BDS

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disambiguation see boycott divest

MERRI OK

boycott sep

see canary mission

student suppression

see palestine

SEE GAZA PROFITEERS

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1st amend STUDENT SUPPRESS 6 26

GGL

AI Overview

The Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-MI) is actively representing pro-Palestinian student activists at the University of Michigan (U of M). Legal actions include a federal civil rights lawsuit against U of M officials, campus police, and private contractors for the alleged targeting, surveillance, and arrest of student advocates. [1, 2, 3]

Key developments and legal actions concerning CAIR-MI and U of M students:

Federal Civil Rights Lawsuit: CAIR-MI, alongside the Sugar Law Center for Economic & Social Justice, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit on behalf of Josiah Walker, a Black Muslim student advocate, citing unconstitutional punishment, unlawful arrest, and harassment. [1, 2]

DOJ Indictments: Federal prosecutors and the DOJ unsealed indictments against pro-Palestinian activists linked to the University of Michigan following coordinated FBI and state law enforcement raids. [1]

Free Speech Advocacy: CAIR-MI has actively pushed back against disciplinary sanctions on pro-Palestinian student groups—such as the Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE)—arguing that public universities are violating students' First Amendment rights by selectively punishing them for political advocacy. [1, 2]

Review additional information on these cases via the official CAIR Press Releases or read the initial reporting from CBS News Detroit.

MICHIGAN STUDENTS DOJ 6 26 cair-mi-raises-serious-first-amendment-concerns-regarding-university-of-michigan-protest-indictments

The Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-MI) today expressed serious concerns regarding the recently unsealed indictments arising from protests at the University of Michigan, warning that while allegations of criminal conduct should be addressed through the judicial process, charging documents should not blur the line between alleged unlawful acts and constitutionally protected political expression, peaceful protest, and advocacy on matters of public concern.

WOW MJR CYA PARa]

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NYT

Eight people who federal prosecutors said had ties to the University of Michigan were accused Wednesday of conspiring to threaten campus leaders and others into severing ties with Israel.

An indictment unsealed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, accused the pro-Palestinian activists of crossing the line from campus protest to crimes that included threats and vandalism. The defendants face varying charges, but the indictment included federal counts of conspiracy to transmit threats, witness intimidation and destruction of property to prevent seizure.

The charges in Michigan, all felonies that carry the possibility of years in prison, appeared to signify an escalation in the federal government’s efforts to crack down on pro-Palestinian activism that roiled American campuses in recent years.

“Their criminal activity included spray-painting threats, breaking windows and throwing glass jars filled with noxious chemicals into family homes,” the indictment said. “They marked their victims with threatening symbols used by Hamas, including red inverted triangles and red handprints. They used the internet and social media to broadcast their message to ensure their threats and commitment to continuing criminal activity were heard by their victims and others who support Israel.”

The Trump administration has taken a hard line against pro-Palestinian protesters, whose activism after the Hamas-led October 2023 attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza led to tumult on campuses. Until now, the administration had mostly targeted universities themselves over their response to protests, although it did move to strip visas and deport some individual students last year.

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:{GUK

A Palestinian middle school student in Michigan who was publicly admonished for refusing to stand for the pledge of allegiance as part of a personal protest against the war on Gaza has settled with her school district following a lawsuit around her first amendment free speech rights.

The teenager, identified as DK in court documents, said she faced racism from a teacher at the East middle school in Plymouth, Michigan, after she did not participate in the pledge. The teacher reportedly told DK to “go back to her country”, Fox 2 Detroit reported.

In a statement following the settlement, DK called the ordeal “terrifying” and “overwhelming” at times.

“But it taught me the importance of speaking up for what I believe is right,” said DK. “I feel proud of the outcome and of being part of something that reinforces how important free speech is. I’ve learned that even when it feels uncomfortable or risky, speaking out can make a difference, not just for me, but for others as well.”

DK, who is 14, chose not to participate in the pledge on 10 January 2025 given the continuing war on Gaza.

“I decided I wanted to sit down because I didn’t feel comfortable standing because of what’s happening in Palestine,” said DK at a February press conference.

After the pledge, DK said that a teacher told the class that “anyone that was sitting down was being very disrespectful to soldiers, to America”. DK said she tried to explain her view to the instructor but was told that if she did not like the US, she should go back to her own country. DK later left the room in tears.

The Arab American Civil Rights League and the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan later filed a lawsuit in June 2025 against the Plymouth-Canton community schools district on behalf of DK.

As a part of the recent settlement, the Plymouth-Canton community schools district has pledged to provide diversity, sensitivity and first amendment training for staff. The district has also agreed not to punish DK, remove any indication from school files that suggest her protest was inappropriate and provide needed counseling.

Jacob Khalaf, DK’s father, applauded his daughter for her bravery in advocating for her freedom of speech.

“My daughter has shown her strong moral fiber throughout all of this,” he said in a statement to Fox 2 Detroit. “She had the courage to resist when a person in authority tried to make her relinquish her right to free speech, and then, with the help of the ACLU and ACRL, brought a lawsuit to make sure her first amendment rights, as well as those of others, were protected.”

A representative of the district could not be reached for comment by the Guardian.

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RTX Corp | AFSC Investigate

QUAKERS

BDS SHORTLIST

The world's second-largest military company, formerly known as Raytheon Technologies. It makes missiles, bombs, components for fighter jets, and other weapon systems used by the Israeli military against Palestinian civilians. Its surveillance technology is also used to monitor the U.S.–Mexico border.

Gaza Genocide

Weapons and Military Equipment

Raytheon Technologies Corp, headquartered in Arlington County, Virginia, designs, manufactures, and sells military weapons and equipment, including combat aircraft, avionics, missiles, bombs, battlefield fighting vehicles, and cybersecurity systems. It was formed in 2020 as a merger of Raytheon Company and United Technologies Corporation. The merger made it the world's second-largest military company, with $64.4 billion in revenue as of 2022, 96% of which derives from its defense sector. Among its notable subsidiaries are Collins Aerospace Systems and aircraft engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney.

The company has long supplied U.S. and international militaries with weapon systems and equipment. Between 2008 and 2021, it signed contracts worth $52 billion with the Department of Defense (DOD). Additionally, the company was one of the top contractors of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in the agency's efforts to erect a "smart/virtual" wall on the U.S.–Mexico border between 2005 and 2019 (see below for more details).

War Crimes Against Palestinian Civilians

Surveillance of the US–Mexico Border

Pain/Heat Ray Less-Lethal Weapon

Other Controversies

Economic Activism Highlights

Unless specified otherwise, the information in this page is valid as of

29 October 2022

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6 24

Companies Profiting from the Gaza Genocide

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The Moral Authority of Marc Rowan

The private equity billionaire is leading a boycott of an Ivy League oligarch factory over a Palestinian literary festival it held last month.

by Maureen TkacikOctober 21, 2023

Two weeks ago, I happened to have a long chat with a nurse whose hospital is owned by the half-trillion-dollar private equity empire Apollo Global Management. I met this nurse, whose gender I am withholding due to their fear of retaliation, at the height of the pandemic, when they were terrified that the extreme cutbacks Apollo had imposed on staffing budgets were risking patient safety or even contributing to a preventable death in the hospital’s isolated rural community. Three years later, this nurse is largely preoccupied with their own basic survival: A virulent infection contracted during a routine surgery last year left them unable to walk without pain, and they walk 12,000 steps during an average shift.

The nurse knew it was unwise to undergo surgery in their own hospital, where there was a well-documented history of abysmal sanitation practices, the lone sterile technician on staff seemed to never leave the hospital, and corporate is so behind on its bills they had almost entirely eliminated the weekend housekeeping staff and were chronically short on basic supplies like IV tubing. But at some point following a restructuring two years ago, Apollo outsourced its health insurance administration to a company that placed onerous restrictions and preauthorization requirements on care received outside Apollo—and anyway, they felt they owed it to their colleagues and community to stay: “I wanted to show the docs and nurses here that I trust them, because they are wonderful people.” So they took the risk, and have since spent thousands of dollars out of pocket attempting to undo the damage.

More from Maureen Tkacik

Now, the nurse wonders if they will ever have time to heal. Only 24 hours passed after their last surgery before they were called back to work. Then in September, the hospital lost ten travel nurses in a single week; apparently, the hospital had slashed their weekly pay by $1,000 with no notice. The nurse has wanted to quit countless times, but it’s the only hospital for hours in any direction, and every month the patients get sicker and more reliant on what a colleague in their seventies told the nurse was “the most broken hospital” they have ever seen. “You know how you wring out a washcloth three or four times and the last time you squeeze it, you’ve got to squeeze really hard for maybe just a drop or two of water?” another of the nurse’s colleagues told me. Apollo “just never stops going back and trying to squeeze a little more.”

This campaign of deprivation has been extremely lucrative for Apollo, which over the past two years has extracted at least $1.6 billion from the nurse’s hospital chain, at an almost incalculable cost to workers, patients, and their small-town communities.

But that is what Apollo does. In the 33 years since a group of Michael Milken protégés founded the consummate modern private equity firm, Apollo has run its businesses ragged. The economic analysts at Moody’s have consistently found that Apollo portfolio companies plunged into distress or default around two-thirds of the time, the highest rate in the business. Since the pandemic began, the financial giant and its subsidiaries have been involved in at least 20 corporate bankruptcies, from the dramatic (and “perplexing,” in the Financial Times’ characterization) liquidation of the trucking company Yellow to the unexpectedly “messy” bankruptcy of serial looting victim Serta Simmons Bedding. (The company did not respond to a request for comment.)

Sometimes Apollo’s “investments” fail as a result of having made Apollo insiders unimaginably rich; other times, Apollo leverages its mastery of the bankruptcy code to enrich itself off other private equity firms’ failures. First-year associates, according to Business Insider, typically make a base salary of $450,000; Apollo founder Leon Black is worth more than $12 billion. And Black’s longtime disciple and current Apollo chief executive officer Marc Rowan is estimated to be worth $5.8 billion.

I bring this up today only because that same Marc Rowan has spent the past week casting himself on cable news and on the anti-woke celebrity publisher Bari Weiss’s Free Press website as some kind of moral authority. Rowan’s oligarch fellow travelers have hailed his “heroic” bid to inflict a campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions upon the University of Pennsylvania, over its administration’s “failure to condemn … anti-Semitic hate.”

Rowan, who assumed the reins after the Apollo board asked his predecessor Leon Black to step down amid revelations he had wired $188 million to the late child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, lookslike a nice enough guy. He wears sweaters for all his media appearances, has spent the past year vowing to reform Apollo’s “ruthless” reputation, and draws a stark contrast with Black, who was sued over the summer for allegedly raping a 16-year-old with mosaic Down syndrome at Epstein’s mansion. (Black denies the allegations and sued the alleged victim’s law firm for the third time shortly after the complaint was filed.) The image rehabilitation has not come cheap: An Apollo investor alleged in an August lawsuit that the private equity firm made $570 million in unexplained payments to Black, Rowan, and their co-founder Josh Harris when Black left the company.

Politically, though, Rowan is a reflection of the financial institution he helms. He also chairs the board of Penn’s famous Wharton Business School, and in 2018 donated $50 million to the business school, $12 million of which was specifically earmarked to bankroll the “study” of a proprietary brand of voodoo economics dubbed the “Penn Wharton Budget Model,” whose proliferation in policy circles the Prospect explored in a recent feature. Penn produces more billionaires than any other undergraduate institution, almost wholly as a result of Wharton’s magnetism to 17-year-olds seeking to become billionaires, but this was the largest single donation in Wharton’s history. Like most oligarchs, Rowan finances politicians who advocate slashing government spending on social welfare programs; but also like most oligarchs, he is not above lobbying for a multitrillion-dollar bailout of the financial sector when his own portfolio is on the line, as it was in early 2020 when he emailed Jared Kushner demanding the Federal Reserve drop its collateral requirements for emergency lending to include junk debt. (“We have a totally unique situation,” Rowan wrote Kushner, whose family business Apollo had recently lent $184 million and whose father-in-law’s 2020 re-election campaign would receive $1 million from Rowan and his wife, according to Forbes. “There has been no MORAL HAZARD.”)

