Monthly Archives: March 2016

Students want Ohio State, other universities to boycott Israel

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REQUEST TO BUY THIS PHOTOBROOKE LAVALLEY | DISPATCHReema Jallaq photographs a Palestinian flag she is holding in front of the Wexner Center for the Arts on the Ohio State University campus during a March 22 protest.

The Israel-Palestine conflict, never absent from most U.S. college campuses, is fueling especially passionate debate in central Ohio this spring.

Much of the argument centers on the nationwide “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” movement, which aims to punish Israel economically as a way to pressure it to change its treatment of Palestinians. In recent years, the movement has attracted powerful pushback from pro-Israel organizations.

As student governments at Capital and Ohio State universities considered resolutions on opposite sides of the issue last week, all three central Ohio Congress members and two state representatives entered the debate at Ohio State. Republican Reps. Steve Stivers and Pat Tiberi joined with Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty in a letter urging the Undergraduate Student Government to reject a measure calling for university divestment from three companies deemed to be involved in Israeli punishment and isolation of Palestinians in the West Bank.

State Reps. Niraj Antani, R-Miamisburg, and Tim Brown, R-Bowling Green, also sent letters opposing the resolution, which named Caterpillar Inc., Hewlett-Packard and G4S.

In the Statehouse, Rep. Kirk Schuring, R-Canton, is one of 14 sponsors of House Bill 476, which would deny state contracts to any company that supports a boycott of Israel. Schuring, who was part of a Statehouse delegation that traveled to Israel, said he considers it “a bright and shining star that we should look to” because it serves as “a prospering, flourishing oasis in the Middle East.”

On Tuesday, a dozen or so members of Jewish Voice for Peace, a group of Jews who support Palestinian rights and criticize Israeli government policies, gathered on the Ohio State campus to protest the anti-”Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” movement, including Schuring’s bill, which they say would suppress a constitutional right to protest through boycott. “It is something you have to do at times,” said Farrell Brody, an organizer of the protest. “It’s a nonviolent means of pushing for justice.”

The pro-Israel side prevailed in both of the college votes; the OSU student government voted 25-9, with 15 abstentions, to reject the divestment measure. At Capital, the Student Senate on Tuesday voted unanimously to approve a resolution condemning anti-Semitism and pledging support for Capital’s Jewish community.

Neither the college measures nor the house bill mentions the BDS movement, but it has figured large in the debate.

Tomer Elias, an Israeli-born OSU student who campaigned against the divestment measure, considers BDS inherently anti-Semitic because it aims to harm Israel. Both he and Capital student Austin Reid, who pushed for the resolution condemning anti-Semitism, believe BDS protests create a hostile atmosphere for Jews on campus.

Sarah Almusbahi is a leader of #OSUDivest, the group that backed the unsuccessful divestment measure. She supports the aims of the BDS movement, but says opponents ignored that the resolution was more narrowly focused. “All we ask is that we not support three companies involved in well-documented human-rights abuses,” she said.

#OSUDivest isn’t going away, she said, noting that the failed resolution won endorsements from 23 student groups. “This movement challenges the status quo, and whenever you do that there’s going to be heavy opposition,” she said. “We’ve just gotten started.”

mcedward@dispatch.com

@MaryMoganEdward

 

You can’t make it up. UN names democratic Israel as world’s top human rights violator

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By Anne Bayefsky

Published March 29, 2016

FoxNews.com

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FILE — A woman walks past the Human Rights Council at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland.

According to the United Nations, the most evil country in the world today is Israel.

On March 24, 2016, the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) wrapped up its annual meeting in New York by condemning only one country for violating women’s rights anywhere on the planet – Israel, for violating the rights of Palestinian women.

On the same day, the U.N. Human Rights Council concluded its month-long session in Geneva by condemning Israel five times more than any other of the 192 UN member states.

There were five Council resolutions on Israel.  One each on the likes of hellish countries like Syria, North Korea and Iran.  Libya got an offer of “technical assistance.”  And countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia and China were among the 95 percent of states that were never mentioned.

