RUTHFULLY YOURS

By now everyone knows that the three letters BDS stand for an economic boycott of Israel. Some have encountered BDS protesters howling and raging outside Jewish stores and synagogues. The tactic of an anti-Jewish boycott, originally developed by Nazi Germany and then deployed by the Arab League, is controversial outside the grimier corners of the anti-Israel left. And so BDS can never go mainstream.

The next stage of BDS is a stealth boycott. Stealth BDS is BDS without the nasty label and the negative associations that go with it. It’s BDS without the stigma, the three bad letters or the bad aftertaste.

Stealth BDS is targeted at the Jewish community because that is where BDS is most controversial. Its organizations operate by appropriating Jewish names, such as If Not Now, T’ruah or J Street U in order to Jew-wash their tactics by making their hatred appear to be Jewish. They avoid openly endorsing BDS, occasionally they will even claim to oppose it while arguing that their opposition to Israel is the best way to beat BDS.

Their way however is just BDS without the label.

Rather than talking about BDS, Stealth BDS groups will claim that they are just “fighting the occupation”. They recruit young left-wing activists with Jewish last names and claim that they are the “voice of a new generation” being marginalized by the Jewish establishment who would otherwise leave the community and go full BDS. They will insist that by meeting their demands, the Jewish community will defang BDS.

But their demands, when they actually get around to them, usually sound a whole lot like BDS. And these groups, even when they claim to be anti-BDS, have a history of providing platforms to BDS supporters, endorsing them, signing on to their demands and fighting their battles for them.

This recent panel pulled out all the well-known arguments about “Islamophobia,” but people seem to be losing interest. A good sign.

In Europe and the United States, “Islamophobia has grown exponentially in 2015. In fact it is pretty much at its highest point,” stated Professor John Esposito on April 14 at his academic home, Georgetown University. His comments typified thepanel, “Race, Religion and U.S. Presidential Politics,” and its hackneyed attribution of growing global concerns about Islam to irrational “Islamophobia.”

Esposito criticized largely negative global media coverage of Islamic issues “with very little coverage of the broader context, the mainstream communities of Muslims around the world.” He referenced Media Tenor, a think tank directed byRoland Schatz, a frequent speaker at Georgetown’s Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) headed by Esposito. Yet Media Tenor’s 2013 study on Islam in the global media showed the esteemed Wall Street Journal’s reporting on Islam as heavily negative, indicating a dearth of worldwide good news concerning Islam.

Schatz, who has previously suggested that the media refrain from reporting bad news about Islam in the absence of countervailing good news, has questionable objectivity. He has dubiously asserted that the “hurting of innocents is absolutely not in keeping with the Koran” and described Egypt’s former Grand Mufti, Ali Gomaa, as “remarkably challenging and funny.” Less humorously, Schatz’s collaborator in the C1 World Dialogue has endorsed Islamic doctrines concerning wife-beating and genocidal apocalyptic predictions concerning Jews. Gomaa also supported bizarre ideas about the companions of Islam’s prophet Muhammad drinking his urine.

Early into fall semester at the University of Missouri, a student wrote to the chancellor complaining about the logo for Sunshine Sushi, a restaurant in the Student Center.

The e-mail, entitled “Racism at Mizzou,” said that the logo closely resembled the Imperial Japanese flag used during World War II, and thus “has the same meaning as the Nazi’s Hakenkreuz [also known as the swastika], which was the symbol of the Nazi.” The student, whose name was redacted, added, “I wish to have this logo changed.”

The logo did somewhat resemble the Rising Sun flag, which has a controversial history but is also symbolically significant well beyond wartime Japan.

The flag dates as far back as the 17th century and is still flown today by the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force. It’s also used commercially, adorning everything from touristy T-shirts to Japanese beer cans to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper company. Some Japanese sports fans have also adopted the symbol to root for their favorite teams. A black version of the logo emblazoned character Danny LaRusso’s headband in the classic 1984 American film The Karate Kid.

E-mails reviewed exclusively by Heat Street and National Review show that soon after receiving an e-mail complaining about the Sunshine Sushi logo, Mizzou’s administrators promptly met with twelve students from different Asian organizations on campus, facilitating a meeting with the restaurant’s owners.

“The owners . . . have agreed to consider changing their logo if our students come up with something equal or better than their current logo,” wrote Jeff Zeilenga, the university’s assistant vice chancellor. He said they were “very willing to work with our students in good faith to find a better image” even though they “are under no obligation to change their registered logo of 15 years.”

The owners of Sunshine Sushi say they chose their original logo as a symbol of American freedom, not Japanese aggression.

Oo Min Aung, the sushi restaurant’s co-owner, was born in Myanmar and marched in pro-democracy protests before immigrating to the United States. He says that he chose a shining sun because he “wanted something that would symbolize the meaning of freedom, liberation.”

