NYU ‘Students for Justice in Palestine’ and a response to ‘the 10 Common Misconceptions About BDS’ - by David Collier

BDS seeks the destruction of Israel. Only Israel. It harms Palestinians, perpetuates the conflict and it only helps the same radical Islamic movements that it shares its goals with. It is a modern day version of a lynch mob, with BDS activists gathered together, wanting to burn the house at the bottom of the hill. ‘Coincidentally’, that house is the only one in the village with the Jewish family inside it. Antisemitic? You decide.

David Collier..
Beyond the Great Divide..
08 November '18..

NYU and the ‘ten common misconceptions about BDS’

‘Washington Square News‘, is an ‘Independent Student Newspaper’ at NYU. Three days ago they published an article written by SJP ‘Students for Justice in Palestine’. It was titled ‘10 Common Misconceptions About BDS‘ and set out to reassure the reader that the boycott movement against Israel (BDS) is a legitimate, credible, successful and ethical tool with which to bring peace to Israel and the Palestinians. I thought I’d take a look:

1 BDS is antisemitic

This is an easy one. BDS is clearly antisemitic. SJP argue that ‘BDS targets the nation-state of Israel, not any religious or ethnic group’, which is half-true, but they fail to address the lies and hypocrisy inherent in the movement. In their argument they bring up historical Jewish anti-Zionism in the shape of the Labour Bund. The logic is this – if some Jewish people were against the formation of Israel in the 1900-1940’s, it is okay to oppose Zionism today. That’s pretty twisted. The Bundists opposed Zionism because they believed Europe could provide safe haven in the shape of Jewish autonomous regions. They were wrong and Bundism burnt in the fires of Auschwitz. SJP are cynically using Holocaust victims to shield criticism of an attack against Jews.

Yet the real issue with BDS is in its selectivity. Notice how BDS ‘target’ Israel. Why not Lebanon? Inside Lebanon are descendants of the 1948 Israel /Arab conflict, perpetually held under a real Apartheid system. These ‘refugees’ are explicitly referenced by BDS, yet BDS does not target those guilty of oppressing them. Why not? If human rights of Palestinians is key here, then BDS should cross borders, but it doesn’t. This shows that promoting the ‘human rights’ of Palestinians is an excuse. BDS is a movement set up to exclusively target the ‘Jewish state’ for reasons beyond those officially stated. Picking exclusively on Jews sounds pretty antisemitic to me.

(Continue to Full Post)

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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Trading Israeli sovereignty for PR - by Vic Rosenthal

...One usually sensible journalist praised the decision to allow Alqasem to enter, because “it proves that the system works” and “showed just how democratic Israel really is.” But in fact it proved the opposite: that the system of laws does not work, because it is often overridden by considerations of public relations. And it has absolutely nothing to do with democracy, unless the next step is to give Lara Alqasem citizenship because her grandparents were “Palestinian.”

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
21 October '18..
Link: http://abuyehuda.com/2018/10/trading-sovereignty-for-pr/

I live in a country in which everything is negotiable, everything is negotiated, nothing is final, and nothing is really forbidden, at least for our enemies.

Graduate student Lara Alqasem, the former president of a BDS-supporting, Israel-hating, university “Students for Justice in Palestine” chapter, was turned back at the border because there is a law that entry is forbidden to a non-citizen “if he, the organization or the body he acts on behalf of knowingly issues a public call for boycotting Israel.” If leading a chapter of SJP doesn’t fit this criterion, nothing does.

The decision of the security service to bar her was initially supported by an administrative court, and then upheld on appeal by the Tel Aviv District Court. But Israel’s Supreme Court threw out the earlier decisions and ruled that she could be admitted. The Court accepted her contention (possibly untrue) that she hadn’t engaged in boycott activity since April 2017, said that the SJP chapter she belonged to was small and unimportant, and argued that since she wanted to study in Israel, she couldn’t have really believed in boycotting Israel. And the justices wanted to avoid giving the impression that, God forbid, she was being excluded for her political opinions.

I could criticize the court opinion in detail, but I’m not going to do that. Just two points: first, even if her SJP chapter (at the University of Florida) was small, the national organization is one of the prime movers of the BDS movement in the US, having introduced countless boycott resolutions at American universities, organizing “Israel apartheid week,” and engaging in intimidation of pro-Israel students.

And second, one of the leaders of the BDS movement, Omar Barghouti, is a Ph.D candidate at Tel Aviv University. So the fact that Alqasem also wants to study here proves nothing.

