RUTHFULLY YOURS

Is it possible for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement to be anything other than anti-Semitic? On January 7, 140 people in Rochester, New York attended a lecture on the topic by Miriam F. Elman, Associate Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. The event was organized and hosted by a local non-profit called Roc4Israel, founded in 2012 expressly to “counter the negative rhetoric towards Israel, expose the rising tide of global anti-Semitism, fight against BDS, and defend Israel’s right to exist.”

As Elman told her audience, “in the Middle Ages Jews were hated for their religion, in the 19th and 20th centuries they were hated for their race and today they are hated for their nation-state.”

Excepting some fringe student groups enthusiastic about boycotting Israel, the BDS movement is mostly absent from the academic scene in Rochester. The president of the University of Rochester, Joel Seligman, is a vocal critic of the movement. And while there are academics in town who sympathize with the movement enough to sign statements, at the moment BDS has no visible academic advocates in Rochester.

Syracuse, NY, located little more than an hour’s drive away, is a different story. Its academic scene has a far more active BDS movement. A group calling itself the Syracuse Peace Council is an active BDS agitator. In May 2015, Cazenovia College hosted BDS factotum Alison Weir (purveyor of the website “If Americans Knew”). Syracuse University itself has some very visible BDS advocates such as Vivian May, Zachary Braiterman, and others.

However, the topic was well-known enough to draw a crowd, on a cold winter’s evening, to an academic lecture. Nearly filling a spacious, tiered-seating auditorium, the audience was far larger than most Political Science or Middle East Studies Colloquia would attract at any of the area colleges.

Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon announcement of large financial rewards to Palestinians attacking Israel was made possible by the tens of billions of dollars released to the Islamic terrorist regime in Iran. Accordingly, the family of each Palestinian killed while attacking Israelis will receive $7,000, and those whose house is demolished by the IDF, will be awarded $30,000 each.
It is unlikely that Iran’s latest inducement to terrorism against Israel surprised U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, or President Obama, since both have acknowledged that some of the billions of dollars released to Iran, “will end up in the hands of the IRGC or of other entities, some of which are labeled terrorists.” Indeed, both should be held accountable for knowingly funding terrorism in violation of the Patriot Act. That, however, is not going to happen. Instead, growing Palestinians attacks on Israel will be seen by the Obama administration, as an opportunity to increase its pressure on Israel to agree to a Palestinian terrorist state.
Sadly, like Iran, the U.S. also helps fund the terrorist Palestinian Authority with at least $500 million annually. This is given to the PA in complete disregard to their incitement to and support of terrorist attacks against the Jewish State. And the PA, like Iran, does not hide its sponsorship of terrorist attacks on Israel. Palestinians killed while attacking Israelis are glorified and honored by the PA. Their families receive stipends and other benefits from the PA coffers, which are annually replenished by the U.S. The Obama administration is well aware of this. However, instead of demanding a stop to the PA’s hostilities towards Israel, cutting their aid, or even threatening to do so, Kerry had “urged” Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas last week, for “calm and a decrease in violence, incitement and inflammatory rhetoric,” according to State Department spokesman John Kirby.

There is much confusion in the minds of politicians, journalists, educators, religious leaders and the proverbial “man in the street” about the conflicts and origins of the many wars in the Middle East.

Foremost among these disputes is the seemingly endless Arab-Israel conflict, or what should more realistically be called the Islam-Israel conflict.

This is not a dispute over territory but a war of genocide by followers of Islam against a Jewish state, Israel, and a people who are non-Muslim.

The Arab and Islamic world will never accept the Jewish state even though its historic and ancestral roots in the land precede the 7th century beginnings of Islam by well over 3,000 years. Just read the Bible.

But to better understand the modern origins of the conflict we have to return to the emerging years after the First World War.

The victorious powers, primarily Britain, France and the United States, met in San Remo to carve up the corpse of the defeated Ottoman Turkish Empire, which had occupied the Middle East for 400 years. In so doing, they created artificial borders, which obliterated ancestral, religious and ethnic boundaries and have plagued the area ever since.

On April 25, 1920, one such cartographic invention was the Mandate of Palestine. This included the geographical territory stretching from the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea up to the border of the then Mandate of Mesopotamia; later to be renamed Iraq.

No independent or sovereign state called Palestine had ever existed in that territory, nor does one exist today, although a hostile and terrorist entity calling itself the Palestinian Authority occupies land in what is called the West Bank, while the terrorist and junior branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, occupies Gaza. But more of that later.

The name, Palestine, was merely applied to a geographical area; just like other non-state territories in the world – such as Siberia or Patagonia.

A group of students at Cornell University is demanding that the school change the name of its botanical garden from “Cornell Plantations” because apparently, the word “plantation” is always racist.

The idea behind the protest is that the word evokes images of slavery. The demand to change it is just one of many demands in a seven-page document sent to the administration by Cornell Black Students United in November.

And it’s one that’s reportedly actually being considered:

“Our staff and Advisory Council have been considering all aspects of our identity, our name, our mission and how our identity can best reflect what Cornell Plantations is — and does,” Christopher Dunn, director of the gardens, wrote in a piece for the Cornell Daily Sun.

The garden was named “Cornell Plantations” all the way back in 1944, according to a piece in Verdant Views, the plantations’ magazine. But according to Cornell Black Students United, it must be changed now. After all, the group claims that its demands must be met in order for the campus to be “conducive to the overall success of students of color.”