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Congressional Testimony re the Effects of BDS, including Daniel Birnbaum, CEO of SodaStream (video)

The video of the testimony runs 1:45 hours, you can skip around

What is the Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) Movement?

This section contains materials that explains the insidious nature of BDS, how it functions and why it is such a threat to Israel. 

On Countering BDS 

This ADL web site starts with a description of the BDS movement and then provides a point-by-point rebuttal to the arguments made by the BDS movement. 

BDS and "Intersectionality"

Have you wondered why Black Lives Matter activists carry signs “Justice From Ferguson to Palestine,” seeking to link claims of American racism and police violence with claims of Israeli brutality against Palestinians?

BDS: An Overview and Approach (AIPAC)

Israel has long been the target of economic warfare designed to weaken the Jewish state and isolate it from international investment and trade. Today’s boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign is the latest iteration of this nefarious effort. This international attempt to isolate, pressure and delegitimize Israel seeks to sanction all those interacting with Israel. Currently, measures before the House and Senate build on strong precedent to provide America with a new opportunity to combat perhaps the most dangerous element of BDS: stateled efforts to harm Israel’s economy.

Five Things You Need to Know About BDS On Campus

Source: AJC Global Conference, June 2016

The movement to Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) Israel, which is particularly popular on U.S. college campuses, seeks to undermine Israel’s very legitimacy as a state. Its adherents ignore the history and current reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, preferring the moral simplicity of condemnation.

Here are the 5 things that you need to know to understand the threat that BDS represents:

1. BDS has arrived on campus in full force.

2. BDS is dividing students

3. BDS creates a toxic campus environment

4. Academic associations are voting to boycott Israel

5. BDS doesn't advance the cause of peace

To read more, click here

 

The Face of BDS

This section contains articles and web sites of the BDS movement. In order to wage an effective campaign against BDS, we need to familiarize ourselves with the messages that the BDS movement communicates to the world.

Caution: The materials posted here will be offensive to many visitors to this web site. Yet, we need to be aware of the lies and misinformation that is spewed by this movement in order to combat it. Here are links to some of the BDS web sites. Visit them often and familiarize yourselves with their content, no matter how offensive it is.

Students for Justice in Palestine

This is a description of this organization as provided by the ADL

And here is additional information about the  Students Justice for Palestine 

Student Justice for Palestine Facebook Page

Worth visiting for an alternate universe point of view of the conflict.

Jewish Voices for Peace

Here is the profile of this anything but peace organization.

Israel's existence as the root cause of global poverty, inequality and injustice. The solution? Of course, BDS!

NEW!

Inside the BDS Lions' Den

Disguising herself as a fervent and devoted BDS supporter, Adi Cohen participated in rallies, speeches and panels during Israel Apartheid Week and discovered their recruitment methods and how they silence their opposition.

How is BDS Funded?

Defeating Hamas in America

BDS Money Trail Suggests Opaque Network

The Anti-Israel Money Trail

Ties Between Hamas-Linked Charities and BDS

 

Defeating Hamas In America

Jerusalem Post, April 28, 2016

On the political front, it is vital that Israel fight BDS as the most widespread form of anti-Semitism in North America. Unlike the situation in Europe, where BDS is largely an economic warfare campaign, in the US its goal is political. Its leaders are not interested in harming the Israeli economy per se. They are interested in cultivating anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel to pave the way for economic warfare and actual war against Israel.

Government ministers involved with the fight against BDS need to provide anti-BDS activists with information about SJP’s links to Hamas and with the PA. American Jewish organizations and activists need to call out college administrators when they say since they refuse to carry out divestment resolutions that they oppose BDS, even as they allow SJP to operate on their campuses and even fund the Hamas front group directly. Read more....

 

BDS Money Trail Suggests Opaque Network

“Funding sources for campus groups are not subject to any disclosure requirements” (unless they are imposed by the individual universities at which the groups are operating), noted Benjamin Ryberg of the Lawfare Project, which tracks what it calls “the politicization of human rights.” Most of the identifiable resources for student groups such as SJP and MSA [Muslim Student Association] come from student funds distributed by the student government or another campus agency. Typically, they need only present a request with a budget reflecting their needs; they do not have to document any additional expenses or revenues.
Read more....

The Anti-Israel Money Trail

Wall Street Journal, April 26, 2016

Brett Stephens

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.