As Rowan had reasoned years earlier in the foreword to a 2012 book: “Traditionally, we are taught to judge the success of a society by how it deals with the least able, most vulnerable members of that society. [But] shouldn’t we judge a society by how they treat the most successful? Do we vilify, tax, expropriate, and condemn those who have succeeded, or do we celebrate economic success as the engine that propels our society toward greater collective well-being?”

Now Rowan is calling on his fellow wealthy Penn alums to inflict the austerity he promotes for the American masses upon his (and very incidentally, my) alma mater, which relies on donors like Rowan to subsidize the educations of students who cannot afford the $90,000 annual cost of attending the Philadelphia university. “Join me and many others who love UPenn by sending the university $1 in place of your normal discretionary contribution,” Rowan wrote in his open letter, “so that no one misses the point.” In a vivid display of class solidarity, his call was immediately heeded by fellow billionaire Wharton alumnus and former U.S. ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, whose family’s eponymous chemical company sued Apollo for $3 billion in 2008, alleging fraud and tortious interference. Penn trustee Vahan H. Gureghian, a charter school mogul with a famously lavish real estate portfolio, also resigned from the board last week, while billionaire Ron Lauder on Tuesday said he was contemplating pulling funds.

ROWAN IS NOT THE ONLY BILLIONAIRE advocating BDS upon the Ivy League over alleged antisemitism, of course; more famously, railroad pillager and fellow bailout demander Bill Ackman, net worth $3.6 billion, called on his fellow oligarchs to assemble a “Do Not Hire” list comprising the listed members of all 34 Harvard University student groups that signed a letter holding Israel “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Ackman’s move inspired a conservative dark-money group to send a “doxxing truck” around Cambridge, parading the names and faces of students it dubbed “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites” on an electronic billboard, a stunt that was quickly condemned by everyone from Larry Summers to Harvard Hillel.

In Ackman’s (extremely limited) defense, the Harvard letter, which failed to muster a single even lukewarm sentence acknowledging the sadism of the attacks on Israel or expressing sympathy for the grieving, was pretty offensive, its combination of absolutist tone and buzzword-laden content calling to mind something the NYU girls in White Lotus might have come up with following a brief consultation with ChatGPT. While ostensibly written to “call on the Harvard community to take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians,” the letter seemed dismayingly unburdened by any genuine reflection as to the power imbalances enabling said annihilation—or for that matter, Harvard—and how fundamental “basic human decency” is to the project of overcoming such an imbalance.

Down the Acela corridor at Penn, Mark Rowan’s Ivy League BDS might seem like a me-too version of Ackman’s McCarthyist blacklist. But it is actually far more sinister. No Penn-affiliated organization produced any tone-deaf letters of note in the aftermath of the Hamas massacre; in fact, Rowan’s coup attempt has nothing whatsoever to do with the barbaric attacks on Israeli civilians—unless you buy into the logic, expressed in his opening sentence, that a Palestinian literary festival held three weeks ago on the Penn campus was somehow a prelude to the carnage.

“It took less than two weeks to go from the Palestine Writes literary festival on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus to the barbaric slaughter and kidnapping of Israelis,” Rowan asserts, relating the rise of wokeness at Penn to the unprecedented orgy of violence.

Reader, I spent days attempting to determine what exactly it was that Rowan and gang found so unspeakably blasphemous about this Palestine Writes literary festival, which was held the weekend of September 22 to honor the late poet and literary critic Salma Khadra Jayyusi. And it is difficult to discern anything other than the festival’s mere existence. Rowan’s letter accused panelists of having “advocated ethnic cleansing,” defending “substantial violence,” and uttering and “repeat[ing] various blood libels against the Jews,” but offered no evidence of any of that. Rowan initially submitted his letter to the campus newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, which failed to immediately publish it, causing him to imply the paper had censored his speech; the DP said in a follow-up story that it had not been able to verify Rowan’s claims.

Contemporaneous media coverage suggested that Rowan might have been referencing Pink Floyd singer-songwriter Roger Waters, who apparently once used the K-word in an email; or possibly CUNY professor Marc Lamont Hill, who was fired from a job at CNN after delivering a speech using the phrase “from the river to the sea”; or possibly Aya Ghanameh, a children’s book author and illustrator who has argued on Twitter that “settlers aren’t civilians” and that violent resistance is necessary when “[peace] isn’t already the status quo.” But the focus of the festival was literature, not inflammatory tweets, as an anti-Zionist Jewish group, Penn Chavurah, pointed out in an Instagram post endorsing the festival: “We do not unilaterally endorse every thing that every speaker at the upcoming event has ever said or done, [but] the festival is an important opportunity to celebrate, center and engage with a diversity of Palestinian voices.” Waters, for his part, claims he arrived at the event only to be told he was not welcome on Penn’s campus, so the single prospective attendee accused of engaging in a normal person’s definition of “antisemitism” was successfully purged from the event. (A Gaza university professor with relatives in Hamas who teaches Israeli poetry to his literature students, but has also posted inflammatory things about Jews on social media, was stricken from the lineup at least a week before the festival started.)

A closer look at the right-wing shitstorm that engulfed the Penn campus over the month of September was no more edifying. The Daily Caller accused the event’s organizers of “glorify[ing] Palestinian terrorism” in a September 10 piece noting that scheduled panelist Salman Abu Sitta had “accused Israel of ‘discrimination and apartheid [and] ethnic cleansing,’” accusations former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo made against the country just days earlier. Three days later, Penn alum and fanatical private equity booster Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), who also lobbied Fed chairman Jerome Powell to approve Rowan’s plan to bail out junk bonds in April 2020, wrote Penn president Liz Magill asking her to disinvite Waters and Hill, the latter of whom he claimed had “never adequately apologized” for saying “river to the sea” even though he publicly apologized at least three times. And two days after that, National Reviewcondemned Penn for “hosting an event packed to the gills with people who have time and again openly and unrepentantly called for the deaths of Jews,” while furnishing no evidence that anyone involved had done anything of the sort.

Magill issued a statement “unequivocally and emphatically” condemning antisemitism, but reiterating the university’s support for the “free exchange of ideas.” She hosted meetings on antisemitism, instructed the Penn police to provide additional security to Jewish student organizations, and pledged to funnel additional resources to combating antisemitism on campus in the future—which partially appeased some critics while rendering others still more furious. By September 18, The Jerusalem Postwas reporting that the event had split pro-Israel groups into two factions, one represented by Miriam Elman of the Academic Engagement Network, who said she felt the danger of anti-Israel rhetoric could be met with “better speech,” and the other exemplified by the Zionist Organization of America, which threatened to sue Penn if it did not cancel the festival.

Behind the scenes, pro-Israel groups pressured sponsors of the literary festival. Organizer Susan Abulhawa, a best-selling novelist who founded the event as an offshoot of a charity she runs to build playgrounds in historic Palestinian neighborhoods and refugee camps, said in an interview that she received an email from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts two days before the festival started asking her to remove its logo from the event website, ostensibly because the grant it had contributed had been specifically earmarked to support an anthology of essays and short stories published in conjunction with the festival, as opposed to the event itself. After clarifying the nature of the group’s grant on the festival website, she received a cease and desist letter demanding she remove the logo immediately. If she’d had any doubt as to who was ultimately behind the sudden request, the letter was immediately posted on the website of the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit organization with an annual budget well in excess of $100 million that has often in the past used its mission as an opponent of antisemitism as cover for spying on human rights and labor activists, in particular not just Palestinian rights activists but opponents of South African apartheid, according to multiple published sources in the 1990s.

Then something weird happened. On the eve of the festival’s first day, the Penn chapter of the Jewish campus group Hillel announced on Instagram that a person the organization described variously as a “student” and a “member of the campus community” had earlier that morning sneaked into the building and begun overturning tables and trash cans while muttering antisemitic diatribes; The Daily Pennsylvanian later quoted a Penn Police spokesman describing the perpetrator as a mentally disturbed individual “experiencing a crisis.” A student who witnessed the incident called the perpetrator someone too old to be a student, though a CBS News article on the incident continues to identify the individual that way. (An email to a Penn Police spokesperson seeking details on the incident was not answered.)

“What Did They Think Was Going To Happen?” blared a *National Review*headline on the incident, in a post reasoning that Penn president Liz Magill “bears responsibility” for the actions of the mentally disturbed individual because she failed to cancel the literary festival: “The Palestine Writes organizers have a right to voice their opinions, but they do not have the right to do so on Penn’s land,” author Zach Kessel concluded, likely unaware and unconcerned that the university used eminent domain to displace 4,500 Black residents a few years before the 1967 war.

That’s where Rowan stepped in. Together with two fellow private equity barons on the board of trustees and a long list of high-net-worth alumni, Rowan composed an open letter to Magill demanding that festival organizers remove all references to Penn from its marketing materials, that Penn-affiliated groups involved with the event (like the Kelly Writers House and the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations program) disclose the precise nature of their involvement with the event and individually issue statements distancing them from the alleged antisemitism, and that Magill immediately implement “mandatory antisemitism awareness training across the University, including in new student orientation programming and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programming—for students, faculty, and staff.” In lieu of such a commitment, someone paid a truck with a digital billboard exactly like the one that appeared last week at Harvard, parading the headshots of various speakers next to captions like “SHAME on [Sponsoring Organization] at U Penn” for sponsoring “[Speaker] for promoting Genocide of the Jews.” Penn did not respond to a request for comment.

IN THE END, THE FESTIVALBILLIONAIRE hedge fund manager Cliff Asness characterized as an “antisemitic Burning Man” turned out to be strangely short on direct references to Jews or even Israel. Perhaps the most explicitly anti-Zionist feature was the screening of a Netflix film about a young girl’s experience being evicted from her village in 1948, which the American Jewish Committee has slammed as a “blood libel” and Israeli politicians have campaigned to cancel, but which the Palestine-focused news site Mondoweiss describes as a “mild depiction” of the 1948 Nakba, a historical event you can read about in this Israeli intelligence report.

Otherwise, the proceedings were mostly … uplifting. There were panels on Palestinian feminism and the experience of being queer in the Arab world, a lecture on Palestinian embroidery, performance poetry on the Australian aboriginal experience, a chat between Palestinian chefs discussing the region’s bread production techniques, a discussion of friendship and “the recognition that … Vietnamese refugees are settlers and alibis for the American Dream” featuring the novelist and professor Viet Thanh Nguyen, and a lecture on Palestinian resistance to Napoleon. It was essentially a feast of cultural topics that might not be at all political if blockades had not shuttered the textile mills, if children of Russian-Bulgarian immigrants had not won James Beard awards marketing hummus and lamb shoulder as “Israeli cuisine,” and if Israeli law had not criminalized gatherings of more than ten Palestinians to discuss topics “liable to be interpreted as political.”

Indeed, the real-life festival was so wildly at odds with the Nazi death rally promised by the antisemitism squad that a Jewish Exponentreporter dispatched to cover it seemed to come away distinctly underwhelmed bordering on charmed, summarizing its vibe with a quote from the husband of a Jordanian performance poet: “When we gather for Palestine, it’s always for protest or there’s war happening, Gaza being bombed, children being killed … This is more celebrating the culture.”

Mackenzie Fierceton, a recent Penn alum and subject of a New Yorker profile about the university’s bizarre campaign to revoke her bachelor’s degree and assassinate her character after her biological mother claimed she’d fabricated stories of being repeatedly physically and sexually abused to impress the admissions department, attended the festival and wrote in an email that she “witnessed only joy, love, and peace amidst the celebration of Palestinian voices, art, and literature.”