I assume that since two lower courts supported the decision of the security service to prevent her admission, it was reasonable from a legal standpoint. The Supreme court rarely interferes in such cases. But this time it chose to find reasons to do so. In other words, it thought the political consequences of keeping her out were worse than allowing her in. And this is what I dispute.

The Court acted (quite predictably) according to the principle – also adhered to by the government in its dealings with the terrorists of Gaza, and illegal Bedouin encampments – that nothing is worse than looking illiberal. Its decision, which was probably intended to improve Israel’s image in the world, in practice eviscerated the law that was passed to prevent subversive activity inside our borders, and will encourage more activists to try to enter the country so they can participate in demonstrations and get street cred to help promote anti-Israel activity back home.

Brown Hillel and the substantive war to deny Jews their freedom as Jews - by Caroline Glick

...The ball is now in Hillel International’s court. Brown Hillel defrauded Hillel International. It lied to Hillel CEO Eric Fingerhut. It used Hillel’s facility to host a group that wishes to destroy Hillel as part of its institutional war against Jewish freedom in the US. This institutional war goes hand in hand with the substantive war against the Jews.

Caroline Glick..
Our World/JPost..
16 May '16..

Two wars are being waged against Jewish students on American university campuses. One is substantive, the other is institutional. The plight of the Jews at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island is emblematic of both.

The purpose of the substantive war is to deny Jews their freedom as Jews. As the guarantor of Jewish freedom, Israel is the subject of a systematic, multidimensional assault, carried out everywhere on campuses.

On a growing number of campuses in the United States, the only Jews who can safely express their views on Israel are those who champion Israel’s destruction.

Those who support Israel are subjected to continuous harassment by their fellow students.

The substantive battle is being led by Students for Justice in Palestine. SJP is a phantom organization with no national organization. As Jonathan Schanzer from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies testified before the US Congress last month, it is directed by former officials from non-profits including the Holy Foundation, KindHearts and the Islamic Association for Palestine that were forced to shut down after they were implicated in financing terrorist groups including Hamas and al-Qaida.

At Brown, SJP seeks to make it impossible for Jewish students to organize as Jews.

For instance, in late January, Brown Hillel hosted a discussion of Jewish identity featuring actor Michael Douglas and Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky.

SJP protested the event arguing that since both men supported Israel, the event stood in opposition to “social justice.”

As Ira Stoll reported in the New York Sun, during the event, protesters outside the hall calling for Israel’s destruction made it hard for the audience of several hundred people to hear what Sharansky and Douglas were saying.

Stoll added that rather than protect the audience’s freedom of assembly and the speakers’ freedom of speech, an assistant dean stood with the protesters and “offered to provide further support for students who had missed class to be involved in activism or who were upset by the evening’s events.”

In March, a consortium of student groups at Brown, including a Jewish group affiliated with Hillel, cosponsored a talk by Janet Mock, an African American transsexual activist.

In light of the Jewish group’s co-sponsorship, SJP launched a petition to boycott the speech. Not wanting the protest to eclipse the substance of her remarks, which, of course had nothing whatsoever to do with Israel, Mock canceled her lecture.

These events make clear that for SJP and its allies, it isn’t just Jewish life on campus that must be destroyed.

Jews as Jews must not be permitted to participate with non-Jews in organizing or hosting campus events related to issues of common concern.

In both of its substantive anti-Jewish actions, SJP tipped its hat to the institutional battle against Jewish freedom that its Jewish allies are leading.

Defeating Hamas in America - by Caroline Glick

Activists from US coast to coast robotically parrot the same lies, employ the same tactics of bullying, intimidating and silencing pro-Israel activists and speakers on campus after campus.

Caroline Glick..
Column One/JPost..
27 April '16..

To fight the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel, it is first necessary to understand it.

The BDS campaign is an extraordinary phenomenon.

Activists from US coast to coast robotically parrot the same lies, employ the same tactics of bullying, intimidating and silencing pro-Israel activists and speakers on campus after campus.

Their goals are uniform. They seek to silence pro-Israel voices in US academia as a means to destroy general public support for Israel in America.

And they seek to make Jew-hatred socially acceptable in elite circles in America for the first time since the Holocaust.

This month it was leftist MK Tzipi Livni’s turn to fall victim to BDS bigotry and defamation. During a public appearance at Harvard Law School, one of the heads of BDS movement at the school, Husam el-Qoulaq, asked her why she is “smelly.”

Qoulaq is the head of Students for Justice in Palestine at Harvard Law School.