“I didn’t see any problems with my own logo,” Aung says. He says he met with students and tried to explain what the logo meant to him. But, he adds, “For people who came from Korea or China, I didn’t understand how much my old logo reminded them of their dark days with Japan. . . . [So I changed it] when I found out these people were not very happy with my logo — and they were students, too, and without them, I wouldn’t be here.”

If world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking finally wins a Nobel Prize, more than four decades after developing his theory of black holes, he will have Israel to thank for it.

Yes, a professor at the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa claims to have verified Hawking’s hypothesis. In a paper posted on the physics website arXiv.org, Jeff Steinhauer described how he had simulated a black hole in the laboratory and witnessed the process that Hawking’s equations predicted.

As someone who backs the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against the Jewish state, Hawking is probably just as perturbed as he is elated by Steinhauer’s revelation. On the one hand, there are few pleasures in life as sweet as vindication, particularly for a scientist considered ahead of his time. On the other, someone swayed by very unscientific theories presented as facts by anti-Israel activists necessarily would be hard pressed to feel grateful to the very entity he wishes to shun.

And shun is precisely what Hawking did to Israel in 2013, when he reneged on a commitment to attend and be a key speaker at the fifth annual Presidential Conference in Jerusalem. Though his office claimed that ill health was at the root of his cancellation, a few weeks before the event, it subsequently emerged that Palestinian professors had advised Hawking to respect their academic and cultural boycott of Israel by not showing up.

Initially, everyone believed Hawking was unwell. After all, the now 73-year-old with a degenerative motor neuron disease related to ALS (Lou Gehring’s disease) is wheelchair-bound, virtually paralyzed and uses a speech synthesizer for verbal communication. That he is still alive at all, let alone functioning at the level that he does, is miraculous. So the notion that he might have had medical reasons for backing out was both plausible and understandable — until this turned out to be a flimsy excuse for his succumbing to BDS, a very different kind of malady.

The April 5, 2016 issue of The Gleaner, the student paper of Rutgers University–Camden, published a cartoon of Muhammad, Buddha and Jesus in a bar. Its content, however, cannot be known at this point, because at the behest of Muslims on campus, and in a case fraught with implications for the health of the freedom of speech today, the entire issue has been deep-sixed.

Two weeks after the cartoon was published, the April 19 issue of The Gleaner contained a letter from the Muslim Brotherhood campus group, the Muslim Students Association, saying that it found the image offensive and asking The Gleaner to remove the image from the April 5 issue and circulate a new edition of that issue without it. The MSA letter claims that Christians and Jews on campus told MSA members that they, too, found the image offensive.

The MSA letter states: “Even though freedom of speech and press is emphasized and is something all of us value as proud Americans, the University prides itself on diversity of people of different faith and backgrounds so we feel that it is necessary to respect those faiths and backgrounds by honoring their beliefs.”

The April 19 Gleaner also contains a response to the MSA letter, written by Christopher Church, the Editor-in-Chief of The Gleaner. Church apologizes to the MSA and agrees to meet with it “so that we can rectify this issue and ensure that it doesn’t happen again.” He also agrees to remove any copies of the offending April 5 issue from the Gleaner boxes around campus and destroy them.

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post.

To defeat 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.

On Tuesday the Organization of Islamic Cooperation held an “emergency,” “extraordinary” meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

The OIC includes violence-wracked countries and failed states like Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and others, as well as severely poor and dysfunctional countries like Burkina Faso, Somalia, Bangladesh, and others. Not a single one of the organization’s 57 countries is a frontrunner in terms of freedom and prosperity, and most are far below that level.

But the topic of Tuesday’s “emergency meeting” was that on April 17 Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that: “Israel will never withdraw from the Golan Heights.”

The meeting’s final communiqué “Condemns strongly Israel, the occupying power, and its macabre acts to change the legal status, demographic composition, and institutional structure of the occupied Syrian Golan.” It also “expresses unconditional support for the legitimate right of the Syrian people to restore their full sovereignty on the occupied Syrian Golan.”

The Arab League—whose 22 member states make up a sizable chunk of the OIC—had already weighed in on Netanyahu’s words on April 21, calling for a special criminal court to be set up and put Israel on trial for the transgression.

The Golan was controlled by Syria from 1948 to 1967, during which time Syrian gunners often fired at the Israeli communities below and forced their residents to sleep in bomb shelters. Israel captured the Golan from Syria in the 1967 Six Day War—and fortunately, since then, has kept it and developed it.

Today, with Syria devolved into Hobbesian war and fragmentation, the Heights are all the more strategically vital to Israel, and the idea of trading them for “peace” has—at least in the Israeli discourse—died a well-deserved death. The Golan, by the way, constitutes less than 1 percent of Syrian territory, and Syria’s loss of it almost 50 years ago is the least of its problems.

But there is further irony in the Arab League’s and the OIC’s reactions to Netanyahu’s words.

At the recent Stand With Us conference, it became obvious that the anti-BDS movement is becoming empowered. American Thinker interviewed those willing to combat BDS both on college campuses and with legislation.