But if it was difficult to reconcile the jihad convention of right-wing fever dreams with the lovefest described by literally everyone in attendance, there’s a good reason for that: The methods and rhetoric Rowan and company deployed to smear Palestine Writes seem to have originated from a playbook specifically devised to undermine student groups advocating boycott, divestment, and sanctions actions on university campuses. The never-aired four-part Al Jazeera documentary }, about a young Jewish journalist who went undercover as an operative for the Israel lobby at the height of the BDS campus movement, features a number of successful astroturf operations that share a spooky resemblance to September’s shitstorm at Penn. In one case at University of California, Davis, two spray-painted swastikas mysteriously appeared on the walls of a Jewish fraternity house the week after a successful student senate vote to demand the college divest its Israel investments, and a consortium of Jewish student groups secretly coordinated with help from the Israeli embassy wrote a flurry of op-eds and social media posts using the incident to paint BDS as a “hate group.” But as an Israeli embassy campus operative in the documentary on a hidden camera, the Jewish groups believed a “random, like, white supremacist type people who just came in, did it, left”—not a student BDS supporter—was responsible for the vandalism.

Similar to anti-BDS operations staged at Purdue University and the University of Tennessee, the Penn media fracas and the doxxing trucks at both the literary festival and last week at Harvard were powered by the shadowy website Canary Mission, which scrapes social media platforms to pull together profiles on Palestinian rights supporters, no matter how young or inconsequential, and culls their Twitter feeds for inflammatory-sounding quotes it can use as “evidence” of antisemitism. A dizzying network of national nonprofits like the Anti-Defamation League (where Marc Rowan is the chief benefactor of a fellowship program), campus organizations, and allied media outlets and dark-money groups are coordinated by a central command that scours the internet constantly for signs of Palestinian rights meetups. “Generally within about 30 seconds of one of these things popping up on campus,” said one operative in the film, “the system picks it up, it goes into a queue and alerts our researchers, and they evaluate it, they tag it, and if it rises to a certain level we issue early warning reports to our partners.”

In the six years since Al Jazeera filmed its documentary, BDS has largely _{ceased to be a thing}_, mostly because pro-Israel lobbyists have passed laws in at least 35 states effectively banning the movement. Last year saw just three campus votes to boycott Israel, down from 44 during the 2014-2015 school year.

Perhaps sheer boredom led the lobby to fix its echo chambers on Palestine Writes, though it may also stem from something specific to Penn, where students who identify as Jewish, who once comprised between a third and 40 percent of the student body, now represent just 16 percent. Earlier this year, Penn Hillel executive director Gabe Greenberg spoke with Inside Higher Ed about the “‘dozens if not a hundred’ conversations” he’d had in recent months “with parents concerned about the shrinkage of Penn’s Jewish population.”

Susan Abulhawa, the novelist and conference organizer, says she had been planning Palestine Writes—and the university had been aware of it—for more than a year, and the first sign of coordinated opposition only came during the first week of September. Abulhawa doubts Rowan’s attempted putsch has anything specific to do with Magill or even Penn. “When you make an example out of a university president, that ensures that not only every other university president falls in line, so does every dean, every provost, every professor,” she said. “It’s to strike terror [and] fear.”

The tactic will surprise no one familiar with Apollo, whose executives are so notorious for bullying creditors in bankruptcy court that investment bankers have historically charged an “Apollo premium” for underwriting deals like the $5 billion bond issuance that financed the firm’s takeover of the rural hospital chain. But that premium is ultimately borne by innocent bystanders like coal miners and factory workers, rural hospital patients and their overwhelmed nurses; the one at the beginning of this story is still owed thousands of dollars Apollo stiffed them for weeks they worked during a ransomware attack two years ago.

If Rowan were truly interested in rehabilitating the reputation of the firm he co-founded, he might forswear wage theft or dividends that leave large employers insolvent or strategic bankruptcies designed specifically to bust unions and plunder their pension funds. But that would require Rowan to acknowledge the carnage with which his company’s insatiable drive for speedy investment returns has littered flyover country. As the scheme to punish his alma mater illustrates, “bullying detractors into exhausted submission” is more amenable to his comfort zone.

Fierceton, who relied on scholarships endowed by rich donors to finance her Penn education after she ended up in foster care, believes lower-income Ivy League students are the ultimate targets of the private equity mogul’s billionaire boycott. “Students who rely on scholarships are forced to realize that their education is dependent on elite, conservative donors who can impose their political preferences on the University to silence speech on campus,” she wrote. “Penn, like other institutions, makes decisions based not in the best interest [of] students, but what billionaire donors tell them to do.”

Tagged:antisemitism, Books, Books, Culture & the Arts, Education in America, Health & Social Policy, hospitals, Israel-Palestine, Marc Rowan, Money, Politics & Power, Pennsylvania, Poverty & Wealth, Private Equity, Religion

Maureen Tkacik

moetkacik@gmail.com

Maureen Tkacik is investigations editor at the Prospect and a senior fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project. More by Maureen Tkacik

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an 6 25

We speak with esteemed historian scholar Ellen Schrecker about the Trump administration’s assault on universities and the crackdown on dissent, a climate of fear and censorship she describes as “worse than McCarthyism.”

“During the McCarthy period, it was attacking only individual professors and only about their sort of extracurricular political activities on the left. … Today, the repression that’s coming out of Washington, D.C., it attacks everything that happens on American campuses,” says Schrecker. “The damage that the Trump administration is doing is absolutely beyond the pale and has never, never been equaled in American life with regard to higher education.”

Schrecker is the author of many books about the McCarthy era, Cold War politics and right-wing attacks on academic freedom. Her recent piece for The Nation is headlined “Worse Than McCarthyism: Universities in the Age of Trump.”democracynow.org

IFrame Content

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump’s crackdown on academic institutions in the United States was the focus of protests and commencement speeches this week as universities like Harvard held commencement ceremonies.

The Trump administration has now directed federal agencies to review all remaining contracts with Harvard, after it already canceled nearly $3 billion in federal research grants for the university and moved last week to revoke its ability to enroll international students. Harvard has two separate suits pending against Trump, arguing the moves violate due process, as well as free speech protections under the First Amendment because they target the university’s staff, curriculum and enrollment.

In his address at Harvard’s commencement ceremony Thursday, Stanford University professor, doctor and novelist Abraham Verghese praised the school’s defiance of Trump and spoke to students facing threats of deportation or having their visas revoked.

DR. ABRAHAM VERGHESE: When legal immigrants and others who are lawfully in this country, including so many of your international students, worry about being wrongly detained and even deported, perhaps it’s fitting that you hear from an immigrant like me. Perhaps it’s fitting that you hear from someone who was born in Ethiopia when it was ruled by an emperor, someone who then lived under the harsh military leader who overthrew the emperor, someone who had at least — who had at least one his medical school classmates tortured and disappear. … More than a quarter of the physicians in this country are foreign medical graduates. … So, a part of what makes America great, if I may use that phrase, is that it allows an immigrant like me to blossom here, just as generations of other immigrants and their children have flourished and contributed in every walk of life, working to keep America great.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the novelist and medical doctor, Ethiopian Indian American, Dr. Abraham Verghese addressing Harvard’s commencement ceremony on Thursday. His latest book, The Covenant of Water.

Meanwhile, down the road in Cambridge, the Indian American class president at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spoke about how MIT’s undergraduate body and Graduate Student Union had voted overwhelmingly to cut ties with Israel. Megha Vemuri wore a red-and-white keffiyeh and said MIT students would never support a genocide, and praised them for continuing to protest despite, quote, “threats, intimidation and suppression coming from all directions, especially,” she said, “your own university officials.”

MEGHA VEMURI: Last spring, MIT’s undergraduate body and Graduate Student Union voted overwhelmingly to cut ties with the genocidal Israeli military. You called for a permanent cease fire in Gaza, and you stood in solidarity with the pro-Palestine activists on campus. You faced threats, intimidation and suppression coming from all directions, especially your own university officials. But you prevailed, because the MIT community that I know would never tolerate a genocide.

Right now while we prepare to graduate and move forward with our lives, there are no universities left in Gaza. We are watching Israel try to wipe Palestine off the face of the Earth, and it is a shame that MIT is a part of it. The Israeli occupation forces are the only foreign military that MIT has research ties with. This means that Israel’s assault on the Palestinian people is not only aided and abetted by our country, but our school. As scientists, engineers, academics and leaders, we have a commitment to support life, support aid efforts and call for an arms embargo and keep demanding now, as alumni, that MIT cuts the ties.

AMY GOODMAN: That was MIT class president Megha Vemuri, now Indian American graduate of MIT.

This comes as Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism — another school facing attacks by the Trump administration — writes for The New Yorker magazine this week about how, quote, “Academic freedom in the United States has found itself periodically under siege.” In his piece headlined “A Tumultuous Spring Semester Finally Comes to a Close,” he describes how he consulted with Ellen Schrecker, a historian and the author of No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, along with other deans at Columbia. They spoke about government repression on college campuses in the 1950s through to the present. Schrecker told him, quote, “I’ve studied McCarthyism’s impact on higher education for 50 years. What’s happening now is worse,” he quoted her saying.

Well, we begin today with Ellen Schrecker in person, joining us in our New York studio. She’s the author of Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. Schrecker is also the author of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom. And she just wrote a piece for The Nation headlined “Worse Than McCarthyism: Universities in the Age of Trump.” Schrecker has been active in the American Association of University Professors, AAUP, since the 1990s. I should note she has three degrees from Radcliffe Harvard and formerly taught there. She’s a graduate of Radcliffe 1960.

Ellen Schrecker, welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. As we look at these universities under attack, you’ve studied higher education for over half a century. Let’s talk about what was happening then and what’s happening today.

ELLEN SCHRECKER: OK. The main thing that happened then to universities was that about a hundred faculty members, most of them with tenure, were fired and blacklisted. That happened in every major institution of civil society within the United States. And although the universities pride themselves on academic freedom — whatever that means — they collaborated with the forces of repression through — that were actively imposing a climate of fear and self-censorship throughout American society.

Today, what’s happening is worse, so much worse that we have to really find a new phrase for it. I don’t know what it’ll be. But during the McCarthy period, it was attacking only individual professors and only about their sort of extracurricular political activities on the left, in the past and in the present, then present. Today, the repression that’s coming out of Washington, D.C., it attacks everything that happens on American campuses.

AMY GOODMAN: I’d like you to start off — we have a very young audience. We also have their parents and their grandparents around the world. And I’d like you to start off by talking about who McCarthy is. What do we mean by the McCarthyism of, for example, the 1950s?

ELLEN SCHRECKER: OK, that’s a very good way to start, because McCarthyism, unfortunately, is misnamed. It is not just the career of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who came in onto the stage of history in 1950 after the “ism” that he gave his name to had been really dominating American domestic politics since the late 1940s. ’47 is when the Truman administration imposed a loyalty test, an anti-communist loyalty test, on its employees.

So, if we wanted to name this phenomenon of political repression, anti-communist political repression — and I want to specify that it didn’t attack randomly people on the left, but very specifically people who had some kind of connection, usually in the past, with the communist movement, that during the 1930s and ’40s was the most dynamic force on the left, even though it was a very flawed, very flawed political group. It was nonetheless very influential on the left. And if we wanted to give that political repression of the 1940s and ’50s a name, it should have been Hooverism, after the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, the movie Good Night and Good Luck, they showed real black-and-white footage of McCarthy, and test audiences thought he was too harsh, unrealistic, not realizing it was actual footage. And now you have Good Night and Good Luck on Broadway, George Clooney starring in it, and it is the financially most successful Broadway show we’ve seen, is going to be now for free on CNN in a few days. But the significance of that, that that — what people feel today was a cartoon character was, in fact, much harsher and sharper than people ever dreamed?

ELLEN SCHRECKER: Yeah, he was beyond the pale, because, like the current president, he had no guardrails, as it were.

AMY GOODMAN: Not to mention Roy Cohn, his sidekick in the hearings, who would later go on to mentor Donald Trump, until, at the very end of his life, Donald Trump rejected him when he was dying of AIDS.

