Over at Engage, with an astonishing degree of patience, they are giving space to an individual called Greenstein from South Africa. He wants an academic boycott of Israel, and only Israel and now says the following:
Continue reading ‘Greenstein Again: Arguing With The Morally Impollute’
1. In a discussion over at Engage in which he offers arguments in support of a boycott of Israel and only Israel, Ran Greenstein says,
Third, any diminishing of the capacity of the Israeli state to continue with its exclusionary and abusive practices is a blow against anti-semitism, because it relieves Jews of the burden of having to pay a price for Israeli policies they do not support and have nothing to do with them.
Continue reading ‘Gurvitz-Goldman, Greenstein And Good Jews’
Our friends over at NIJ report the following:
Many Norwegian media channels are today reporting on how one hundred more or less prominent Norwegians have signed a call for boycott of Israel. Communist football coach Egil Drillo Olsen, who works with the national football team, seems to be the designated leader of the pack this time. This will give prominent Israel-basher Dr. Mads Gilbert more time to manipulate the situation up at the hospital of Tromsø, where he is spearheading the resistance against providing the Norwegian army with doctors for the Norwegian soldiers in Afghanistan.
In Aftenposten today, communist football coach Egil Drillo Olsen claims: This (boycott of Israel) is in line with what 90 percent of the world’s population believes. There cannot be many other opinions then that the occupation is deeply objectionable and illegal.
“Everyone” believes that a boycott is the right strategy? And there “cannot be” many other opinions? This kind of talk sounds familiar.
The boycotters will doubtless the fact the coach of a national soccer team has joined their ranks, but let’s also remember that Norway is hardly a soccer power. Whether it’s the World Cup or the European Championship, they tend not to even qualify. It’s not like Vicente del Bosque has donned a keffiyeh.
At the same time, I have to ask where UEFA, the governing body of European football, is in all this. Israel, which plays soccer at the club and national levels in Europe because of the Arab boycott, is a member of UEFA. Is Olsen saying that he would refuse to field his side in the event that they were drawn against Israel? Sounds to me that’s exactly what he’s saying.
UEFA needs to take disciplinary action. Readers who wish to politely encourage them to do so should contact them here.
Neve Gordon is an Israeli academic who favors an international boycott of Israeli academics. David Hirsh goes to town on him here. You really should read it all but I’ll provide a brief taster:
Here’s a tremendous story from The Brooklyn Paper, right here in New York City:
Local Jewish leaders and anti-Israel protesters faced off on Montague Street - again - on Tuesday, holding a raucous debate over whether West Bank-made lotions sold at Ricky’s cosmetics shop support Israel’s “illegal” occupation of the embattled region.
In the end, the boycott supporters ended up actually promoting the Ahava products, as Brooklyn Heights residents flocked to Ricky’s with their wallets open.
“I came in when I saw the flags - I think [the boycotters] are absurd,” said Ginger Berman, who bought a tub of Ahava bath salts. “There are so many other big issues to protest, why this?”
Why indeed.
Sorry BDSers. Looks like your sordid little campaign has suffered yet again. Why do you keep making claims that aren’t true, I wonder? Wouldn’t be Ahmadinejad’s influence, would it?
By way of Haaretz I learn of a pledge by 150 Irish artists not to perform in Israel. Most of the signatories are nonentities whose undertaking not to perform in Israel is about as meaningful as one by me not to run for president of Azerbaijan would be.
“You never listened to a word that I said…” Thus did John Lydon, with his muezzin-like wail, kick off one of the greatest songs he ever wrote, “Public Image,” by his post-Sex Pistols group Public Image Limited (PiL to you and me.)
The Israel boycott crowd would be well advised to listen to what Lydon has to say now. And they can listen to him telling the BBC that, as far as he’s concerned, politics everywhere are terrible, not just Israel, and that he’s against all government - “I have been all my life,” he says. You may not agree with Lydon’s trenchant loathing of authority qua authority, but at least he’s morally consistent. And that logic means that the recently-reformed PiL will play in Tel Aviv, unlike Santana, Elvis Costello, The Pixies and others who bowed to the pressure of those who reserve their hatred for Israel alone, and have expressed it by sending Lydon hate mail.
