BBC’s continues BDS campaign reporting failures - by Hadar Sela

As we see in this article that editorial policy continues and that "Israel says" line (previously employed earlier this year) does not – as the BBC apparently believes – mean that the story has been reported accurately and impartially.

Hadar Sela..
BBC Watch..
04 September '18..

On September 1st the BBC News website published an article titled “Lana Del Rey: Singer postpones Israel performance after backlash” on its ‘Entertainment & Arts’ and ‘Middle East’ pages.

Readers were told that:

“The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (Pacbi) welcomed her decision to cancel next week’s headline performance.

“Thank you for your principled decision,” the group said in a statement. It had earlier urged the singer to “reconsider”.

Pacbi is part of the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) movement, which campaigns for a complete boycott of Israel over its policies towards the Palestinians.

Israel says that BDS opposes Israel’s very existence and is motivated by anti-Semitism.” [emphasis added]

So is it really the case that just “Israel says” that the BDS campaign “opposes Israel’s very existence”, as the BBC would have its audiences believe?

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Hawking’s affinity with political movements antithetical to the very idea of freedom? Why not?

Ben Cohen..
Commentary/Contentions..
08 May '13..



There was much relief when, earlier today, a spokesman for Cambridge University in England released a statement denying that Stephen Hawking, the renowned British physicist, had invoked the academic boycott of Israel as the reason for his decision to withdraw from the “Facing Tomorrow” conference, which will be hosted by Israeli President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem in June.

As it turns out, Cambridge spoke too soon. Tim Holt, the spokesman who said that Hawking had backed out for health reasons, was compelled to issue the following clarification:

“We have now received confirmation from Professor Hawking’s office that a letter was sent on Friday to the Israeli President’s office regarding his decision not to attend the Presidential Conference, based on advice from Palestinian academics that he should respect the boycott.

“We had understood previously that his decision was based purely on health grounds having been advised by doctors not to fly.”

The initial doubt over the whether the Hawking story was true is easy to understand. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement has a track record of lying about its successes. Over the last few years, many of their claims about individuals and companies endorsing the boycott–including PGGM, the largest pension fund in the Netherlands, Hampshire College, Harvard University, the academic retirement fund TIAA-CREF, and telecoms giant Motorola–were quickly exposed as false. Additionally, the signal failure of the movement’s academic arm to enlist any prominent, respected scholar to its cause naturally sowed doubts about Hawking’s apparent endorsement. Finally, it seemed difficult to believe that Hawking, whose own achievements owe a great deal to the Israeli physicist Jacob Bekenstein, would approve something as crude and as ugly as a boycott.

What, exactly, has Hawking signed up to? At the outset, the idea that his decision is related to discomfort with Israel’s settlement policies should be dispensed with. The Palestinian Call for an Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel is refreshingly clear that Israel’s presence in the West Bank is simply one element of a much more comprehensive assault upon Israel’s legitimacy:

What UEFA needs to know - Soccer and terrorism

Petra Marquadt-Bigman..
The Warped Mirror..
11 April '13..

Thanks to an energetic campaign by anti-Israel activists, even someone like me who doesn’t really keep up with sports and soccer news can know that this year’s UEFA European Under-21 Championship finals are scheduled to take place in Israel this June.

Naturally, the BDS-crowd that wants Israel held to bigoted double standards can’t stand the idea, and at sites like the Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah and friends have begun to churn out their usual fare of propaganda, petitions and piffle to rally the BDS-faithful for yet another campaign.

When it comes to football, it’s perhaps particularly easy to illustrate that BDS is indeed all about applying bigoted double standards to Israel. After all, while there have been displays of despicable racism by Israeli football fans, very similar problems have long plagued the sport in Europe and elsewhere, as even the title of this BBC analysis from 2000 nicely illustrates: “Soccer violence an international problem.”

Yet, the BBC and other media outlets like nothing better than to report over and over again on the transgressions of Israeli fans. But when Egyptian football fans display a huge banner calling for a new Holocaust, it’s not worth mentioning. Similarly, there is no interest when Jibril Rajoub, the President of the Palestinian Football Federation and the Palestinian Olympic Committee elicits chuckles and roaring applause when he promises that he will provide helicopters for visiting committee members “so they will see no Jews, no Satans, no Zionist sons of bitches.”

Given the determined disinterest of the media in reporting anything that might show the pervasive demonization of Jews and Israel among Palestinians, the activists who want to pressure UEFA into boycotting Israel take no risk when they use Palestinian footballer Mahmoud Sarsak to push their campaign. And the BBC is there to help: as blogger Adam Holland noted in a post last July, the BBC “reported on Israel’s release of Mahmoud al-Sarsak and his return to Gaza, portraying him as a hunger-striking soccer player who was never formally charged with a crime. […] All that is true, of course, but only a partial recounting of the facts.”

