gaza, designed to kill, cause serious bodily and mental harm, and deliberately inflicts conditions of life calculated to bring about partial and gradual physical destruction.” Of course, Israel does not and can not “hermetically” besiege Gaza, which shares a border not only with Israel but also with Egypt, which has likewise imposed sanctions on the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. As for the Israeli closures, Israel allows humanitarian aid through border crossings. In addition, Hamas, which is sworn to Israel’s destruction, uses its vast tunnel system to import all types of goods from Egypt, from food to weapons, and to dispatch terrorists to Israel. Israel’s control of its border with Gaza is determined by its ongoing security assessments. No country is obligated to freely open its borders to those who are committed to its destruction. The fact that Israel does not is not “an act of genocide” but an act of self-preservation.
Barghouti’s many unscholarly lies and deceptions are easily refuted. But perhaps what best belies Barghouti’s apartheid charge is Tel Aviv University Rector Zvi Galil’s measured response to petitions (bearing tens of thousands of signatures) demanding the expulsion of the radical student:
A university campus should be a place that encourages and tolerates free speech, no matter how offensive the expressed opinions may be to the majority of students and faculty at that institution, or indeed to the public at large. Our university has adopted a similar policy also in previous occasions….The University cannot and will not expel this student based on his political views or actions. He will be assessed only on the basis of his academic achievements and excellence…
In other words, even Barghouti—who seeks not only the boycott of the very institution he attends, but also the destruction of the Jewish state – is not discriminated against on any level, not racial, not national, and not political.
Unsurprisingly, Barghouti was less than thrilled with Galil’s response. Scrambling to undo the damage caused to his boycott campaign, he stated:
The anti-boycott lobby will now jump to use this as a weapon in their increasingly desperate attempts to fend off the growing threat of academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions, arguing that these institutions respect the academic freedom “even” of boycott advocates. Other than the evident trivialization of academic freedom implied in such a claim, it misses the point completely on why PACBI, BRICUP (British Committee for Universities for Palestine), USACBI (U.S. Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel), among many other small academic boycott groups in France, Spain, Belgium, Norway, Australia, South Africa, etc., have called for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions..The well documented complicity of Israel’s academic institutions in the state’s colonial and racist policies remains THE main factor standing behind the boycott call. Whether TAU expels me or not, this compelling factor remains true. Expelling me would have added just a bit more fuel to an already blazing fire!”
A public statement by PACBI furiously lashed out at those who publicly condemned Barghouti’s contradictory situation. It declared such criticisim “underhanded,” a “witch hunt,” a “McCarthyist campaign” and a “smear campaign.” PACBI weakly attempts to justify Barghouti’s hypocrisy by alleging that “successive Israeli governments, committed to suppressing Palestinian national identity in their pursuit of maintaining Israel’s character as a racist state, have made every effort possible to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian university inside Israel. The only choice left to Palestinian students and academics in Israel, then, is to go to an Israeli university or leave their homeland to pursue their studies or academic careers abroad, often not possible due to financial or other compelling reasons…”
Indeed, the argument that Israel does not establish a “Palestinian university” within the Jewish state, as opposed to accomodating Arab students within Israeli universities, which Israel presently does, just underscores PACBI’s underlying goal of erasing Jewish/Israeli nationalism and replacing the Jewish state with a Palestinian one. After all, Palestinian students and academics do have “another choice” other then “attending an Israeli university” or “leaving their homeland.”– and that is attending a Palestinian university in the West Bank or Gaza – which is what many Palestinians do. The most recent Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistic figures available online indicate that as of 2006-7, 158,132 Palestinian students were enrolled in a total of 40 higher academic institutions in the Palestinian territories – eight universities, three colleges and 16 community colleges in the West Bank and six universities, three colleges and four community colleges in the Gaza Strip. Most of these universities were established or expanded after1967 under Israeli administration. That PACBI rejects this choice and condemns the fact that Palestinian universities are not available within Israel’s pre-1967 borders is evidence of their true agenda.
It is no wonder, given all the fabrications, distortions and hypocrisy by members of PACBI, that most academicians have not joined its mission. The movement has suffered one failure after another, the latest being the overwhelming rejection by the board of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology to adopt the recommendations of a PACBI-inspired petition to boycott.
Fabricated Successes
Successes, in fact, have been so scarce that proponents of academic boycott have been reduced to inventing accomplishments. For example, in February 2009, PACBI’s Web site triumphantly blared that “as a direct result of a two-year intensive campaign by the campus group, Students for Justice in Palestine,” Hampshire College had become the “first college in U.S. to divest from Israeli Occupation!” Shortly afterward, however, a joint public statement of clarification by Hampshire College’s President, Vice President, and Board of Trustees Chair explained that “the investment committee’s decision [to transfer assets held in a State Street fund to another fund] …did not pertain to a political movement and it was not made in reference to Israel.“
The only tangible success PACBI can boast of in the academic world, so far, is the University of Sussex’s student union decision not to stock Israeli goods in their campus stores.
Recent cultural boycott attempts by PACBI have not fared much better. For example, PACBI endeavored to have the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto cancel its exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, falsely alleging that the scrolls were “illegally stolen” from “East Jerusalem during Israel’s 1967 military invasion and occupation of the Palestinian West Bank.” The Canadian exhibition went ahead and was a record-breaking success, drawing the largest crowds for any single exhibit in almost a decade.
Similarly, highly publicized efforts to convince renowned singer Leonard Cohen to cancel his September concert in Tel Aviv failed, as did efforts to convince fans to boycott that concert. PACBI, however, did announce that it “received confirmation from the Palestinian Prisoners‘ Club Society that they will not be hosting Leonard Cohen in Ramallah.” The Tel Aviv concert, entitled “A Concert for Reconciliation, Tolerance and Peace” played to a sold-out audience of 47,000 and the $2 million dollar profit was donated to organizations promoting Israeli- Palestinian co-existence.
More recently, a letter invoking a PACBI call to boycott the June 2010 Tel Aviv International Student Film Festival was sent to film schools by two BDS activists—York University film professor John Greyson and filmmaker Kathy Wazana. The letter listed two signatories—director James Cameron and actress Jane Fonda. But upon learning of this, both Cameron and Fonda denied ever having signed or having known about the letter, and rejected its contents.
Clearly those interested in genuine Israeli-Palestinian peace and co-existence do not sign on to the BDS mission. And informed and educated scholars and students recognize the movement’s falsehoods. Nevertheless, even outright lies repeated often enough are eventually accepted as truths, and the BDS movement is intensifying its campaign of dishonest apartheid allegations against Israel. Those who believe in honesty and truth must recognize the underlying goal of BDS is to dismantle the Jewish state and stand against this hypocritical and dishonest movement.
BDS, Academic/Cultural Boycott of Israel, and Omar Barghouti
As anti-Israel extremists prepare to bring their propaganda campaign to campuses across North America under the rubric of 'Israeli Apartheid Week,' CAMERA analyzes the
Why don't you just post directly from the IDF?
Your racism is on the wrong side of history, CM.