No slander is deemed too vile for the U.N. human rights bodies that routinely listen to highly orchestrated Palestinian versions of the ancient blood libel against the Jews.

Asylum-Seekers from Israel by Country in 2015 | FindTheData

In Geneva, Palestinian representative Ibrahim Khraishi told the Council on March 24, 2016:  “Israeli soldiers and settlers kill Palestinian children. They shoot them dead. They will leave them to bleed to death.”  And in New York, Palestinian representative Haifa Al-Agha told CSW on March 16, 2016:  “Israel…is directing its military machinery against women and girls. They are killing them, injuring them, and leaving them bleeding to death.”

Operating hand-in-glove with governments and the U.N. secretariat are the unelected, sanctimonious NGOs, to which the UN offers free facilities and daily advertisement of “side-events.”  In theory “materials containing abusive or offensive language or images are not permitted on United Nations premises.”

In practice, in Geneva the UN permitted handouts that claimed Israel “saw ethnic cleansing as a necessary precondition for its existence.”  A film accused Israel of sexual violence against children and “trying to exterminate an entire Palestinian generation.”  Speeches focused on the 1948 “catastrophe” in which a “settler colonial state” was established on Palestinian land.

The New York CSW-NGO scene included a film set in in the context of Israeli “oppression” and the “tear gas of my childhood,” and statements analogizing the experiences of Palestinians to today’s Syrian refugees.

Picture these real-life scenes:

In Geneva’s grand U.N. “Human Rights” Council chamber, 750 people assembled, pounced on the Jewish state, broadcast the spectacle online, and produced hundreds of articles and interviews in dozens of languages championing the results.

On the ground, Israelis are being hacked to death on the streets, stabbed in buses, slaughtered in synagogues, mowed down with automobiles, and shot in front of their children.

At the New York’s UN headquarters, 8,100 NGO representatives gathered from all corners of the globe, in addition to government delegates, and watched the weight of the entire world of women’s rights descended on only one country.

On the ground, Palestinian women are murdered and subjugated for the sake of male honor, Saudi women can’t drive, Iranian women are stoned to death for so-called “adultery,” Egyptian women have their genitals mutilated and Sudanese women give birth in prison with their legs shackled for being Christian.

Isn’t it about time that people stopped calling the U.N. a harmless international salon or a bad joke?

The poison isn’t simply rhetorical.  One of the Council resolutions adopted last week launches a worldwide witch-hunt for companies that do business with Israel – as part of an effort to accomplish through economic strangulation what Israel’s enemies have not been able to accomplish on the battlefield.  The resolution casts a wide net encompassing all companies engaged in whatever the U.N. thinks are business “practices that disadvantage Palestinian enterprises.”

And the toxicity is self-perpetuating. Acting at the beck and call of Islamic states and their conduit – French Ambassador Elizabeth Laurin and Council President Choi Kyonglim selected Canadian law professor Michael Lynk as the newest U.N. “independent” human rights investigator on Israel.

Lynk’s qualifications?  He has likened Israelis to Nazis, and challenged the legitimacy of the state of Israel starting in 1948 as rooted in “ethnic cleansing.”

All of this played out in the same week that Europe was reeling from the Belgian terror attacks.  Petrified or already vanquished, no European state voted against this onslaught of U.N. resolutions against Israel.  Germany and the United Kingdom occasionally abstained, while France voted with Arab and Islamic states on all but one Council resolution.

Here we are just 70 years after World War II and Europeans believe that they can license this vitriol against the Jewish state – the only democracy on the front lines of an Islamist war against human decency – and the consequences can be contained to the Jews.

Even as the converse stares them in the face.  Two days after the Brussels attacks, Islamic states rammed through a Council resolution slyly labeled “Effects of terrorism on the enjoyment of all human rights” that was actually so anti-human rights even Belgium was forced to vote against it.

