Blame you Know Who: At the Park Slope Food Coop, a Foiled BDS Push Against Soda-Stream has Anti-Israel Activists Seething
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/editorial-blame-article-1.2215991
Blame you know who: At the Park Slope Food Coop, a foiled BDS push against SodaStream has anti-Israel activists seething.
The zealots who seek to isolate and punish Israel by boycotting, divesting from and sanctioning businesses in the Jewish state are on the march in New York City. Again.
Where? Park Slope, of course. The Food Coop, of course.
Having once been defeated, Israel-obsessed members of the hyper-democratic purveyor of all things healthy and organic last month resumed a drive to purge Israeli products from the shelves.
The target was familiar: SodaStream, the popular water carbonation company that employs 500 Palestinians, 450 Israeli Arabs and 350 Israeli Jews in a plant located in Palestinian territory on the West Bank.
Did we say “employs”? Following pressure from the BDS movement, which reviles any Israeli presence in the territories, SodaStream is closing the facility and moving operations to Israel.
The BDS brigades seek to delegitimize Israel as punishment for the sin of existing. Holding the Jewish state, and only the Jewish state, guilty of human rights violations, many of its partisans veer into anti-Semitism.
The Park Slopers are so eager to score a victory over Israel that they care not about SodaStream’s soon-to-be unemployed Palestinian workers.
One lamented to USA Today last year that the boycotters “need to understand what the factory gives the Palestinian workers, and there are a lot of factories in this area doing the same thing.”
Thankfully, some are vigorously resisting the attempted purge — including members who happen to be pro-Israel Orthodox Jews from Borough Park. It got ugly. Really ugly.
The fact that some people spoke up stridently against the boycott didn’t sit well with BDS proponent Ann Schneider, who lamented in a post at the Indypendent:
“I talked to my friend, another long-time member, Carol Lipton. She reminded me that the Coop had a membership drive in the 90’s and reached out to Borough Park, rather than Red Hook, Sunset Park or Brooklyn’s Chinatown.
“While we have worked for four decades to create a community based on cooperation, equality, diversity, organic farming and sustainability, ‘we’ve incorporated members whose core values are the antithesis of ours, except for the common denominator of concern for healthful and cheap food,’ Lipton said.”
In other words: Those damn Borough Park Jews ruined everything.
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