Here, then, are PiL with “Public Image.” Yesher koach, Mr. Lydon.
(Via Engage)
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Move over Elvis Costello. Here’s Jennifer Lopez. And it’s not Israel where she’s declining to perform.
The Argentine singer and songwriter Diego Torres played to a packed house at the Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv on Monday. If you go to his Facebook page you can see him doing a bit of tourism as well. Good for you, Diego.
Why? Read about it here. As for the response, this powerful statement from the UK Board of Deputies of British Jews says it all:
Statement from Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council: Methodist Conference
30 June 2010 - This is a very sad day, both for Jewish-Methodist relations and for everyone who wants to see positive engagement with the complex issues of Israeli-Palestinian relations. The Methodist Conference has swallowed hook, line and sinker a report full of basic historical inaccuracies, deliberate misrepresentations and distortions of Jewish theology and Israeli policy. The deeply flawed report is symptomatic of a biased process: The working group which wrote the report had already formed its conclusions at the outset. External readers were brought in to give the process a veneer of impartiality, but their criticisms were rejected. The report’s authors have abused the trust of ordinary members of the Methodist Church, who assumed that they were reading and voting on an impartial and comprehensive paper, and they have abused the goodwill of the Jewish community, which tried to engage with this issue, only to find that our efforts were treated as an unwelcome distraction. This outcome is extremely serious and damaging, as we and others have explained repeatedly over recent weeks. Israel is at the root of the identity of Jews and of Judaism, and as an expression of Jewish spiritual, national and emotional aspirations, Zionism cannot simply be ruled as illegitimate in the way that the Methodist Conference has purported to do. This smacks of breathtaking insensitivity, as crass as it is misinformed. That this position should now form the basis of Methodist Church policy should cause the Conference to hang its head in shame, just as surely as it will cause the enemies of peace and reconciliation to cheer from the sidelines.
It’s not all gloom and doom in the labor movement. The International Trade Union Confederation understands all too well the toxic, antisemitic, reactionary politics underlying the campaign to boycott Israel.
At its world congress in Vancouver, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) stated its rejection of “the extremist policies of Hamas”.
And in a defiant slap to the boycott movement, the leader of Israel’s Histadrut, its umbrella trade union body, Ofer Eini, has been elected as one of ITUC’s vice presidents and given a place on its 25-member executive board.
Read more on the JC.
The Nation magazine has become the house journal of the BDS movement in America. But it wasn’t always that way. Back in 1981, The Nation published a brilliant piece of investigative journalism exposing the role of US corporations in complying with the Arab boycott; in doing so, the writers offered some vital insights into why the boycott movement is so irredeemably and wretchedly reactionary. I explain more in my latest piece for The Huffington Post.
Ron Radosh takes apart this ridiculous article by Adam Horowitz and Phillip Weiss from The Nation, which is rapidly emerging as the house journal of the BDS Movement here in America. Inter alia, Radosh notes:
In essence, in identifying the “Arab revolt” approvingly and as a precedent that informs their work today, Weiss and Horowitz are supporting a Nazi inspired terror which took place against the Jews and other Arab Palestinians who did not support the Mufti’s agenda. It’s not only chilling that American students are being subjected to distortions of American history with fallacious analogies, but also that journalists, who purport to be serious about their craft, would distort the truth about the history of boycotts and general strikes during the “Arab revolt” in Palestine.
Phillip Weiss whitewashing the allies of the Nazis? In The Nation? Surely not…
(H/T Soccer Dad.)
Most readers of this blog will not have heard of him but Charly García is an Argentine rock musician of unrivalled talent and artistic integrity. He’s been a giant on the nation’s cultural scene for more than three decades and he travelled to Israel to play two concerts this week. Never a man weighed down by brute notions of political correctness his visit represents another raised middle finger to the boycotters.
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