SJP is the central engine of the BDS movement.

Its members are the ones who organize the “divest from Israel” resolutions routinely passed by ignorant or intimidated student representatives on college councils.

SJP members are the ones who regularly harass pro-Israel students and riot or otherwise disrupt pro-Israel events on campuses.

They are the ones who willingly and purposely engage in rank anti-Semitic demonization of Jews and Israel to normalize Jew-hatred in America.

Given SJP’s lead role in the campaign against Israel and American Jewry on college campuses, students and Jewish groups trying to combat the racist movement focus their attention on SJP.

But it works out that SJP doesn’t formally exist.

There is no nonprofit group called Students for Justice in Palestine. SJP doesn’t file tax forms. It doesn’t have a paper trail. In other words, SJP is a ghost organization, an illusion.

To bring it down you need to find its controllers.

Pro-Palestinian campus activists have some ‘very smelly’ financial supporters

...SJP’s self-declared goal is to end Israel’s “occupation and colonization of all Arab lands” while “promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.” That’s another way of saying destroying the Jewish state. Yet as prominent as SJP and the wider BDS movement have become, less is known about the sources of their funding.

Bret Stephens..
Wall Street Journal..
25 April '16..

The Anti-Israel Money Trail

Earlier this month, Harvard law student Husam El-Qoulaq posed a question at a public conference to Tzipi Livni, the former Israeli foreign minister. “How is it that you are so smelly?” Mr. El-Qoulaq wanted to know. “It’s regarding your odor—about the odor of Tzipi Livni, very smelly.”

Harvard went out of its way to try to keep the questioner’s identity a secret, including by deleting the comment from its video of the event—a privilege, one suspects, the school would not have afforded a student asking a similar question of a black speaker. And Mr. El-Qoulaq, who is active in a Harvard affiliate of Students for Justice in Palestine, or SJP, later offered an anonymous apology “to anyone who felt offended.”

Yet the exchange is another reminder of the anti-Israel, and increasingly anti-Semitic, environment students now experience on American campuses. That’s the doing of several groups, including some nominally Jewish ones. But none is so prominent as SJP, which has more than 100 chapters nationwide and has been canny in pairing itself with left-wing or minority student organizations to sponsor anti-Israel events, heckle pro-Israel speakers, and agitate for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) resolutions on campus.

SJP’s self-declared goal is to end Israel’s “occupation and colonization of all Arab lands” while “promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.” That’s another way of saying destroying the Jewish state.

Yet as prominent as SJP and the wider BDS movement have become, less is known about the sources of their funding. That changed last week after testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee by Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Mr. Schanzer, a former Treasury Department official and terrorism-finance expert, notes in his testimony that a prominent backer of SJP and like-minded groups is an organization called American Muslims for Palestine, based in Palos Hills, Ill., and led by UC Berkeley lecturer Hatem Bazian, who also happens to be one of SJP’s founders. AMP claimed to have spent $100,000 on anti-Israel campus activities in 2014, including to SJP. An AMP conference that year at a Chicago Hyatt invited participants to “come and navigate the fine line between legal activism and material support for terrorism.”

FDD discovered that many of AMP’s leading members were previously active in some dubious former charities. The most prominent, the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation For Relief and Development, was shut down in 2001 by the federal government for providing millions in funds to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas; five Holy Land officials eventually were convicted to prison terms and two others fled the country.

The Link Between Hamas and BDS - by Jonathan Tobin

...The problem with BDS isn’t who funds it so much as the fact that it remains a cause in service to hate. It is wrong not because of its associations but because, like Hamas, it’s purpose is to work for Israel’s destruction and the dispossession of its people. This is a fact that BDS supporters and fellow travelers ignore at the loss of their own integrity.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
20 April '16..

Those who wish to rationalize or apologize for those involved in the BDS — boycott, divest and sanction — movement against Israel have sought to depict it as a principled effort that is rooted in a concern for human rights. Even those liberal critics of BDS like writer Peter Beinart have called for welcoming young Jews who are supporters of BDS and even members of groups like Students for Justice in Palestine into Jewish communal groups and events. He depicted such people as “hearing the voice of Sinai” — a metaphor for a vision of Jewish values and law — albeit in a different, if upsetting manner. Just as he denies that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, Beinart and other liberals who agree with him allege that however upsetting BDS may be, it is primarily motivated by Israeli policies rather than hate.

