A Maryland software engineer and former state delegate is suing his state’s governor for signing an executive order into law which targets and penalizes supporters of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement (BDS), in what he says is a violation of his First Amendment rights.
The “Humboldt 3” are three BDS activists who face a criminal trial in Berlin next month for disrupting a pro-Israel event by an Israeli lawmaker at a university in 2017. Israel has silenced Germany on Palestinian rights using Holocaust guilt, but in Copenhagen the three activists received an award for their courage in exposing apartheid.
After the University of California chancellors posted an anti-BDS statement in December, Daily Californian editors solicited an op-ed response from the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. Editors were initially receptive to a submitted article and planned to publish it quickly, but later killed it after saying the “upper management team” found it potentially libelous. Read the op-ed article the Daily Californian would not run.
On February 3, 2019 New Yorkers demonstrated at Carnegie Hall against a fundraising brunch and performance by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.
Robert Cohen, British anti-Zionist, is accused of being a “champagne boycotter,” because he urges boycott of Israel while using computer products from companies heavily invested in Israel. But BDS doesn’t target Intel, because it has a virtual global monopoly and thus a boycott would not succeed. The real hypocrisy is talking up human rights and opposition to nukes while enforcing an apartheid system and secretly holding nukes.
“Disney BDS’d me,” Roseanne Barr said on a tour of Israel, where she repeatedly attacked the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign aimed at Israel as the second coming of Nazis. She also said ABC tried to kill her when they canceled her show, and she’d make a good prime minister.
Michia Moncho reports on the amazing success of 2018’s Israeli Apartheid Week in South Africa which saw over 150 activities, including events with over 5,000 people in attendance: “Not out of arrogance, but humility, we can confidently claim that in this last year’s #IsraeliApartheidWeek, South African civil society (across the gender, racial and religious spectrum) undoubtedly played a role in advancing the struggle for the freedom of the Palestinians.”
Israeli weapons giant Elbit Systems is reaping profits from the suffering both in Gaza and at the U.S.-Mexico border. Ariel Gold and Ursula Rozum of CODEPINK say that divestment from Elbit will play a major role eroding the institutional and economic support that allows Israel to commit war crimes with impunity and the U.S. to increase border repression.
The BDS campaign doesn’t want to destroy Israel but to end its Zionist regime, Yossi Gurvitz explains. No people have the right to self-determination in another people’s homeland. Yet this is precisely what happened in Israel, and this is precisely what Zionists are defending: a country based on denial of the rights of others.
The Jewish establishment is reactionary when it comes to Israel: The Boston Jewish Community Relations Council voted overwhelmingly Thursday to move towards throwing out one of its founding members, the Boston Workmen’s Circle, because BWC had signed on to statements with Jewish Voice for Peace, which is anti-Zionist and supports Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) targeting Israel. JCRC sided with members AIPAC, Camera, and the Zionist Organization of America.