Spare a thought for the anti-Israel “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement. It’s had a rough couple of weeks.
It all started with Roger Waters, Pink Floyd frontman, in late July of this year. For the last few months, a controversy has been raging as to whether Waters, one of the cultural leaders of BDS, is anti-Semitic or not. The point of contention was a giant inflatable pig that Waters used in his tour, and which had printed on it various symbols of capitalism, dictatorial regimes and the like. One of these symbols was the Jewish Star of David. This, coupled with the symbolism of the pig, considered an “unclean” animal in Judaism, was enough to get people wondering. To deflect criticism, Waters added a Crucifix and a Star and Crescent to the pig as well, in a somewhat warped gesture of “goodwill”. At the time, Abe Foxman, the National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, defended Waters, saying of the show “It’s artistic exuberance and crossing the lines of whatever, but he’s not an anti-Semite.”
Fast forward six months, and Waters has managed to change that perception of himself in an interview with the American CounterPunch magazine. In it, he referred to a shadowy “extremely powerful” Jewish lobby controlling America, a standard anti-Semitic trope (for those interested in further reading, this article by Michael Koplow (@mkoplow) is a great rebuttal of this argument). He then went on to accuse Israel of ethnic cleansing and apartheid, and rolled out another popular anti-Semitic line, that of Israel being equivalent to Nazi Germany, and Israel committing acts equivalent to those of the Nazi regime. He gave his source of information as a book by an author whose name I won’t repeat here. Suffice to say that the book has been almost entirely ignored in the media as extremely shoddy and biased journalism, and so it should remain. Waters’ comments have come in for praise from notorious Holocaust-denying anti-Semite and fellow BDS supporter David Duke, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan. And Abe Foxman? He has reluctantly had to change his view, telling the Times of Israel: “Roger Waters has absorbed classic anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and these have now seeped into the totality of his views.”
It got worse for the BDS movement though. The central claim for the movement, and the reason for its existence, is its claim to be backed by the Palestinian people, a statement which is almost impossible to qualify. The President of Al-Quds University, the second biggest in the West Bank, and a leading Palestinian intellectual, Dr Sari Nusseibeh, said in response to a British academic boycott in 2005: “Our position is based upon the belief that it is through cooperation based on mutual respect, rather than boycotts or discrimination, that our common goals can be achieved.” Last week at the funeral of Nelson Mandela, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas added his voice to Nusseibeh’s, telling the South African “Star” newspaper: “we do not ask anyone to boycott Israel itself… we have relations with Israel, we have mutual recognition of Israel.”
The BDS movement was cheered though by news of a vote in favour of boycotting Israel by the American Studies Association of the USA. The motion was carried by 800 members of the 3800 members of the organisation, a whopping vote of support of around 20%. In the days following the vote, two American universities, Penn State Harrisburg and Brandeis, quit the organisation. What made this particularly tragic was the quote given afterwards by the President of the ASA, Curtis Marez, on the reasoning behind the vote. His response? “One has to start somewhere”. As already pointed out in another blog on the subject, this is Nelson Muntz style logic:
The next anticipated battleground for the BDS movement is the American Modern Languages Association (MLA), and its shaping up to be a classic peek into the workings of the BDS movement. The MLA will be “debating” whether to support BDS or not next month, but for those who can’t wait until then to find out the results of that debate, here’s how it ends.
What's Left? 