Factsheet: Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI)

NGO MonitorFebruary 09, 2011

http://www.ngo-monitor.org/article/factsheet_palestinian_campaign_for_the_academic_and_cultural_boycott_of_israel_pacbi_

Overview

• PACBI is led by Palestinian academics and intellectuals promoting a “comprehensive and consistent boycott all Israeli academic and cultural institutions.”
• Omar Barghouti –  co-founder (doctoral student at Tel Aviv University)
• Ramallah-based. Following 2001 Durban NGO Forum, initiated a 2002 call for a comprehensive economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel and 2003 statement calling for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. (Restated in July 2005 “Palestinian United Call for BDS against Israel.")
• Spearheads rhetoric and ideas behind global BDS campaigns, publishing the “guidelines for the international boycott of Israel.”
• Insists that boycotts will help “end Israel’s occupation, colonization and system of apartheid.”
• Declares boycott will continue “until Israel withdraws from all the lands occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem; removes all its colonies in those lands; agrees to United Nations resolutions relevant to the restitution of Palestinian refugees rights; and dismantles its system of Apartheid” (referring to Arabs living within the 1949 armistice lines). 
• Funding not transparent - no online information.

Inflammatory Rhetoric

• Refers to Israel as an “apartheid state” with “racial exclusivity,” alleging that “the apartheid character has been part of the design of Israel since its inception.”
• Claims that “resistance in all its forms is a legitimate right” of Palestinians, and that the “barriers” between Israelis and Palestinians exist because “the Zionist movement and the State of Israel did not stop for one day and massacred and uprooted [the Palestinians].”
• Accuses Israel of “war crimes,” “crimes against humanity,” and “genocidal policy,” and calls Gaza a “concentration camp.”
• Falsely states that 86% of casualties in the Gaza War (2009) were civilians, and accuses Israel of having “genocidal intentions,” and “annihilate[ing] all civilian infrastructure, target[ing] civilian shelters, [and] prevent[ing] medical teams from reaching victims.”

Targeting Artists

• PACBI publishes open letters to artists, urging them to cancel their planned appearances in Israel.
• Warns artists that they “will forever be attached to the draconian machine of Israeli colonial and racist policy,” and encourages treating Israel as “a pariah state.”
• These letters often contain false information, such as alleging that Arab-Israelis are subject to ongoing martial law, and falsely claiming that artists such as Bono and Snoop Dogg cancelled performances in Israel due to the boycott.
• Urges international audiences to boycott Israeli artists such as the Israel Ballet and the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra, which it accuses of being a “partner with the state in planning, implementing, and whitewashing war crimes and international law violations.”

Barghouti

Jon
Divest This!
14 May '10

If you’ve been on either side of the BDS debates over the last couple of years, you can’t help stumbling over Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).

I’ve discussed PACBI before, and despite a name which implies that the organization’s focus is on academic and cultural boycotts (the least successful variant of BDS), the PACBI name – and Barghouti’s – tend to get invoked by participants in any BDS project (university and union divestment battles, product boycotts at US food co-ops, etc.) regardless of whether they fall into PACBI’s alleged mandate.

When the Irish trade union movement met to discuss their controversial boycott resolutions against Israel, Barghouti was on the agenda. When the San Francisco Jewish Federation was debating how to prevent BDS activists from subsidizing their project with community money, local Jewish leaders were denounced for not debating Barghouti on the subject.

Even within the Israel-de-legitimization movement, where the efficacy of BDS vs. other tactics are debated (usually behind the scenes), Berghouti’s name is used as a show-stopper, an attempt to end disputes over the subject by claiming PACBI’s 2005 academic boycott call means the BDS movement wells up purely from Palestinian civil society and is thus beyond discussion. (The fact that PACBI and Barghouti himself are late-comers to the BDS campaign, which began in 2001, seems to have fled the consciousness of anti-Israel campaigners.)

So who is Mr. Barghouti?

If the name rings a bell, Omar Barghouti is related to a pair of older Barghouti’s, Mustafa Barghouti (the man who ran against current Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas) and the more notorious Marwan Barghouti who is currently serving five consecutive life sentences for his involvement in terror attacks against Israeli civilians. Like the Husseini’s, a clan which includes PA negotiator Faisal Husseini, the late Yassir Arafat (whose real name is Abd al-Rahman abd al-Bauf Arafat al-Qud al-Husseini), and the infamous Haj Amin al-Husseini (the George Washington of Palestinian nationalism who spent World War working for the Nazis in the Middle East), the Barghouti’s are major players in regional Arab politics.