As for the United States, the Obama administration has been the Human Rights Council’s most important supporter.  Though the U.S. is currently in a mandatory one-year hiatus — after serving two consecutive terms — President Obama plans to bind his successor by running again in the fall for another three-year term that starts January 1, 2017.

Memo to Americans who are mad as hell: It’s time to elicit a promise from our would-be leaders to refuse to sit on the U.N. Human Rights Council or to legitimize the United Nations.

Anne Bayefsky is director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust. Follow her on Twitter @AnneBayefsky.

How Israel hardliners like Hillary Clinton are trying to suppress free speech

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By: Ryan Cooper

REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

March 28, 2016

Over the past several years, Israel has become progressively more isolated from the international community.

A slowly growing storm of international condemnation has gathered over Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian lands, its wars against Gaza, and its ongoing annexation of the West Bank. While governments the world over (with the important exception of the United States) have voiced outrage, there’s also been a fast-growing independent movement patterned after the international effort against Apartheid in South Africa. The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement seeks to disrupt the Israeli economy and thus push it into giving up the occupation.

In response, Israel’s defenders have begun to settle on a familiar rhetorical line: that such action is anti-Semitic. They’ve made similar claims in the past, but the form is beginning to evolve in unsettling ways that infringe on free speech, particularly on college campuses. Where the typical tactic used to be bad-faith readings of criticism of Israel, increasingly the idea is to portray any political activism aimed at Israel as definitionally anti-Semitic.

In the U.S., the most important of the Israel hardliners is undoubtedly Hillary Clinton, who has a good chance to be the next president. She has embraced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to a frankly comical degree, writing how she would reaffirm the “unbreakable bond” with him and would invite him to the White House within her first month in office. (That’s despite the fact that he palpably loathes President Obama, hasworked to elect Republicans in an attempt to undermine the Iran nuclear deal, and has used dog-whistle politics to get elected.)

At the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference last week, Clinton equated BDS with anti-Semitism. Speaking of the movement, she said:

Particularly at a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise across the world, especially in Europe, we must repudiate all efforts to malign, isolate, and undermine Israel and the Jewish people… As I wrote last year in a letter to the heads of major American Jewish organizations, we have to be united in fighting back against BDS. Many of its proponents have demonized Israeli scientists and intellectuals, even students. To all the college students who may have encountered this on campus, I hope you stay strong. Keep speaking out. Don’t let anyone silence you, bully you, or try to shut down debate, especially in places of learning like colleges and universities. [Hillary Clinton, via Time]

The final line about shutting down debate on university campuses is an ironic one, since Israel hardliners have been trying to do just that, most recently at the enormous University of California system. Support for Palestinian rights has been growing on many college campuses, and so the UC Board of Regents, under pressure from pro-Israel groups, had been considering a statement which conflated anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, both of which “have no place at the University of California.” This would have been the first such statement at any major public university system.

Like any broad political label, Zionism has several contested meanings, but most commonly it means Jewish nationalism — the idea that Jews should have their own state, placed in the traditional Jewish homeland (more-or-less where Israel currently sits). Given that the merits of any kind of nationalism are a worthy subject of debate and the fact that the creation of Israel in 1948 required an extensive campaign of ethnic cleansing, such a concept is at least contestable. Indeed, many Jews identify as anti-Zionist.

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In other words, while there are surely some anti-Zionists who are also anti-Semites, anti-Zionism in itself is not inherently bigoted. As the Los Angeles Times editorial board noted, “It’s difficult to read [the UC statement] as anything other than a warning to those students or faculty members who have fundamental disagreements with the state of Israel.”

The statement also very likely ran afoul of the First Amendment, as theACLU pointed out, and so the regents changed it at the last minute before passing it through, removing the equation between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. (They still kept in a condemnation of “anti-Semitic forms of anti-Zionism.”)

All this is only one small part of what has become a general campaign of political repression against BDS advocates, from America to the U.K. and France.

