MELANIE PHILLIPS: TWO CHEERS FOR BRITAIN’S BDS BAN
New government guidance will prevent any public body from imposing a boycott on a member of the World Trade Organization to which Israel
belongs.
The British government has done something in support of Israel, and
the progressive intelligentsia is in shock. Prime Minister David
Cameron is taking action against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
movement.
New government guidance will prevent any public body from imposing a
boycott on a member of the World Trade Organization to which Israel
belongs.
Local boycotts breach the WTO Government Procurement Agreement, which
demands that all suppliers are treated equally.
The guidance aims at preventing publicly funded bodies such as
municipal councils or National Health Service trusts from boycotting
goods produced by what they believe to be “unethical companies,” such
as firms involved in arms trading, fossil fuels or tobacco products as
well as companies based in Israel.
Matthew Hancock, the British government’s Cabinet Office minister,
revealed the development on a visit to Israel this week. Such
boycotts, he said, were divisive, potentially damaging to the UK’s
relationship with Israel and risked fueling anti-Semitism.
The enemies of Israel are beside themselves in fury.
The British Labor Party has called the guidance an “attack on
democracy.” NGOs in the forefront of anti-Israel activism, such as
Amnesty, War on Want and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, have
called it a “gross attack” on democratic freedoms and the ability of
councils or other public bodies to make “ethical investments.”
The British government’s initiative has understandably delighted
Israel and its supporters. They should nevertheless temper their
jubilation.
In its own limited terms, the guidance is certainly justified. It
merely restates existing law and requires public bodies to comply. The
boycott of Israel by public bodies is a gross abuse of taxpayers’
money. The protests at the government initiative are specious.
Democracy does not require a local council or hospital trust to busy
itself in foreign policy matters. It does not require public bodies to
behave in a discriminatory manner by singling out Israel for treatment
afforded to no other country. And “ethical investment” hardly entails
supporting Palestinian dictatorships and the proposed ethnic cleansing
of the Jews from their own ancient homeland.
The term “boycott” doesn’t do this justice. BDS is a campaign of mass
bullying and intimidation, sending threatening mobs into supermarkets,
lecture theaters and concert halls intent on harassment and censorship
under the guise of human rights – directed at further punishing the
victims of a century of exterminatory terrorism and war in the Middle
East.
Many British Jews feel intimidated and threatened by BDS because they
understand it to be nothing less than the Western front in the war of
extermination directed at Israel.
No other country is subjected to such a campaign built on grotesque
lies about its behavior designed to turn the Israelis into devils in
the Western public mind.
No country, indeed, is subjected to a boycott campaign based on the
truth about its behavior. There is no boycott campaign directed
against Saudi Arabia, Iran, China or any of the myriad states which
oppress and subjugate their hapless populations.
There is no boycott campaign against either Hamas or the Palestinian
Authority which persecute and tyrannize their populations, jail
dissidents and throw homosexuals off the roofs of tall buildings. On
the contrary, these regimes are supported against Israel by the BDS
brigade, who are mute on the Palestinians’ abuse of each other let
alone their hysterical incitement against and mass murder of Israeli
Jews.
Apartheid in South Africa was a real and demonstrable evil. When Jews
hear that BDS against Israel is modeled on the anti-apartheid
campaign, the comparison turns their blood to ice.
That’s because accusing Israel of apartheid is a wicked and
manipulative lie deployed as a weapon of war by Israel’s enemies to
portray it as a rogue state which needs to be eliminated. BDS thus
makes its Western proponents complicit in the attempt to destroy the
only state in the Middle East which actually upholds human rights, and
whose only crime is to exist at all as the homeland of the Jewish
people.
Far from promoting human rights, BDS seeks to deny them to the Jews
alone. As its co-founder Omar Barghouti openly declared, “We oppose a
Jewish state in any part of Palestine.” As such, BDS is directed not
just at Israel but at the entire Jewish people.
But the Israel boycott is by no means the whole problem.
BDS is to anti-Israel lunacy what ISIS is to Islamic extremism: merely
the noisiest and most eye-watering manifestation of a deeply rooted
and widespread lethal contamination.
The poison is incubated in the universities. This week, the
co-chairman of the Oxford University Labor Club, Alex Chalmers,
announced he was resigning over its rampant anti-Semitism and
endorsement of Israel Apartheid Week on campus.
“Whether it be,” he wrote, “members of the executive throwing around
the term ‘Zio’ (a term for Jews usually confined to websites run by
the Ku Klux Klan) with casual abandon, senior members of the club
expressing their ‘solidarity’ with Hamas and explicitly defending
their tactics of indiscriminately murdering civilians, or a former
co-chair claiming that ‘most accusations of anti-Semitism are just the
Zionists crying wolf,’ a large proportion of both OULC and the student
Left in Oxford more generally have some kind of problem with Jews.”
A further statement from the Oxford University Jewish Society said
senior members of the Labor Club liked to regale listeners with a song
called “Rockets over Tel Aviv” and endorsed Hamas attacks on Israeli
civilians, stated all Jews should be required to denounce Zionism and
the State of Israel, and said those who refused to do so should be
shunned. And they had arranged for a group of students to harass a
Jewish student and shout “Filthy Zionist” at her.
Preventing BDS will not stamp out this deranged animosity against
Israel and Zionism that has now gripped most of the Labor Party and
Britain’s “progressive” intelligentsia.
Indeed, the new guidance may provide a fig leaf for the derangement to
continue. The British government can pose as a champion of Israel
against delegitimization.
But that very same British government continues to propound one of the
key lies fueling Israel delegitimization: that its “occupation” and
settlement of the disputed territories is illegal.
If David Cameron really wants to tackle anti-Israel incitement, he
should be telling the British public some inconvenient truths – such
as that the occupation and the settlements are legal several times
over; that in the entire Middle East it is only Israel that upholds
human rights for Arabs along with all its other citizens; that no
decent person should support the Palestinian agenda of anti-Israel
incitement, Jewish ethnic cleansing and the destruction of Israel; and
that NGOs such as Amnesty and War on Want are a disgrace for doing so.
Alas, he will not do this. Although he has moved sharply in the right
direction over Israel, he hasn’t yet joined up the dots. Or maybe he
has, but isn’t brave enough to show his country the completed picture.
Unless he does so, however, his guidance will do little to restore
reason and decency to British public debate.
Melanie Phillips is a columnist for The Times (UK).
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/As-I-See-It-Two-cheers-for-Britains-BDS-ban-445425
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