ELLEN SCHRECKER: Exactly. So, there are lots of similarities with the fact that there’s this very aberrant character at the heart, or at the sort of public heart, of this repressive movement. But what we should have known in the '40s and ’50s, and should know now, is it's not just a one-man show. It has been this moment of trying to crack down on dissent, constitutional dissent, free speech, the ability to say what Israel is doing in Gaza is a terrible thing. That is something that has been building up for decades. And that was the same thing during McCarthyism. There was a kind of network of right-wing activists, similar to groups today, like the Heritage Society, that brought us the 2025 Project blueprint for Trump’s attack on the institutions of civil liberties and civil society, that has come to fruition since he entered the White House.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I mean, you speak as a Jewish author, active member of the American Association of University Professors. Would you say that the McCarthyism of yesteryear is the charges that President Trump, with his sidekick Elon Musk giving the “Heil Hitler” salute, charging antisemitism for what he’s doing?

ELLEN SCHRECKER: Antisemitism is a pretext. We know that. Trump has been all his life a racist, clearly befriending these fascist individuals and groups for years. And what we’re seeing is a kind of a melding of Trump’s own right-wing proclivities, reactionary proclivities, pro-fascist proclivities, with a long-term attempt within some pro-Zionist organizations to eliminate all support for Palestinian freedom and Palestinian liberation from American universities, in particular, but from within American society.

AMY GOODMAN: You have, earlier this month, a federal judge, Geoffrey Crawford, ordering the release of Columbia University graduate, Palestinian activist Mohsen Mahdawi from a prison in Vermont. He was picked up by masked, hooded ICE agents at his naturalization interview in Vermont. He was beyond holding a green card. The judge writing in his ruling, quote, “Our nation has seen times like this before, especially during the Red Scare and Palmer Raids of 1919-1920” and during the McCarthy period of the 1950s. And I wanted to take it beyond that. You note that, you know, that we’re not just talking about individual professors anymore. We’re talking about current attacks being much broader. And you write that — this interesting paradox, quote, “despite higher education’s much larger footprint within American society, today the academy is in a much weaker position to resist political intervention.” Why is it weaker?

ELLEN SCHRECKER: It’s weaker for two reasons. One, because the state is stronger. The state does much more with regard to higher education than it did in the 1950s. You know, it supports most important basic scientific research. It regulates things on campus with regard to, shall we say, diversity, equity and inclusion, with trying to ensure that all Americans have a good shot at higher education. That was a push by the federal government. So, you can see that the government is much more involved. It funds student loans. Most smaller universities without huge endowments rely on students who have to get federal loans in order to pay tuitions. So, what he’s doing by withdrawing federal money from higher education is, essentially, threatening to destroy American higher education today.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to the clip of Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaking in March following the arrest of the Columbia graduate student, now graduated graduate student, albeit he was in jail in Louisiana when he got his diploma at Columbia, Mahmoud Khalil.

SECRETARY OF STATE MARCO RUBIO: If you tell us, when you apply, “Hi. I’m trying to get into the United States on a student visa. I am a big supporter of Hamas, a murderous, barbaric group that kidnaps children, that rapes teenage girls, that takes hostages, that allows them to die in captivity, that returns more bodies than live hostages,” if you tell us that you are in favor of a group like this, and if you tell us when you apply for your visa, “And by the way, I intend to come to your country as a student and rile up all kinds of anti-Jewish student, antisemitic activities. I intend to shut down your universities,” if you told us all these things when you applied for a visa, we would deny your visa. I hope we would. If you actually end up doing that, once you’re in this country on such a visa, we will revoke it. And if you end up having a green card — not citizenship, but a green card — as a result of that visa while you’re here and those activities, we’re going to kick you out.

AMY GOODMAN: Of course, the Trump administration not proven any of this. And a number of students have been released from prison, with very angry judges talking about “Where are the grounds for these people to be imprisoned?” Mahmoud Khalil has been now imprisoned for three months as his little baby was born here in New York. If you can talk about what this leads to, these kind of harsh attacks, when it comes to speech and when it comes to universities? You were just addressing the deans at Columbia University. Some compare Harvard not fighting — Harvard fighting back against the Trump administration, and Columbia conceding, and the pressure it’s put on its students.

ELLEN SCHRECKER: Yeah, this has been a constant in the history of American higher education to collaborate with political repression. They, universities, do not fight back. They didn’t fight back during the McCarthy period. They’re not — were not fighting back, until this miracle. It really was a miracle, totally unexpected, of the president at Harvard saying, “No, I cannot go along with what you were asking.” And what they were —

AMY GOODMAN: The Jewish president at Harvard, right?

ELLEN SCHRECKER: He’s Jewish, right.

AMY GOODMAN: Alan Garber, who President Trump is accusing of antisemitism.

ELLEN SCHRECKER: Well, of course, we’re all antisemites, as long as we feel that maybe you shouldn’t be killing babies in Gaza every day.

But what we’re seeing is the beginning of a pushback against what Trump is doing, what his entire apparatus of hoodlums, I think, is trying to do to the universities. And that wonderful quote you had from Secretary of State Rubio, when he said, you know, paraphrasing these supposed terrorists, that they wanted to shut down the universities, he’s doing more to shut down the universities than probably anybody else in America at this moment.

AMY GOODMAN: Threatening to revoke the visas of all —

ELLEN SCHRECKER: Exactly.

AMY GOODMAN: — international students. What about the role of your organization, the AAUP, the American Association of University Professors?

ELLEN SCHRECKER: Right. We are a group that is over a hundred years old. And when we were founded, it was a period very much like today, where outsiders, politicians and especially very wealthy businesspeople on boards of trustees, were interfering with what faculty members were saying and doing with regard to — at that point, there was a lot of labor unrest and attempts to create unions. And university professors were sort of saying, “Well, look at the working conditions under which American workers are being oppressed. Let’s do something about industrial accidents and things like that.” Today, we’re seeing that, in every way, the federal government, state legislators interfering with the academic work of university professors. And that is what my organization is trying to do, is to protect the integrity and the educational value of what goes on on American campuses.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you hold out hope, in this last minute we have together?

ELLEN SCHRECKER: Yes, because, unfortunately, we have no model we can follow from McCarthyism, because there was no pushback, but today we’re seeing people marching to commencement at Harvard wearing labels saying, you know, “Enough is enough, President Trump. “We’re seeing huge crowds showing up to welcome Mohsen coming back from Vermont after having been picked up by ICE.

We’re seeing a growing movement within civil society, that has to be maintained, and has to be maintained for years. I mean, the damage that the Trump administration is doing is absolutely beyond the pale and has never, never been equaled in American life with regard to higher education. So, we’ve got to get out there in the trenches and even begin to think some more about: OK, if they’re not paying attention to the judges, if the Supreme Court folds — and let us pray that it does not — what do we have to do?

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, Ellen Schrecker, author of Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, also the author of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom. We’ll link to your piece in The Nation headlined “Worse Than McCarthyism: Universities in the Age of Trump,” as well as Jelani Cobb’s piece in The New Yorker that extensively quotes you, Ellen Schrecker, at democracynow.org.

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SEE CRC

Massachusetts Mapping Project Linked to Terrorists

Mapping Project interactive map of Massachusett. Credit: Mapping Project.

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by Ryan Mauro

OCTOBER 9, 2023

In December 2022, a coalition of 28 organizations asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement over its extensive links to terrorist groups. Of particular concern was the BDS movement’s links to a mysterious “Mapping Project” that published an apparent hit list of targets linked to the U.S. government, Israel, and the Jewish community.

An investigative report by the Zachor Legal Institute exposed the Mapping Project’s links to supporters of terrorists, the BDS movement and, in all likelihood, the government of Iran.

“Dismantling” and “Disrupting”

The Mapping Project’s content makes it clear that its anonymous creators’ intention is to inspire violent attacks on the listed sites. The project’s website states, “Our goal in pursuing this collective mapping was to reveal the local entities and networks that enact devastation, so we can dismantle them. Every entity has an address, every network can be disrupted.”

What the project means by “dismantling” and “disrupting” was clarified by a tweet it posted. The message called for the abolishment of the Boston Police Department and was accompanied by an image of a firebombed police car. The post is an unmistakable incitement to violence.

The project openly supports Palestinian terrorists, putting to rest any notion that the Mapping Project is merely a provocative academic exercise. “Glory to the martyrs! Free Palestine from the River to the Sea! Free All Political Prisoners!” the website proclaims in a statement expressing solidarity with Palestinian terrorists seeking the destruction of Israel.

The website’s language doesn’t depict the targets as mere political opponents, but as willing participants in U.S. and Israeli “imperialism”—and therefore, legitimate targets for violent “resistance.”

Crossover Appeal

The creators’ rhetoric is designed to appeal across various ideologies, adopting themes commonly associated with Islamist extremists, “alt-left” extremists like Antifa, and “alt-right” extremists like white supremacists. The success of this crossover messaging became evident when the leader of the neo-Nazi Goyim Defense League lavished praise on the project during an online stream.

The identities of the project’s creators remain murky. However, one name has been reportedly linked to the project: Calla Walsh, a member of BDS Boston, Democratic Socialists of America and, as of April 2022, Office Manager for Massachusetts Peace Action. An investigation by the Canary Mission found four tweets by Walsh that idolized the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist group.

Walsh says she’s simply a promoter of the Mapping Project and denies having worked on it. However, Al-Jazeera reported that she “participated” in it and, in an apparent slip of the tongue, referred to the project as “we” in a tweet. She’s also implied that she knows the authors of the project who, she says, “have been working on it for years.”

Whatever Walsh’s role is, the project is not the creation of a single individual or even a single BDS chapter. The Zachor Legal Institute examined the site’s metadata and found that the map has over 2,300 sites internally listed. Only 500 of those can be seen on the publicly available version of the map.

The institute concludes:

It would require considerable funds to finance such an operation, far more than the standard anti-Israel groups initially suspected to be behind the project, whose yearly budgets do not generally exceed $1,000,000 annually. The skill and budget required to launch such a project are not found in average nongovernmental organizations or volunteer groups. Instead, the project was likely created by a state-backed element via a proxy group, private contractor, or civilian intelligence unit.

PFLP Connections

The common denominator among the groups that appear closest to the Mapping Project is support for the Iran-backed PFLP terrorist group.

The first PFLP connection comes through BDS Boston, whose Twitter account was the first to report the project’s debut. As mentioned, BDS Boston member Calla Walsh posts pro-PFLP material.

Later that same day, an anonymous group called the JISR Collective promoted the Mapping Project. JISR’s Twitter account has also expressed support of PFLP, as well as two other Iran-backed terrorist groups, Hamas and Hezbollah.

The Samidoun Prisoner Solidarity Network, identified as a PFLP front in an expose by the Clarion Project, soon followed. Samidoun and the project appear to have an intimate relationship, as Samidoun published an interview with the project’s anonymous authors. Samidoun and the project also often retweet each other.

Shortly thereafter, PFLP itself praised the project, as did Iran’s state-run PressTV. It also received positive press coverage from Al-Mayadeen, a pro-Hezbollah news outlet.

This pattern of interaction provides the biggest clue about the likeliest source of the project’s resources: PFLP directly or PFLP proxies with sponsorship from Iran.

The Larger Problem

The Mapping Project is part of a larger problem, though. The BDS movement, while portraying itself as nonviolent activism for human rights, is intertwined with terrorist organizations backed by Iran who seek the genocidal elimination of Israel. BDS is not a nonviolent alternative to terrorism, but a weapon deployed by terrorists to augment their violent campaigns.

PFLP, Hamas, and the like are designated by the U.S. State Department as foreign terrorist organizations.

If the U.S. government is serious about preventing them from having safe harbor on American soil, then the Justice Department must investigate the BDS movement and, as able and necessary, prosecute BDS participants for their involvement with terrorist groups and their thinly veiled fronts.

Tags: and sanctions (BDS), Anti-Semitism, boycott, divestment, Israel, Mapping Project, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, terrorism

Ryan Mauro

Ryan Mauro is an investigative researcher for Capital Research Center. He is also an adjunct professor at Regent University and the former Director of Intelligence…

+ MORE BY RYAN MAURO

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hypocrisy

Former Associated Press reporter Emily Wilder was fired from the international media company late Thursday following a pressure campaign by right-wing media, including publications such as The Federalist and The Washington Free Beacon working in tandem with the Standford College Republicans. Wilder was "canceled," if you will, for pro-Palestinian activism during her years in college — not at the AP.