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Omar Barghouti’s academic terrorism

Fresnozionism.org
10 May '10

In honor of Yom Yerushalayim, a very special video - Jerusalem Day: Reflections by Rabbi Yisrael Ariel

Omar Barghouti (not to be confused with convicted murderers Ahmed Barghouti or Marwan Barghouti) is a graduate student in Philosophy at Tel Aviv University. He is also a founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), the leaders of the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

Some have suggested that Barghouti, a ‘Palestinian citizen of Israel’ is behaving hypocritically by continuing to study at a university that he urges others to boycott; but as we will see, he’s no stranger to double- or even triplethink. There is a petition (in Hebrew) here which has been signed by almost 143,000 people who want to see him kicked out of Tel Aviv University.

Barghouti is often referred to as ‘moderate’ and ‘nonviolent’, which he is compared to Ahmed and Marwan, for example. But although he doesn’t launch terror attacks or even give speeches calling for Arabs to rise up and slaughter Jews, his goal is the same, to end the state of Israel.

Omar Barghouti is a man at home in the academic world who spins the ugly core that underlies all of Palestinian Arab ‘culture’ — burning hatred and a drive for bloody revenge — into perfectly formed academic English, providing a theoretical basis for educated Westerners to tap into their own darker impulses in the guise of an enlightened pursuit of justice, and in terms of the most modern post-colonial thought.

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BDS, Academic/Cultural Boycott of Israel, and Omar Barghouti

Ricki Hollander
CAMERA
24 February '10

A Palestinian call for comprehensive economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel was issued in August 2002, a year after the idea was introduced at the first United Nations-sponsored World Conference on Racism in Durban. The "Durban Strategy"— a term coined by NGO-Monitor's Gerald Steinberg—attempts to demonize the Jewish state as apartheid and isolate it with the same boycott and divestment tactics that were used so successfully to dismantle South Africa's apartheid regime.

While the comparison of Israel to South Africa is a patently false one rejected by people who have lived and suffered under actual apartheid rule and which has been throughly debunked, it is gaining traction among those who seek an end to the Jewish state. And while the Palestinian-initiated Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) movement has not managed to inflict economic harm upon Israel, BDS is wielded as a propaganda tool with which to delegitimize that country.

One of its few early successes came in 2004 and 2005 through a group of liberal Protestant (or "mainline") churches in the United States that promoted divestment from companies doing business with Israel, although similar anti-Israel resolutions were defeated at subsequent national church gatherings. This campaign was covered in depth by CAMERA's Christian media analyst Dexter Van Zile (see "Mainline American Christian ‘Peacemakers' against Israel") who points out that, "largely because of their shrinking numbers, the churches involved in this campaign have had little impact on the American public's attitudes toward Israel."

Over the past year, however, BDS activists have been ratcheting up their efforts. They seized upon the biased and mendacious Goldstone report to endorse their goals, claiming that "the report, and the media attention given to it, moved the terms of international solidarity with Palestine into a new plane, where calling for BDS is no longer considered ‘unrealistic' or ‘counterproductive.'"

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Dexia Israel Denying Economic Rights to Jewish Applicants

Manhigut Yehudit Blog
31 December 09

In the Dec. 30th, 2009 Jerusalem Post, the following headline appeared, "Belgian bank won't lend to settlements". The Belgian bank, Dexia, has a special branch in Israel that works with municipalities. Dexia has recently decided to refuse loan requests coming into the bank from local councils in Judea and Samaria. They are arguing that the loans are too risky because if Israel agrees to abandon the Jewish heartland, they will not be able to collect on their loans. Hmmm. Does anyone else smell something not so nice here? Click here for the full story. I decided to do a wee bit of research on this and it took only one google search to find out who is behind this actuarial attack on the Jewish people -- take a guess -- you got it! Omar Barghouti: founder of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).

Now this fellow, Omar, calls himself a "Palestinian". He was actually born in Qatar and grew up in Egypt but nevermind ... he says he is a "Palestinian". From his perspective "Palestinian" is probably a "state of mind" and he really feels it in his bones. After all he is a graduate of Columbia University which Caroline Glick (also a grad) calls "Bir Zeit University on the Hudson". Omar is one of the most successful activists working to demonize and delegitimize Israel - so it is a good idea for us to get to know the enemy a bit. He is a key force behind the Belgian bank loan refusal policy.

In addition to Mr. Barghouti's efforts to generate economic attacks on Israel - more about this shortly - one of his most clever tactics was to enter Tel Aviv University as a student hoping that they would expel him. Well no such luck! Despite the seeming contradiction his study there presents to his organization's stated purpose "Academic Boycott..etc" ; and contrary to the hopes of tens of thousands who signed a petition to have him expelled (65,000 people) - he will remain. Tel Aviv University has no plans to expel him. Of course he is disappointed by this. As he explained to his fellow activists,

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