At any rate, hair-trigger deployment of “anti-Semitism!” would be a lot easier to take seriously if Netanyahu’s defenders evinced any worry at all about the bigotry of Donald Trump. He is running the most racist campaign in decades, has many overt anti-Semites among his supporters, and gave a speech before the Republican Jewish Coalition riddled with anti-Semitic stereotypes. (“I’m a negotiator, like you folks,” he told the audience.) But the conservative Anti-Defamation League defended him, and a later speech before AIPAC was greeted with wild applause. It’s as if George Wallace was enthusiastically cheered by the NAACP in 1968.

Make no mistake, anti-Semitism is a real problem that must be combated. But I can think of no worse way to fight it than by lashing the world’s Jews to the political fortunes of de facto apartheid.

Senate passes bill on companies boycotting Israel

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This article, or part of, was posted on the YAHOO website.

TALLAHASSEE, FLA.

Florida wouldn’t be able to invest in companies that boycott Israel under a bill now headed to the desk of Gov. Rick Scott.

The Florida House on Wednesday voted 112-2 for a bill that would force the State Board of Administration to identify companies that boycott Israel and then notify them they are on a “scrutinized companies” list. The board is responsible for managing the state’s retirement fund.

If the companies continue to boycott Israel, the board would not be allowed to invest in those companies. It would also place limits on state agencies from contracting with companies on the list.

The push to take action against companies that boycott Israel is a reaction to a global movement backed by Pro-Palestinian groups.

I would like to ask Gov. Rick Scott and the Florida House a question, or actually several. Is this what you call democracy? Is this what you call free speech? Is this what you call free trade? Or maybe this is what you call blackmail and intimidation!! When are you people going to get away from under the thumb of the Israelis? When are you people going to have a backbone and say NO to Israelis who are dictating their demands to you? You are truly nothing but a bunch of cowards who can only say yes to the Israelis who, half the way across the world, tell you what to do and how to do it!! Grow up and stand up for Florida! Stand up for your country! And most of all stand up for yourselves!

U.S. Military Aid To Israel: Debating An Increase

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This article was posted on the pages of YAHOO.

By DAVID MAKOVSKYon March 16, 2016 at 10:00 AM

When Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu cancelled his planned visit to Washington recently, many speculated that he was protesting the continued lack of agreement on the amount of U.S. military aid to be embodied in a new ten-year memorandum of understanding (MOU). Vice President Joe Biden, who enjoys a close friendship with Netanyahu, visited Israel last week and urged the prime minister to finalize a deal at the level favored by the Obama administration. Although Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon will meet with Defense Secretary Ash Carter at the Pentagon this week, the MOU talks have been spearheaded by the White House and the Prime Minister’s Office, so the Carter-Yaalon talks are unlikely to be a game-changer.

U.S. aid rose dramatically in the wake of Israel’s 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, yet the first MOU on military aid was not signed until two decades later in 1998, for $21.3 billion over ten years. The second MOU was signed in August 2007, for $30 billion over ten years. The mutual advantage of signing such MOUs is that they inject predictability into the process so that aid levels do not have to be negotiated each year.

Did you read that? Netanyahu is protesting the amount of Aid Israel is receiving. It’s like you see a beggar on the street, you give him $5.00. Instead of saying thank you, he says, what is this cheap skate?? you should give me at least $50.00, and you say, please accept this $5.00 and I promise to give you what you ask for next time. That’s exactly what Joe Biden was doing when visited Israel.

It seems like the US and the Israeli governments don’t think that the amount of arms that Israel is currently receiving from the United States is not killing enough innocent Palestinians so the increased it by 33%. Trigger happy Israel put those arms to a bad use, killing more and more Palestinians and destroying more and more of their properties. I bet George Bush and Dick Chaney are sleeping soundly and dreaming about all the blood of innocent people spilled on the streets of Gaza and the West Bank. Truth to tell, I, as an American, am ashamed to say that these two thugs used to run my country.