The campaign to have Wilder fired started on Monday with the Stanford College Republicans taking to Twitter to bill the reporter's past pro-Palestine demonstrating as controversial, coming to the verdict that she would never be able to be impartial while covering national news.[twt pix]

"Recently, we discovered that theAssociated Press has hired former Stanford anti-Israel agitator, Emily Wilder, who referred to the late Sheldon Adelson as a 'naked mole rat' as one of their 'journalists,'" the college Republican organization tweeted. The series of tweets from the Standford Republican chapter went onto claim that the reporter, who is Jewish, during her college years belonged to a "Students for Justice in Palestine," on-campus group. The college Republicans — who appear to have their own questionable Twitter activity — also took offense to Wilder calling right-wing provocateur Ben Shapiro a "little turd" and Sheldon Adelson a "naked mole-rat."

From there, the right-wing outrage machine got ahold of the story, including The Federalist, The Washington Free Beacon, and Fox News, which billed the reporter as being "anti-Israel." Notably, the Free Beacon ran their hit-piece with no attached byline and didn't return Salon's request for comment as to why.

On Thursday, an all-staff email from AP News director Peter Prengaman to employees read: "A note to say that news associate Emily Wilder is no longer with the AP[twt pix]

but the Associated Press claims it wasn't her activism in college. "While AP generally refrains from commenting on personnel matters, we can confirm Emily Wilder's comments on Thursday thatshe was dismissed for violations of AP's social media policy during her time at AP," an AP spokesperson told The Wrap.

"Amazing how quickly a talented young reporter's career can be snuffed out by a Twitter mob that decided to feign outrage over some college tweets. And if @vv1lder somehow violated @AP's social media rules, the solution is to offer guidance, not termination, to a new reporter," TheWashington Post's Glenn Kesslerwrote on Twitter following the ouster.

[twt pix] responding to her firing, Wilder told SFGATE that her firing was nothing more than a right-wing outrage mob that reportedly disdains "cancel culture," doing what they claim to resent.

"There's no question I was just canceled," told SFGATE reporter Eric Ting on Thursday following the news of her firing. "This is exactly the issue with the rhetoric around 'cancel culture.' To Republicans, cancel culture is usually seen as teens or young people online advocating that people be held accountable over accusations of racism or whatever it may be, but when it comes down to who actually has to deal with the lifelong ramifications of the selective enforcement of cancel culture — specifically over the issue of Israel and Palestine — it's always the same side."

in her interview with SFGATE, Wilder noted an "onslaught of absolutely vile messages" she received after right-wing media began running with the story. Wilder didn't immediately return a request for comment from Salon.

While The Associated Press might have folded to the demands of the right-wing mob, many journalists on Twitter voiced their support for the young journalist. "Shame on @AP @peterprengaman. I stand with Emily. Her reporting at our newspaper was excellent. Reverse your decision NOW," The Arizona Republic's reporter Rebekah Sanders wrote. The Washington Post's Dave Weigel responded: "'Hire @vv1lder' is something more and more people are saying."

"Every journalist should be outraged about @AP firing [Wilder] over college activism in favor of freedom for Palestinians. The industry is rife with clear double-standards on this," Los Angeles Times investigative reporter Adam Elmahrek commented on the firing. The Daily Beast's senior politics reporter Will Sommer replied, "It's crazy that editors are still falling for these bad-faith campaigns from right-wing media."

The decision to out Wilder comes on the heels ofright-wing pundits cheering the Israeli airstrike that leveled a building in Gaza on Saturday, housing several international news outlets, including The Associated Press.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/gaza-2653011635

salon

Far right pundits cheered the Israeli airstrike that leveled a building in Gaza Saturday housing several international news outlets, including The Associated Press, Al Jazeera and the BBC.

The Israel Defense Forces later said the militant group Hamas had "military intelligence assets" in the building — though as of Sunday afternoon no evidence supporting the claims had been made public.

The bombing, broadcast live television by several journalists who had just escaped the blast, quickly gained widespread media attention Saturday due to the nature of the attack, which drew condemnation from many press freedom advocates around the globe.

Yet, right-wing pundits on Twitter had a different view on it all — they celebrated and jeered at the destruction.

Senior columnist at the right-wing site Townhall, Kurt Schlichter, called those who carried out the bombing "heroes," while seemingly finding pleasure in the attack. "Let's stop pretending that the media is not a participant and that it is somehow entitled to not be treated like every other active enemy," he declared.

Let’s stop pretending that the media is not a participant and that it is somehow entitled to not be treated like every other active enemy.

— Kurt Schlichter (@Kurt Schlichter)1621090669.0

Popular conservative Twitter pundit, Stephen L. Miller, who is currently a contributor at the conservative opinion site The Spectator, reacted by mocking the bombing with a meme of a lady smiling....[twt]

Former Newsmax TV host John Cardillo wrote on Twitter: "Looks like the IDF took out Hamas's PR team," while fellow right-wing Twitter pal David Reaboi called the bombing "based," a term coined by the rapper Lil B to signal that one agrees or approves of a statement.

"Just warms your heart to see," a contributing editor for right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire, Harry Khachatrian, responded to the attack.

@davereaboi Probably watched this a dozen times already, what a great start to the weekend

— Harry Khachatrian

Many online also tried to draw spurious connections between the destruction and last summer's Black Lives Matter protests.

GOP operative Arthur Schwartz, who is known for losing his coolafter a waiter spilled steak sauce on him while dining with Trump, tweeted, "Black Lives Matter, Inc. thugs burned and looted American cities, we're now told that property damage is a big deal? What's different here?"

No journalists were reported injured as a result of the airstrike. According to several firsthand reports from inside the building, residents and workers were warned ahead of time that the bombing would occur, sparking a mad scramble to evacuate the premises.[10 min?!]

"I have been covering lots of events from this building. We have lots of good memories with our colleagues," Safwat al-Kahlout, a reporter for Al Jazeera, said. "Now everything, in two seconds, just vanished."

The AP reports at least 188 Palestinians were killed this week in the most recent round of fighting between Israel and Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip. That number includes 55 children and 33 women, with more than a thousand wounded. Eight people in Israel have died from rocket attacks launched from Gaza.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Appeals

Approximately 800 individuals have signed a petition in support of the professors, urging the university to rescind Cheney-Lippold’s punishment and ensure that Peterson not be subjected to similar sanctions.

Academics, scholars, graduate students, alumni and human rights advocates are appealing to the university to drop the punishments as well....

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no lnx 919

REPUBLICAN LAWMAKER SEEKS TO MUZZLE STUDENTS CRITICAL OF ISRAEL

Josh Ruebner

9 August 2019

Misleadingly-named Anti-Semitism Awareness Act introduced in US House of Representatives just before summer recess.

REPUBLICAN LAWMAKER SEEKS TO MUZZLE STUDENTS CRITICAL OF ISRAEL

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/josh-ruebner/republican-lawmaker-seeks-muzzle-students-critical-israel

The misleadingly-named Anti-Semitism Awareness Act of 2019 has been introduced to the US House of Representatives shortly before its summer recess.

Republican lawmaker Doug Collins, who proposed the bill, is portraying it as “an effective tool for investigating whether prohibited discriminatory actions have become a barrier to learning” in universities.

As the legislation notes, however, the Department of Education already is empowered to investigate incidents of anti-Semitism as a form of discrimination.

A careful reading of its text suggests that its real intent is to muzzle students and teachers who oppose Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians.

The bill had earlier this year been introduced in the US Senate by Tim Scott, another Republican lawmaker.

It embraces the working definition of anti-Semitism approved in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), a body bringing together 33 governments.

That definition is accompanied by several “examples” of anti-Semitism. They include claims that Israel’s foundation was a “racist endeavor” and “applying double standards” to Israel by requiring from it “behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”

These examples affect political speech clearly protected by the First Amendment of the US constitution.

For example, students could run afoul of these examples by advocating for a one-state solution in Palestine, by hosting a speaker addressing Israel’s separate-and-unequal policies which discriminate between Jews and non-Jews, and running campus campaigns to boycott Israeli products or divest university funds from corporations profiting from Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people.

If the new bill were to become law, then the US Department of Education would be required to “take into consideration” these types of examples when assessing if an incident reported on US campuses was “motivated by anti-Semitic intent.”

A university which does not take action against students or teachers accused of anti-Semitism – based on their advocacy for Palestinian rights – could potentially lose federal funding.

New power to stifle activism

With passage of this bill, the US Congress would provide the Trump administration with powerful new statutory authority to further police and crack down on campus speech for Palestinian rights, a process well underway already.

When Donald Trump was running for president ahead of the 2016 election, his campaign team pledged to stifle campus activism for Palestinian rights. Jason Greenblatt and David Friedman, who at the time served as the co-chairs of Trump’s Israel Advisory Committee committed the future Trump administration to “ask the Justice Department to investigate coordinated attempts on college campuses to intimidate students who support Israel.”

Greenblatt now serves as Trump’s special representative for international negotiations, while Friedman is the US ambassador to Israel.

The Trump administration has delivered on its threat. Last year The Intercept published an exposé on the FBI’s use of the Canary Mission – a shadowy pro-Israel group – to question college students advocating for Palestinian rights.

The Trump administration also has attempted to crack down on Palestine activism on campus by nominating Kenneth Marcus as the assistant secretary for civil rights for the Department of Education.

Previously, Marcus was president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.

In that capacity, he filed or otherwise supported complaints against Palestinian rights campaigners by alleging that their activities violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That provision bans discrimination based on race and national origin in all bodies receiving federal funding.

Last year, Marcus wrote a letter to the Zionist Organization of America announcing that the Office of Civil Rights was now using the controversial IHRA definition and examples of anti-Semitism to guide its investigations. He had not given any prior notice of that decision to the public.

The organization Palestine Legal argued at the time that Marcus was “sending a clear signal that attacking free speech for Palestinian rights is at the top of his agenda.”

The so-called Anti-Semitism Awareness Act is a dangerous attempt by Congress to retroactively provide Marcus with the legal authority to justify his use of this controversial definition to further muzzle campus criticism of Israel.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/landmark-victory-for-first-amendment-as-court-strikes-down-texas-anti-bds-law/

In a decision hailed as a “landmark” victory for the First Amendment, a federal judge on Thursday struck down a Texas law requiring government contractors to sign a pledge vowing not to participate in the pro-Palestinian boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement.

“This is a complete victory of the First Amendment against Texas’s attempts to suppress speech in support of Palestine,” said Gadeir Abbas, senior litigation attorney with Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), one of the organizations that sued Texas over the anti-BDS law.

CAIR filed its suit on behalf of Bahia Amawi, a Texas speech pathologist who lost her job at an elementary school after refusing to sign a pro-Israel pledge required by the state’s law.

“It’s a huge win not just for me, but for everybody here in Texas,” Amawi said in an interview with the Washington Post. “I was in tears.”

In his 56-page opinion (pdf), Judge Robert Pitman of the Western District of Texas ruled the state’s law violated the First Amendment by threatening to “suppress unpopular ideas” and “manipulate the public debate through coercion.”

As The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald wrote last December after Amawi lost her job, the language of the pledge she was “told she must sign reads like Orwellian—or McCarthyite—self-parody, the classic political loyalty oath that every American should instinctively shudder upon reading.”

The ACLU—which also sued over the anti-BDS law on behalf of four Texans—celebrated the judge’s ruling in a statement late Thursday, noting that it marks “the third time a federal court has blocked an anti-BDS law on First Amendment grounds.”

“Whatever their views on the BDS movement, members of Congress and state legislators should heed this strong message from the courts,” Vera Eidelman, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said in a statement. “The right to boycott is alive and well in the United States and any attempt to suppress it puts you squarely on the wrong side of the Constitution.”

BDS Movement Co-Founder Omar Barghouti Denied Entry to the United States

wish I could say I were surprised at the demonization of Ilhan Omar by an establishment that remains eager to whitewash Elliott Abrams’ record of war crimes. But I’m not. In fact, it’s exactly what I’ve come to expect. The super-strict (yet simultaneously sloppy) language policing to which Omar has been subjected is ludicrously asymmetric.