This claim has been undermined by the anti-Semitic statements and behavior that has been employed by BDS advocates on American college campuses. But yesterday we learned of another link between BDS and hate. In testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’ Jonathan Schanzer presented evidence of a troubling link between a main source of funding for BDS and the terrorist Hamas movement.

As Schanzer explained, his group traced what happened to employees of three now-defunct non-profit groups that were implicated by the federal government in support for terrorism. The three, the Holy Land Foundation, the Kind Hearts Foundation for Humanitarian Development and the Islamic Association for Palestine were involved in raising money for Hamas in the United States. But while the Treasury Department shut these Hamas fundraisers down, that still leaves open the question of what happened to those involved with these groups. According to Schanzer, seven key figures in raising money for Hamas are now associated with a new organization called American Muslims for Palestine.

As the Times of Israel reports:

Schanzer told members of Congress that the latter is “arguably the leading BDS organization in the U.S., a key sponsor of the anti-Israel campus network known as Students for Justice in Palestine.” The organization, he said, provides money, speakers, training and even “apartheid walls” to SJP activists on campus, for the annual Israel Apartheid Week events.

While the activity of American Muslims for Palestine is advocacy, not terror funding, Schanzer is right when he says, “Americans have a right to know who is leading the BDS campaign and so do the students who may not be aware of AMP’s leaders or their goals.”

The lie of pro-Palestinian activism - by Caroline Glick

...Until 1994, Eid’s human rights activism made him the darling of the far Left. He was a co-director of B’tselem. He was invited to prestigious anti-Israel forums worldwide and given platforms where he presented his accusations against Israel to international acclaim. But since the PA was formed, those who once upheld him as a hero have turned their backs on him. In so doing, they have shown their true colors. During his talk at the University of Chicago, those colors came shining through. Eid talked about the human rights abuses and repression of Palestinians not at the hands of Israel, but at the hands of the PA and Hamas. In other words, Eid held the Palestinian leadership accountable for its failure to respect the rights of the Palestinians it claims to speak for. This, it turns out, is a big no-no.

Caroline Glick..
Our World/JPost..
23 February '16..

Last Thursday, yet again, we learned that pro-Palestinian activists couldn’t care less about Palestinians.

For them, the Palestinians whose rights they claim to champion are nothing more than means to another end.

Our latest lesson came from the University of Chicago.

Last week, Palestinian human rights activist Bassam Eid was abused and threatened by supposedly pro-Palestinian and pro-peace activists as he tried to inform his audience about the state of Palestinian human rights today.

Bassam Eid has dedicated his life to defending the human rights of the Palestinians. From 1967 through 1994, Israel administered the population centers of Judea, Samaria and Gaza. From 1994, with the establishment of the Palestinian Authority until today, the Palestinians have been ruled by the PLO and Hamas.

As a human rights activist, until 1994, Eid directed most of his criticisms against Israel. Since then, Eid has defended Palestinian human rights from abuse at the hands of the PLO and Hamas.

Until 1994, Eid’s human rights activism made him the darling of the far Left. He was a co-director of B’tselem. He was invited to prestigious anti-Israel forums worldwide and given platforms where he presented his accusations against Israel to international acclaim.

But since the PA was formed, those who once upheld him as a hero have turned their backs on him. In so doing, they have shown their true colors.

During his talk at the University of Chicago, those colors came shining through.

Eid talked about the human rights abuses and repression of Palestinians not at the hands of Israel, but at the hands of the PA and Hamas. In other words, Eid held the Palestinian leadership accountable for its failure to respect the rights of the Palestinians it claims to speak for.

This, it turns out, is a big no-no.

(Video) Students for Justice in Palestine - Spreading Hate Under the Guise of Social Justice

StandWithUs..
31 March '15..

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) sells itself as a group of grassroots activists for human rights and justice, but what they do in reality is promote an anti-peace, anti-justice, anti-human rights agenda on campus. They host extremist, hateful speakers and programs, and reject efforts to build mutual respect and understanding between Israelis and Palestinians.



Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3GX8yt2uak

Visit Stand With Us at http://standwithus.com/

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 as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter, 
.

(Video) Privileged Hatred: Students for Justice in Palestine

peaceandtolerance.org..
28 March '15..

Students for Justice in Palestine is a growing activist group on American and Canadian universities. It attracts Islamic extremist and radical Leftist activists to campuses for events that demonize and delegitimize Israel and Jews.


apeacet

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rool4bFqg9o

Americans for Peace&Tolerance - Promoting peaceful coexistence in an ethnically diverse America. Learn more at www.peaceandtolerance.org/

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 as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter, 
.