Today, AMP’s leaders include at least three Holy Land alumni. One of them is Milwaukee furniture salesman Salah Sarsour, who last year told Al Jazeera that an AMP conference he chaired “aims to keep up with and support the Palestinian people’s continuous intifada.”

According to a November 2001 FBI report, Mr. Sarsour’s brother Jamil confessed in 1998 to Israeli officials that “some of the members of the Islamic Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and his brothers Salah and Imad are involved in raising money in the name of HLFRD that is actually for Hamas.” Mr. Sarsour spent time in Israeli prison for Hamas-related activities but has not been charged with a crime in the U.S. He did not return calls for comment.

Then there is the Islamic Association for Palestine, which in 2004 was found civilly liable in federal court for supporting Hamas and was disbanded in 2010. At least four former IAP senior leaders are currently active in AMP, including its national policy director,Osama Abu Irshaid.

In a phone interview, Mr. Abu Irshaid insisted that “IAP has nothing to do with AMP” and dismissed claims that IAP had ties to Hamas as “definitely baseless,” at least as far as he knew. “I can only testify to what I experienced,” he added carefully.

But the verdict in the Holy Land case noted donation checks from the early 1990s that “were made payable to the IAP but deposited into HLF’s bank account and on which the donors had written on the memo line ‘for Palestinian Mujahideen only.’ ” The court also described IAP as a “media entity” created by Mousa Abu Marzook, a senior Hamas leader who in 1995 was named a “specially designated terrorist” by the Treasury Department.

On Monday, I spoke to Mr. Bazian and asked him to address Mr. Schanzer’s specific claims. “This is about silencing any person or any group that speaks about Palestine,” he said, accusing Mr. Schanzer and the House Foreign Relations Committee of giving “McCarthyism a new lease on life.” As for the past ties of AMP’s leaders, he dismissed it as “guilt by association.”

Mr. Schanzer stressed in his testimony that FDD “had seen no evidence of illicit activity” by AMP, including raising money for foreign causes. And even unindicted co-conspirators in terror-sponsoring organizations have rights, including to assembly and speech.

Still, it’s worth thinking about who these people are and the politics they support. As Judge Richard Posner wrote in his 2008 decision upholding the judgment against IAP, “Anyone who knowingly contributes to the nonviolent wing of an organization that he knows to engage in terrorism is knowingly contributing to the organization’s terrorist activities.”

As Husam El-Qoulaq might say, “very smelly.”

 

Ties Between Hamas-Linked Charities and BDS

The US should boost transparency of nonprofit organizations in order to shed light on ties between a key pro-boycott organization and defunct charities that were implicated in funding Hamas, analyst Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told members of Congress during testimony Tuesday afternoon when two subcommittees of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs met to discuss current threats to Israel. [Source: Times of Israel, May 24, 2016] To read full article, click here.

 
 

 

Why the BDS Movement is Destroying the Prospect of a Palestinian State

Israel could have played by Arab rules and deported all Arabs in the land it occupied, but it did not. Precisely because Israel respected the human rights of Arabs, and despite its own self-interest, Israel gave the Palestinians a platform from which to seek the destruction of Israel.

One can only hope that the Palestinians, like Egypt and Jordan, will soon decide to live in peace with a neighbor which turned out to be far better in the way it treats Palestinians than the Palestinians' own "Arab brothers" -- not all that bad, after all. One can only hope that Palestinian leaders will start promoting a culture of peace rather than a culture of hate. To read the rest of the article, click here.

I'm not antisemitic, I just don't like Israel. Really?

Watch this video of MK Sharen Heskel demolish this argument. Click here

23 Reasons Why BDS is Antisemitic

BDS is a global campaign against Israel and only Israel.  It seeks to foment sufficient emotional anger with Israel, and with only Israel, so that people around the world will want to punish Israel, and only Israel. To read more, click here

"Still, we choose to follow Mandela, Gandhi..." (and other big lies)

Read this article by Professor Haidar Eid of Postcolonial and Postmodern Literature at Gaza's al-Aqsa University as published in a large, on-line Indian newspaper.

"I, myself, live in besieged Gaza. I have witnessed three huge massacres committed by apartheid Israel, almost lost my life more than once, lost very close comrades, colleagues, relatives, and students. I have lived through an indescribable, ongoing trauma, and seen horror beyond words." Read more....

 

Tue, March 19 2024 9 Adar II 5784