No matter how heinously conservatives may behave, Democrats always bend over backward to punish anyone on their side whom conservatives single out as comparable, no matter how far-fetched or bogus those conservative claims might be. We’re seeing that now as House Democrats struggle over a resolution aimed at rebuking Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., for nonexistent anti-Semitic comments. As Paul Waldman explained at the Washington Post: Omar did not accuse Jews of holding dual loyalties. Rather, she objected to dual loyalties being demanded of her— and those who attacked her only proved her point.

A reality check on all this came from Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, which describes itself as “the political home and voice for pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans,”.on Tuesday’s “All In” on MSNBC:

If you’re going to have a serious discussion about hate and intolerance in this country, let’s start at the top. Let’s start by having a House discussion about the president’s intolerance and his racism. Let’s have a discussion about the xenophobia and the racism that’s coming from the other side of the aisle. And let’s stop using the discussion of anti-Semitism as a way of avoiding a real discussion about policy towards Israel and Palestine, and the issues that are actually on the table about occupation and the treatment of Palestinians.

The last sentence was almost an exact echo of the sentiments Omar had expressed in the public speech that gave rise to the most recent controversy. Before wading further into the swamp of false allegations, it’s wise to consider that eminent Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has hailed Omar as “a glimmer of hope on Capitol Hill,” adding: “Maybe, for the first time in history, someone will dare tell the truth to the American people, absorbing scathing accusations of anti-Semitism, without bowing her head.”

Levy’s assessment of Omar’s alleged transgressions is blunt:

What, after all, has Omar said? That pro-Israel activists demand “allegiance to a foreign country”; that U.S. politicians support Israel because of money they receive from the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC, and that “Israel hypnotized the world.” What is incorrect in these statements? Why is describing reality considered anti-Semitic?

The reason, of course, is sensitivity to language— a sensitivity that’s wildly asymmetric in America today. Language matters, of course — but so do context, history, intent and willingness to enter into dialogue. All of which seem to be utterly lacking in the rush to pillory Omar for things she did not say.

Crucially, Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., a longtime Israel booster and chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, on which Omar serves, accused her of “invoking a vile anti-Semitic slur.” She did nothing of the sort.

Here’s what Omar said: “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”

And here’s why it’s supposedly problematic: Claims about Jews’ allegiance to Israel (“dual loyalty”) reflect centuries of stereotyping them as inherently disloyal to the communities and countries where they live, because of their identity as Jews, as outsiders, as others.

But there’s just one big problem. Omar didn’t say anything about Jews. What’s more, there is a push for allegiance to Israel at large in American politics — and it’s not just about Jews. It’s about everyone.

A majority of states have passed laws punishing — and in some sense prohibiting — participation in boycotts against Israel. This is specifically aimed at the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) strategy, modeled on the one used to pressure South Africa to end apartheid in the 1980s, even as Israel supported South Africa. These anti-BDS laws clearly aim to punish political speech and are inherently abhorrent to the First Amendment. When Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed his state’s anti-BDS law, he tweeted, “Anti-Israel policies are anti-Texas policies. Proud to sign anti-BDS legislation into law today.” You couldn’t ask for a clearer example of dual loyalty than that. To state what ought to be obvious, the right-wing Republican governor of Texas is not Jewish.

The Senate’s very first order of business this year, Marco Rubio’s S. 1, included support for these unconstitutional state anti-BDS laws, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., was similarly attacked for her criticism at that time. (Tlaib and Omar, both elected last year, are the first two Muslim women to serve in Congress.)

First, Bernie Sanders tweeted, “It’s absurd that the first bill during the shutdown is legislation which punishes Americans who exercise their constitutional right to engage in political activity. Democrats must block consideration of any bills that don’t reopen the government. Let’s get our priorities right.”

Tlaib quote-tweeted him, adding, “They forgot what country they represent. This is the U.S. where boycotting is a right & part of our historical fight for freedom & equality. Maybe a refresher on our U.S. Constitution is in order, then get back to opening up our government instead of taking our rights away.”

Once again, Tlaib said nothing about Jews. There is nothing in her comment that questioning anyone’s loyalty based on religious or ethnic identity, rather than actions. But Rubio ignominiously responded, “This ‘dual loyalty’ canard is a typical anti-Semitic line,” and Tlaib shot back, “Sen. Rubio, it’s clear my earlier tweet was critical of U.S. Senators like yourself, who are seeking to strip Americans of their Constitutional right to free speech.”

This first attempt to demonize the two new Muslim-American congresswomen quickly fizzled out, because it was mounted in the context of the shutdown, and Sanders’ position — with which Tlaib was aligned — had the backing of pro-Israel Democratic leaders, at least until the shutdown ended. But the strategic desire behind it — not just to demonize Omar and Tlaib, but to fragment the Democratic coalition — never went away. And now that the shutdown is ancient history, and Rubio’s bill passed the Senate easily (with significant Democratic support), these attacks have returned with a fierce vengeance.

Hence, the logic of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s response:

It’s not my position to tell people how to feel, or that their hurt is invalid.

But incidents like these do beg the question: where are the resolutions against homophobic statements? For anti-blackness? For xenophobia? For a member saying he’ll “send Obama home to Kenya?”

She went on to highlight the core issue of intent, on all sides:

In this administration + all others, we should actively check antisemitism, anti-blackness, homophobia, racism, and all other forms of bigotry.

And the most productive end goal when we see it is to educate and heal.

It’s the difference btwn “calling in” before “calling out.”

“Calling out” is one of the measures of last resort, not 1st or 2nd resort.

We do it when repeated attempts to “call in” are disrespected or ignored. And I believe that Ilhan, in her statement a few weeks ago, has demonstrated a willingness to listen+work w/impacted communities.

But I have to ask: Who’s listening to Ilhan Omar when they put words in her mouth and then demand her apology for things she has never said? Who’s listening when this act of heinous, bullying false accusation illustrates exactly what she was talking about?

It’s important to listen to those who feel impacted — but also important to go beyond surface appearances. Waldman’s Washington Post article, “The dishonest smearing of Ilhan Omar,” not only lays bare the dishonest dual loyalty charge, it also reflects on history.

Waldman explains how “dual loyalty” has almost disappeared as a slur over time, as support for Israel and the orientation of AIPAC have both shifted, with support coming from conservative evangelicals and the Republican Party, while AIPAC’s lobbying has shifted “from supporting Israel generally to being the lobby in the United States for the [right-wing] Likud.” In short, the “loyalties” involved are not at all the ones referred to 30 years ago, so the slur simply doesn’t make sense.

“‘Supporters of Israel’ hasn’t been a synonym for ‘Jews’ since the 1980s,” Waldman notes. “In the United States today, a ‘supporter of Israel’ is much more likely to be an evangelical Christian Republican than a Jew.”

But this situation is even more deeply confused than Waldman describes, since the “support” from right-wing Christians — based on a particular reading of the Book of Revelation — is premised on the prospect of Israel’s ultimate destruction. That gets us into territory that is almost never discussed. Language policing is tightly focused on folks like Ilhan Omar, but no questions are to be asked about the attitudes or belies of white evangelical Christians.

As filmmaker David Heilbroner wrote just before the theatrical release of the documentary “Waiting for Armageddon,” end-times theology is their guide:

And if that means embracing foretold disasters and wars including the Battle of Armageddon, so be it.

Professor Gary Dickerson from the all-Christian Corban College puts it this way: “I don’t look at the wars in the Middle East with the hope that things will work out. We’ve been told, Israel will experience this distress all the way to the end.”

Such are the “friends of Israel” in America today. But don’t dare question anything about them! They’ll have a Mark Meadows-style meltdown that may never end. In contrast, it’s supposed “anti-Semites” like Ilhan Omar who don’t want Israel to be destroyed, but want a society based peace and justice in the Middle East instead.

Demonizing Omar serves to defend otherwise indefensible politics, both on the ground in Israel and Palestine and in the halls of power here. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has just pushed Likud past simply being a right-wing coalition into an alliance with racist extremists, leading even AIPAC to condemn the move. Here in America, as money-in-politics reporter Alex Kotch noted, “AIPAC officials have bragged about their power over Washington lawmakers,” which simply can’t be ignored:

Labeling anyone who speaks of Jews and money in the same sentence as an anti-Semite weakens our fight against the real anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi, and other white nationalist forces that have seen a resurgence in recent years. It also stifles legitimate discussion about the enormous power of special interests, something that threatens our democratic political system.

As Israel plunges farther and farther to the right under Netanyahu, American public opinion really wants the U.S. government to take the constructive bridge-building approach it’s always pretended to. Recent polling finds increasing criticism of Israel, while an overwhelming majority of Democrats, 82 percent want America to lean neither toward Israelis nor Palestinians. That staggering supermajority is the underlying threat that Ilhan Omar’s refusal to play by Washington’s rules really represents.

The irony here is that Omar is asking America to play the role it has long claimed to play, and to seek a liberal international order that actually lives up to its promise. She’s being painted as an enemy to that order by the folks who are its real enemies — Donald Trump and his Republican fellow travelers, most obviously, but also those like the “white moderates” whom Martin Luther King Jr. came to see as the greatest obstacles to justice.

One striking example of this is New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, who has chosen to take aim at what Brendan Nyhan calls “liberal whataboutism,” saying, “Incredible to see the tactics GOP relies on to defend Trump being mirrored so explicitly — same playbook (‘the real problem is…’)”. But this symmetrically framed analysis utterly ignores the asymmetrical world we live in, as well as the fundamental underlying facts. Chait wrote:

The main theme of the defenses of Omar is deflection. Mehdi Hasan’s pro-Omar column lists all the anti-Semitism on the Republican side that has gone unpunished, and devotes not a single word to defending or even minimizing her offense. This has been a running theme of pro-Omar commentary on social media.

But Hasan explained the reason for this simply when he appeared along with Ben-Ami on “All In.” It’s because the media reporting has largely been false:

Let’s be clear, she hasn’t said anything about Jews. She’s not said one word about Jews. I got an email today from a Jewish reader saying, “You wrote an article and you didn’t mention how she’s accused Jews of having dual loyalties to Israel. Why didn’t you say that?” Because she didn’t say that. She talked about supporters of Israel insisting that politicians in the U.S. show allegiance to Israel, and that’s kind of undeniable. I mean, that’s been reported on for years.

That’s not whataboutism. That’s what-about-the-facts-ism, which is the exact opposite of what Nyhan and Chait pretend is going on.

It was weak-willed moderate pseudo-allies like that who drove Martin Luther King Jr. to distraction. Nevertheless, he persisted. So will Ilhan Omar, no doubt.

https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/22/sheldon-adelson-palestine-jew-haters-colleges-campuses

no lnx many

GOP mega-donor funds group calling pro-Palestine US students 'Jew haters'

Sheldon Adelson-funded group accused students and professors at a college campus of ‘allying themselves with Palestinian terrorists’

Sam Levin in San Francisco

@SamTLevin Email

Wed 24 Aug 2016 17.51 EDT First published on Mon 22 Aug 2016 17.45 EDT

This article is over 2 years old

Robert Gardner, a 25-year-old UCLA senior, saw his name on one of the posters outside a grocery market: ‘I was really shocked and felt really disturbed.’ Photograph: Courtesy of Robert Gardner]

Sheldon Adelson, the Nevada casino mogul and conservative mega-donor, is leading a campaign against pro-Palestine groups on US college campuses and has funded a group that has publicly accused individual students of supporting terrorism and promoting “Jew Hatred”.

:{:{}:

The multimillion-dollar effort, which has launched at six campuses in California, is targeting the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement that has become increasingly popular among American university students protesting the Israeli government.

At the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), recent posters named 16 students and professors, saying they “have allied themselves with Palestinian terrorists to perpetuate BDS and Jew Hatred on this campus”. It further claimed BDS was a “Hamas-inspired genocidal campaign to destroy Israel”.

