IF you believe in fairies, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaigners – who I’ll call BDS-ards for space reasons – are kindly folk, if a tad economical with truth, who only seek a better world…better still without that pesky state of Israel.
What a travesty it is, they claim, that uppity Jews – six million of them – boss the Middle East, an oasis of fellowship, where 400,000,000 amiable Arabs merely want to go about their daily business of annihilating each other.
And what are these ‘land-grabbers’ doing there, demand the BDS-ards. Huh! It’s as if the Jews think they’ve some 3,500-year-old right to Israel, not poor Arabs, who’ve identified themselves as Palestinians for…er, well maybe a century, give or take a decade.
So forget historical fact, including the glaring one that no country called Palestine ever existed. All the world’s ills lie at the doorstep of Israel, the only Middle East nation rated as ‘free’ by the internationally respected organisation, Freedom House.
The point is, despite swapping land for peace with Egypt and Jordan, the confounded Israelis just won’t cave in to all Palestinian demands – PLO warlord Yasser Arafat was offered a country comprising 97% of what he sought, yet still flatly rejected it.
Israel also insists on being recognised as a Jewish state, not dissimilar to 57 Islamic ones dotting the planet.
What cheek, rail the BDS-ards, who know – for all its Western democracy, respect for gays, equal rights for women and people of other faiths, especially its 1.3-million Muslims – Israel is an ‘apartheid regime’, ruthlessly occupying the West Bank, coincidentally the cradle of terrorism.
Israel even built a protective wall rounds itself, dramatically curbing terror attacks by 80%, and has the nerve to retaliate against suicide bombers and fusillades of rockets fired by Gaza’s cuddly social workers, Hamas.
So, indulging in a repugnant equivalence to the Holocaust, BDS-ards dub Israel’s legitimate right of self-defence as ‘Nazism’, disingenuously obscuring the fact their own tactics smack of totalitarian bullying.
Founded in 2005, BDS was the wheeze of Qatari-born bigot Omar Barghouti – bizarrely a student at Tel Aviv University – to delegitimise and destroy Israel via an international trade and cultural boycott.
BDS-ards say their model is the one that helped topple white, supremacist South Africa, though Nelson Mandela, who knew a thing or two about real apartheid, distanced himself from their ravings.
Meanwhile, BDS stoops to devious sophistry in a claim that it merely seeks to end Israeli ‘occupation and colonisation of all Arab lands’ and a ‘right of return’ for Palestinians.
What they’re coy in admitting is this includes today’s four million descendants of the 700,000 Arabs displaced in the 1948 Israel War of Independence, when five, invading Arab armies failed to crush the renascent Jewish state.
Note the ‘all’, because the ploy is to dump on Israel a multitude of Arabs, weaned on a diet of vicious anti-Semitism, that will ultimately deliver a new Muslim state, entirely Jew-free – ‘Judenrein’, as Hitler called it – because a bloodbath will be guaranteed.
In its pursuit of this ghoulish vision, BDS never lets facts spoil its PR war, especially with a pliant Western media – lead by those bastions of journalistic objectivity, The Guardian, New York Times and BBC – to give lies legs.
Naturally, there’s a fetid stench of far-Left piety about BDS-ards, who subscribe to free speech, only if it chimes with their preposterous ‘group think’.
Its key battlegrounds are academia, big biz and showbiz, where it has achieved some traction, though not without embarrassments, the latest being a kick in the skewered ethics of Oxfam by its former goodwill ambassador, actress Scarlett Johansson.
When Oxfam upbraided her for promoting SodaStream, a fizzy drinks gizmo made in a factory just over the contentious ‘Green Line’, pre-1967 border, the Hollywood A-lister summarily dumped the charity, saying she supported ‘economic co-operation and social interaction between a democratic Israel and Palestine’ (which, by implication, Oxfam doesn’t).
Worse, Oxfam was told to shove off by SodaStream’s 700 Palestinian workers, who enjoy identical rights to Israeli staff and are paid four times the West Bank average.
Still BDS remains the toast of some showbiz luminaries, like the preciously PC Emma Thompson, who ganged up with like minded luvvies to pen an anguished letter to The Guardian – where else! – demanding an Israel theatrical troupe be banned from appearing at London’s Globe Theatre.
Another is ex-Pink Floyd strummer, Roger Waters, whose hysterical animus towards Israel is claimed by critics to hide motives far more insidious as he tries to harass pop stars into nixing appearances in the Jewish state.
Despite such odious coercion, icons like Sir Elton John, Rihanna, Madonna, Lady Gaga and Alicia Keys continue to play Israel; Sir Paul McCartney did so, too, bravely defying death threats by BDS-ards; and The Rolling Stones are due in Tel Avis this June.
On the financial front, several European banks have been pressed into severing links with Israel, notably Denmark’s Danske Bank (otherwise known as the bank that liked to say ‘Yes’ to backing North Korean sales of ballistic missiles to Iran, according to a US State Department report revealed by Wikileaks).
In academia, the tiny, Left-leaning American Studies Association added its voice to BDS, only to find itself boycotted over a hundred, top US universities.
But the BDS-ards claimed a major scalp when they persuaded Stephen Hawking, lauded as Britain’s most brilliant physicist, to renege on an invitation to visit Israel…despite the hi-tech wonders powering his awesome wheelchair being Israeli innovations
The stark truth is BDS is shot full of such hypocrisy and bigotry and – let’s face it – not a few who hide their repellent anti-Semitism under the pretence of Palestinian solidarity.
Sane folk would imagine art, wealth-creation and ground-breaking technology should transcended all boundaries, their bounties shared by people everywhere. But, where only Israel is concerned, that’s heresay in the warped minds of BDS-ards.
And the people they target – from showbiz stars to businesses and academics – are no more responsible for the Israel-Palestinian imbroglio than they are for the slump in Mongolian yurt sales.
So let there be no mistaking the real message of BDS: Make hate, kill hope.
To read more of Hugh Ash’s comments, follow his award-winning, online blog – Views From The Mallorca Pier – at hughash.wordpress.com
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