California Assemblyman Travis Allen (R) has been on the forefront of pushing legislation to counter the BDS movement. First introduced in January he has since decided to co-author, in a bipartisan manner, another bill, AB 2844, to ensure its passing. In its current form the bill requires that California will not contract with any entity that officially boycotts the State of Israel, calling Israel a “vital ally and only democracy in the Middle East.” Every 180 days the list is updated.

California should join other states that have considered such legislation. Currently there are seven states that passed bills, seven pending, of which five of those are highly likely to pass. AB 2844 has been approved by two committees and will shortly be up before a third, after which it will go to the floor for a general vote. Unfortunately, as it moves through committees some will try to change the language from its original form. The Democrats do not have a good track record nationally, considering many did not see the Iran Nuclear Deal as a problem, so will this BDS bill be watered down?

Allen noted to American Thinker, “Republican support will be contingent on it remaining a strong bill with clear language. It is important that all members of the legislation need to work together to ensure the bill is not unduly complicated or watered downed through the process. The resulting law must be concise and effective.”

He wants to remind Californians, “Israel has a level of freedom not enjoyed by surrounding countries in the Middle East. When the proponents of boycotting Israel talk about freedom of equality and tolerance they should be asked if the same standard is applied to other countries around the world. I introduced the bill to show that California values its allies and our taxpayers do not want to support prejudice with their tax dollars. California has a closeness with Israel: over two billion dollars in trade, over 1500 companies do business in Israel, and Governor Brown signed a memorandum of understanding in 2014 to increase collaboration and trade with Israel.”

More and more opponents of BDS are putting the movement on the defensive. People are recognizing that one of the important battlefields is the terrain of college campuses.

Molly, a senior at Stanford University, is attempting to pass a resolution on campus against anti-Semitism. She sees herself as a student advocate and does not believe in a “tepid response. I did not have the support of the Hillel Director… She works in an organization that should help make the lives of Jewish students better. I was actually inspired by her response, because she forced me to stand up for what I believe. There is no strong leadership on campus that says anti-Semitism is not okay, so we need to stand up for ourselves. I warn my fellow students who are not Jewish, anti-Semitism, which is also anti-Zionism, is a canary in a coalmine. The first piece of discrimination starts with the Jewish people and goes forward to others.”

In 2016, Israel is a major contributor to – and a global co-leader with – the USA in the areas of research, development, manufacturing and launching of micro (100 kg), mini (300 kg) and medium (1,000 kg) size satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as well as joint space missions, space communications and space exploration sounding rocket and scientific balloon flights. According to NASA Administrator, Charles Bolden, “Israel is known for its innovation. The October 15, 2015 joint agreement gives us the opportunity to cooperate with Israel on the journey to Mars, [highlighting Israel’s unique, extremely lightweight technologies, which conserve energy]….”

Academics like Noam Chomsky should be put out to pasture with Bernie Sanders before they destroy more minds.

Fast on the heels of publishing “And the World Was Made Right” (Rule of Reason, April 23), which has had an incredible and positive response from many quarters, I happened to read Cliff Kincaid’s review of Michael Walsh’s The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West on AIM’s site (Accuracy in Media). The review is titled “Defunding the Marxist Madrassas.”

Kincaid’s review of the Walsh book opens with some richly deserved swipes at Noam Chomsky, the MIT professor of everything under the sun. For decades, the name, “Noam Chomsky,” for me, at least, has evoked the image of a leftist college professor instructing his student victims to “thoroughly chew” his latest theory – say, of Cognitive closure, or of Psychological nativism, or ofRecursion in language — until they can memorize it and recite it back to him verbatim (preferably in a choral mode). That is, after all, the nature of an Islamic madrassa – to memorize – not to understand or critique the Koran and other Islamic texts – until one’s mind is completely subverted by masses of illogic and non sequiturs and one is no longer able to think. Once one has memorized by rote every little comma, simile, and metaphor of the Koran, one is ready to join the Taliban (Islamic students) to kill and terrorize.

And that is, more or less, what American students of Chomsky (and students of his ilk elsewhere in academia) to go out and do: become activists for Socialism, Social Justice, to Occupy Wall Street, occupy your home, occupy your business, and become the snowflakes for “safe places” and the hoarse hollerers for women’s restrooms being open to transgenders and LGBTs of every stripe. And also become advocates and demonstrators for Muslim immigration and trigger-warning sensitive freshmen.

Noam Chomsky, a Marxist professor who says he has been at MIT for 65 years,maintains that we need a new economic system. He has endorsed something called “the next system,” which is supposed to replace free enterprise capitalism. My counter-proposal is for a “next system” to replace Chomsky and other Marxists in academia. My old friend, “Jimmy from Brooklyn,” a legendary anti-communist, says what we need is the defunding of the “Marxist Madrassas,” otherwise known as college and universities.