Robert Gardner, a 25-year-old UCLA senior, saw his name on one of the posters outside a grocery market. “I was really shocked and felt really disturbed,” he said.

“They are trying to cast us as antisemitic, that we are somehow a discriminatory group,” said the political science student, who is a member of the college’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) organization. “That is a completely spurious accusation. One of our core principles is anti-oppression and anti-racism.”

Tensions surrounding Israel-Palestine campus activism have escalated in recent years, but SJP leaders said the posters identifying specific students were particularly aggressive and had led some of them to face online harassment and death threats.

The UCLA poster accusing students and professors of ‘Jew Hatred’. Photograph: Handout]

Adelson – who has poured money into Republican campaigns and last year purchased Nevada’s largest newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal – recently launched the so-called Maccabee Task Force to “combat the BDS Movement through education and meaningful conversation about Israel truths”.

The billionaire gambling magnate, who has reportedly supported Donald Trump, helped inject the conflict into the US presidential race.

While Adelson and his new task force have focused on building support for Israel through social media campaigns, partnerships with student groups and subsidized trips to Israel, the tactic of calling out students on public posters and linking them to terrorism has earned widespread condemnation.

“This definitely felt like a more direct escalation,” said Omar Zahzah, a 28-year-old graduate student at UCLA who was also named in the recent posters. “It wasn’t just slandering SJP anymore. It was attacking specific individuals.”

Zahzah, a comparative literature student, who is Palestinian, added: “It’s easy to joke about and dismiss. But at the end of the day, it’s still pretty intimidating, which is the point.”

The UCLA posters included the hashtag #StopTheJewHatredOnCampus and linked to the website of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a conservative Los Angeles-based group that has repeatedly been accused of promoting Islamophobia.

David Brog, executive director of the Maccabee Task Force, said in a statement to the Guardian that the group had approved a “modest grant” to the Horowitz Freedom Center “to focus on the true nature of pro-BDS organizations, but we did not ask for or approve the poster campaign that targeted student activists, and were not aware that our money had been used to support it. It should not have been.

“The Maccabee Task Force does not believe that focusing on student activists who conduct themselves civilly is an appropriate or effective way to combat the BDS movement on campus,” Brog added.

A spokesman declined to disclose the size of the grant but said the Maccabee Task Force plans to expand to 20 additional college campuses this fall.

On Wednesday, two days after publication of this article, the Maccabee spokesman said that the Horowitz center has since confirmed that it did not use any funding from the Adelson group for its poster campaign, contradicting its earlier statement acknowledging that its money had gone toward the effort.

The Horowitz center and representatives for Adelson did not respond to inquiries on Monday. Horowitz, however, defended the posters in an interview with the Los Angeles Times and said he planned to produce similar ones at other campuses.

SJP and BDS activists have repeatedly argued that their efforts are not antisemitic and that they are simply calling for Israel to be boycotted due to its continued occupation of Palestinian territories.

In recent months, some Black Lives Matter activists have aligned themselves with pro-Palestine groups, which has intensified the campaigns against the BDS movement.

Robin Kelley, a UCLA history professor who was named on the Horowitz poster, said there were many Jewish students who support SJP. He also noted this was not the first time critics had gone after SJP students in a harassing and threatening manner.

Still, he said, for some of them, it was “devastating” and “traumatizing”.

“To try to destroy a young person’s life because you disagree with their politics is reprehensible,” said Kelley, who is a member of the advisory board for the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. “It can affect their job prospects, their future … These kids don’t have the capacity to destroy Sheldon Adelson’s life.”

An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of David Brog

This article was amended on 24 August to clarify a new statement from the Maccabee group which now claims that the Horowitz center did not use any of the Maccabee funding for its campus posters

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https://yyy.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/14/bds-boycott-divestment-sanctions-movement-transformed-israeli-palestinian-debate

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state and fed law req ppl pledge loyalty to Israel?!

https://kpfa.org/episode/project-censored-february-8-2019/

also newsguard fact check

https://www.mintpressnews.com/newsguardneocon-backed-fact-checker-plans-to-wage-war-on-independent-media/253687/

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After The Intercept reported over the weekend that a bipartisan group of senators is pushing, as its first legislative priority, a bill that would hand states more power to punish boycotts of Israel—even as the prolonged and deeply harmful government shutdown continues into its third week—Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Sunday condemned the legislation itself and urged Democrats to block any bills that are not related to reopening the government.

“It’s absurd that the first bill during the shutdown is legislation which punishes Americans who exercise their constitutional right to engage in political activity. Democrats must block consideration of any bills that don’t reopen the government,” Sanders wrote on Twitter. “Let’s get our priorities right.”

✔@SenSanders

It’s absurd that the first bill during the shutdown is legislation which punishes Americans who exercise their constitutional right to engage in political activity. Democrats must block consideration of any bills that don’t reopen the government. Let's get our priorities right. [twit]

Sponsored by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the legislation would give states and localities more legal authority to punish companies that participate in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Kathleen Ruane, senior legislative counsel with the ACLU, condemned the measure as an attack on Americans’ First Amendment rights that must be voted down.

“In the midst of a partial government shutdown, Democratic and Republican senators have decided that one of their first orders of business… should be to sneak through a bill that would weaken Americans’ First Amendment protections,” Ruane declared.

“The bill, Combatting BDS Act, encourages states to adopt the very same anti-boycott laws that two federal courts blocked on First Amendment grounds,” she continued. “The legislation, like the unconstitutional state anti-boycott laws it condones, sends a message to Americans that they will be penalized if they dare to disagree with their government. We therefore urge senators to vote no on the Combatting BDS Act.”

According to The Intercept‘s Ryan Grim and Glenn Greenwald, “26 states now have enacted some version of a law to punish or otherwise sanction entities which participate in or support the boycott of Israel, while similar laws are pending in at least 13 additional states. Rubio’s bill is designed to strengthen the legal basis to defend those Israel-protecting laws from constitutional challenge.”

“Punishment aimed at companies which choose to boycott Israel can also sweep up individual American citizens in its punitive net, because individual contractors often work for state or local governments under the auspices of a sole proprietorship or some other business entity,” Grim and Greenwald noted. “That was the case with Texas elementary school speech pathologist Bahia Amawi, who lost her job working with autistic and speech-impaired children in Austin because she refused to promise not to boycott goods produced in Israel and/or illegal Israeli settlements.”

In the last Congress, Rubio’s bill was co-sponsored by six received the backing of at least six Democrats who are still in the Senate: Bob Menendez (N.J.); Joe Manchin (W.Va.); Ben Cardin (Md.); Ron Wyden (Ore.); Gary Peters (Mich.); and Debbie Stabenow (Mich.).

As The Intercept reported, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) “plans to support the Rubio bill, rather than whip votes against it.” If all seven Democrats back Rubio’s bill, it will have enough votes to pass the Senate.

Waleed Shahid, communications director for Justice Democrats, expressed outrage at Rubio’s legislation, and Schumer’s support for it, on Twitter.

“It’s horrifying that Sen. Schumer and the Democratic leadership’s first Senate bill (‘S. 1’) allows state and local governments to boycott U.S. companies which boycott Israel,” Shahid wrote. “How is this the first priority?”

hawking spoke to palestinians, wanted to do again but was convinced boycott more effective

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https://yyy.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/14/bds-boycott-divestment-sanctions-movement-transformed-israeli-palestinian-debate

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~ NAS

https://senate.ucsc.edu/committees/caf-committee-on-academic-freedom/index.html

book, We Will Not be Silenced, teach us about activism and academia

http://mondoweiss.net/2017/07/palestine-academic-repression/

WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED: The Academic Repression of Israel’s Critics

Edited by William I. Robinson and Maryam S. Griffin

Forward by Cynthia McKinney and Preface by Richard Falk

280 pp. AK Press, 2017. $19.95.

There are many ways to try to silence people whose ideas you don’t like. You can bully, blackmail, violate, isolate, punish, and smear them until they shut up, back down, and/or lose the platform upon which they were speaking.

It’s not just autocratic despots or crooked attorneys who wield such strategies with tyrannical efficacy. The forces of the pro-Israel lobby have long carried out systematic campaigns of vilification and repression with a pugnacious energy that rivals even the mob’s. Anyone in the public eye who dares to level a critique of the State of Israel could find themselves targeted. And if you are a prominent and vocal Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) activist:[uggedaboutit](https://youtu.be/pS6zJ7IsJkM)uggedaboutit.

This climate of censorship is especially hard felt on college and university campuses where a historic upsurge in successful pro-Palestine activism has led to a corollary increase in McCarthyist pressure by the dozens of Zionist organizations who have formed into a network called the Israel on Campus Coalition. Characterized by their shameless meddling in internal university proceedings, well-organized groups like the AMCHA Initiative, Stand With Us, Campus Watch, Canary Mission, and ADL are the most visible tip of a slander-industrial complex whose mission is to purge professors and students who challenge their own narrative.

When fear of reprisal has become the norm, speaking out becomes an act of courage and resistance. This is the premise of “We Will Not Be Silenced,” AK Press’s excellent new collection of first-hand testimonial accounts penned by pro-Palestinian scholars who have been targeted on U.S. campuses. With more than a dozen essays by some of the luminaries in the movement such as Richard Falk, Saree Makdisi, Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, Nadia Abu El-Haj, Steven Salaita, Joseph Massad, members of the Irvine 11, and many others—”We Will Not Be Silenced” serves as an instructive compendium of the pro-Israel lobby’s bag of underhanded tricks and an invaluable playbook for how to preempt and defeat them.

Across the breadth of these infuriating yet illuminating essays, a consistent pattern of tactics emerges. Most of these tactics are predicated on the lobby’s willingness to breach basic standards of academic freedom and common decency to achieve their aims.

In their helpful opening essay, David Theo Goldberg and Saree Makdisi discuss the alarming implications of the Hasbara Handbook that is distributed by organizations like StandWithUs to help train pro-Israel campus activists to be effective propagandists. The handbook explicitly encourages its acolytes to avoid legitimate argument and debate with pro-Palestinian activists in favor of deceitful strategies like point scoring, emotional manipulation, and name calling—to create negative connotations “without allowing a real examination of that person or idea.”

The direct and damaging results of these methods are on full display in the pages of “We Will Not Be Silenced” where victim after victim narrates the life-altering consequences they have faced for their criticism of Israel.

William Robinson, one of the co-editors of the book, was brought up on spurious charges at UCSB for circulating a photo-essay that juxtaposed images from Operation Cast Lead in Gaza with the images of the Warsaw ghetto, accompanied by a text condemning Israel’s human rights record. After a strenuous fight, Robinson was cleared of all charges, but at a steep cost to his research and reputation.

David Delgado Shorter, whose only “crime” was to offer his students the optionof researching the BDS movement as a case study in his “Tribal Worldviews” course, survived a demoralizing ordeal at UCLA at the hands of AMCHA that included death threats and false accusations of anti-Semitism that damaged his professional and personal life.

David Klein, a math professor at Cal State, Northridge and prominent BDS activist, was subjected to a similar coordinated campaign of censorship that stretched out for years and may not even be over yet. Unlike most of the scholars in this collection, Klein was fortunate that Harry Hellenbrand, the president of CSUN at the time, was an outspoken supporter of Klein’s academic freedom.

Most of these political witch hunts have been instigated and/or vigorously pursued by outside lobbyists, powerful politicians, or alumni donors. While these forces hold no contractual or professional affiliation with the universities, they often interfere with impunity in internal governance procedures. In some cases they help pro-Israel students file official complaints against pro-Palestinian faculty members, but often dispense with even that “nicety.”

What is especially disturbing is the alacrity with which many upper administrators quickly cave and often collude with pressure groups who have no interest in research and knowledge production, but rather have a vested interest in censorship and knowledge suppression.

The Israel on Campus Coalition has shown few scruples about smearing its opponents as supporters of terror, self-hating Jews, or anti-Semites. Groups like AMCHA, Hillel, StandWithUs have worked with political allies around the clock to cement the erroneous notion that opposition to Zionism is tantamount to anti-Semitism, and that a hatred of Israel’s policies of racism, ethnic cleansing and dispossession is the same as hatred of Jews qua Jews.

Given the horrific history of anti-Semitism, and the deplorable reality of its continued existence, even among some who identify as “supporters” of Palestinian rights, the grave charge of anti-Semitism is not to be taken lightly. As several of the essayists in this book point out, this highly fraught context gives the lobbying groups the perfect straw-man weapon to combat its opponents; and they wield it with a vengeance, in reckless disregard of the lives and livelihoods ruined in the process, and in reckless disregard of the important task of defanging the real anti-Semites.

The question becomes why—why are these extra-academic interests given such wide berth to operate on U.S. campuses? The answer, in part, has to do with the rise of the neoliberal university and the decline of faculty protections across the board. Kristofer J. Petersen-Overton, a doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center, situates his own persecution within the broader context in higher education—the increasing reliance on vulnerable adjunct labor, the steady elimination of tenure, and a prevalent “boardroom mentality” where administrators have become chiefly concerned with protecting “carefully cultivated brands.”

Lisa Rofel and Steven Salaita both draw pointed and sustained attention to the decline of the public university and its traditional commitment to the common good. In an era of “neoliberal graft,” where students are viewed as consumers, adjunct labor is exploited, and administrators command exorbitant salaries, we see a sharp increase in the profit-motives of upper management. In such a climate, wealthy donors, lobby groups, and board members are able to sway and even dictate hiring decisions and curriculum.

Though the death knell of academic freedom is tolling, all is not lost. The apt title of this book “We Will Not Be Silenced” indicates that the tables are beginning to turn. Despite cause for anger and outrage, these stories are leavened with encouraging lessons. In nearly every case, some small victory has been snatched from the jaws of defeat. With the unwavering support from scores national and international progressive and civil rights organizations, most of these scholars were eventually vindicated.

Despite appearances, the pro-Israel lobby is not winning these campus skirmishes. All of us who work for social justice should take heart and fight smart. We should embolden ourselves to speak out and assert our rights. We should donate and build stronger alliances with the organizations like the AAUP, the National Lawyers Guild, the ACLU, FIRE, Palestine Legal, and many others that have been steadfast in support of civil rights. We should denounce anti-Semitism where we find it, and strenuously educate on the immense difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

Those of us working in academia should purchase the book, read it, and lend it our colleagues and administrators so they too can strengthen their resolve to defend our campuses from these unseemly and costly attacks. Rather than squelching discourse and avoiding “controversy,” campus leaders—whether students, faculty, staff, or administrators—should help cultivate an atmosphere of intellectual debate based on time-tested principles of academic freedom.

Professors and students have a right to engage in research and to disseminate that research, even it challenges long-cherished dogma. Colleges and universities are sites traditionally dedicated to the dialogical process of learning where ideas are put forth, tested, and debated, then accepted or rejected on the merit of the arguments. The misuse of money and power to warp this process is not just damaging to the brave individuals who refuse to be silent, but to the entire project of participatory democracy.

In the latest analysis of the world’s top universities published by Times Higher Education (THE), UC Santa Cruz ranked third in research influence as measured by the number of times its faculty’s published work is cited by scholars around the world.

Published as part of the THE World University Rankings 2018, the analysis measured overall research influence based on the average number of citations per paper, using a database of almost 62 million citations to more than 12.4 million research publications published over five years, from 2012 to 2016.

With a citation score of 99.9, UC Santa Cruz is tied for third place with Stanford University. St. George’s University of London and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were tied for first. UC Berkeley ranked just behind UCSC and Stanford with a citation score of 99.8.

The 2018 rankings list the top 1,000 universities in the world, comparing them in five areas: teaching (the learning environment); research (volume, income, and reputation); citations (research influence); international outlook (staff, students, and research); and industry income (knowledge transfer).

The research influence indicator looks at the role of universities in spreading new knowledge and ideas. As explained on the website for the World University Rankings, "The citations help to show us how much each university is contributing to the sum of human knowledge: they tell us whose research has stood out, has been picked up and built on by other scholars and, most importantly, has been shared around the global scholarly community to expand the boundaries of our understanding, irrespective of discipline."

UCSC’s overall ranking in the THE World University Rankings 2018 was 162 out of 1,000 institutions worldwide. In the United States, UC Santa Cruz ranked 55 out of 154 institutions.

https://www.alternet.org/human-rights/israel-bars-bds-activists-entering-country

...The ministry plans to begin enforcing the list in March.

Local media outlets have reported that the list includes organizations based in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, including Jewish Voices for Peace, a prominent left-leaning advocacy group based in the United States with over 200,000 online members and dozens of chapters across the globe. The group has historically been critical of Israel's treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and the country's expansionist policies.

Other American groups on the 'BDS blacklist' include American Friends Service Committee, American Muslims for Palestine, US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, National Students for Justice in Palestine, and Code Pink.

During Sunday's announcement, Erdan said barring the activists from entering Israel was a matter of public safety.

"We have shifted from defense to offense. The boycott organizations need to know that the State of Israel will act against them and not allow [them] to enter its territory to harm its citizens," Erdan said, according to Haaretz."No country would have allowed critics coming to harm the country to entry it."

Interior Minister Arye Dery, whose ministry is responsible for implementing the list, added: "These people are trying to exploit the law and our hospitality to act against Israel and to defame the country. I will act against this by every means."

The BDS movement is a years-long effort from international organizations to put economic and social pressure on Israel to cease its occupation of land where Palestinians have historically resided in, as well as acknowledge Palestinians' "right to return" to lands currently under Israeli control.

The BDS movement has been the subject of routine criticism by Zionists and other supporters of Israel.

The announcement of the list comes a week after Israel approved $72 million for a public campaign against BDS movement. The plan calls for setting up a non-profit organization managed by a board made up of both government officials and private donors from Israel and abroad.

Hadashot News, the Israel Television News Company, reported Saturday night that Jewish Voices for Peace would be included in Israel's list of blacklisted groups.

...

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/7/21/criminalizing_critics_of_israel_congress_considers

U.S. lawmakers are seeking to criminally outlaw support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel. If a proposed bipartisan law is passed, backers of BDS could face up to 20 years in prison and a million-dollar fine. We speak to Rabbi Joseph Berman of Jewish Voice for Peace and Ryan Grim of The Intercept. His latest article is titled "U.S. Lawmakers Seek to Criminally Outlaw Support for Boycott Campaign Against Israel."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott,_Divestment_and_Sanctions

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (also known as BDS and the BDS Movement) is a global campaign attempting to increase economic and political pressure on Israel to comply with the stated goals of the movement: the end of Israel's occupation and colonization of Palestinian land and the Golan Heights, full equality for Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, and acknowledgement of the right of return of Palestinian refugees.

The campaign is organised and coordinated by the Palestinian BDS National Committee.^[1] The campaign was started on 9 July 2005 by over 170 Palestinian non-governmental organizations in support of the Palestinian cause for boycott of Israel, disinvestment from Israel and international sanctions against Israel. Citing a body of UN resolutions and specifically echoing the anti-apartheid campaigns against white minority rule in apartheid era South Africa,^[2] the BDS campaign called for "various forms of boycott against Israel until it meets its obligations under international law".^[3] Protests and conferences in support of the campaign have been held in a number of countries around the world.

Supporters of BDS compare the movement with the 20th century Anti-Apartheid Movement and view their actions similar to the boycotts of South Africa during its apartheid era, comparing the situation in Israel to apartheid.^[4][5][6] Critics of BDS vehemently repudiate the charge that Israel is an apartheid state, asserting, among other things, that in Israel (outside of the West Bank) "Jews and Arabs mix freely and increasingly live in the same neighborhoods...there is no imposed segregation" and that Arabs and Jews interact together in any mall, restaurant, or hospital in Israel.^[7]

Critics further argue that the BDS movement disincentivizes the Palestinian leadership from negotiating with Israel at present,^[8] is antisemitic,^[9][10] and that it is a form of anti-semitic anti-Zionism^[11][12] that promotes the delegitimization of Israel.^[13][14]

There is considerable debate about the scope, efficacy, and morality of the BDS movement.

[hide]

Background

One of the objectives stated at the founding of Arab League in 1945 was to "frustrate further Jewish development in Palestine by means of boycott against Zionist products". A central boycott office was established to coordinate this effort. After the establishment of Israel in 1948, the boycott of Jewish products from Palestine was transformed into the boycott of Israeli products and services. The boycott was conducted on a primary level (as a direct boycott of Israeli products), a secondary level (though direct pressure on states and institutions not to deal with Israel), and a tertiary level (to prevent companies from uninvolved third-party states from dealing with companies that had relationships with Israel).^[15]

Marc Greendorfer argues that the BDS movement originated in the Arab League's boycott of Israel in name, in function, in tasks, in methodology and in goals.^[16]

During the Second Intifada, Palestinians began developing international solidarity and support that could be used to apply pressure on Israel through non-violent means.^[17][18] In 2002, organizations in Europe, Australia, the United States, and the Palestinian territories called for a boycott of Israeli institutions, including a boycott of academic and cultural institutions.^[19] Palestinian academics and intellectuals also called for a boycott in October 2003.^[19] In 2004, an attempt to coordinate the boycotts gained momentum following the start of the construction of the Israeli West Bank barrier.^[17] In April 2004, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) was founded.^[20] One of the founders was Omar Barghouti.^[21][22]

On 9 July 2005, the first anniversary of the advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice in which the West Bank barrier was declared a violation of international law, a large number of organizations representing Palestinians in Israel, Palestine and abroad called upon the international community for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it complies with International Law and Universal Principles of Human Rights.^[23] At the first Palestinian BDS Conference, held in Ramallah in November 2007, the "BDS National Committee" (BNC) was established as the Palestinian coordinating body for the BDS campaign worldwide.^[23] The movement's main example and source of inspiration is the 20th century boycott of South Africa by the Anti-Apartheid Movement.^[24]

Goals of the BDS campaign

On 9 July 2005, a broad spectrum of over 170 Palestinian non-governmental organizations^[23] initiated a campaign for a boycott, divestment and international sanctions against Israel in support of the Palestinian cause. According to the call, the BDS campaign urges various forms of non-violent punitive measures against Israel until it complies with the precepts of international law.^[25] These measures should bring about:^[25]

Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall;
Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.

The BDS campaign is organised and coordinated by the Palestinian BDS National Committee.^[1] The committee cites a body of UN resolutions and specifically echoes the anti-apartheid campaigns against white minority rule in apartheid era South Africa;^[2] the BDS campaign called for "various forms of boycott against Israel until it meets its obligations under international law".^[3]

Methods

Social media platforms are used to draw attention to BDS activities.^[29] With public calls on social media, protests, petitions and articles, pressure is put on individuals to cancel their participation in events in Israel or in Israeli settlements, such as concerts or academic events.^[30] On the other hand, Israelis are pressured not to take part in activities outside Israel or the Occupied territories.^[31] Participants in events are sometimes demanded to declare solidarity with the Palestinian cause.^[32]The BDS Movement uses the means of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel. The campaign has organised demonstrations and protests targeting companies that have contracts with the Israeli military or with companies in Israeli settlements.^[26][27][28] Actions may also target prominent individuals who openly support settlements businesses.^[22]

BDS also makes use of Israeli Apartheid Week, which is an annual series of university lectures and rallies against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The series is normally held in February or March. According to the organization, "the aim of IAW is to educate people about the nature of Israel as an apartheid system and to build BDS campaigns as part of a growing global BDS movement."^[33] Since IAW began in Toronto in 2005, it has since spread to at least 55 cities around the world including locations in Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Austria, Jordan, Japan, Korea, Brazil, Botswana, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, the United States, South Africa, Mexico, Norway, Australia, and Palestine.^{[34][35][36][37][38][39]}

Responses by Palestine and Israel

Reactions by Palestinian authorities

In December 2012, following the withholding of taxes collected by Israel on behalf of the Palestinians, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad called for a boycott of all Israeli goods. In the past, he had unsuccessfully called for a boycott of goods made in Israeli settlements.^[40]

During a visit to South Africa in 2013, President Mahmoud Abbas stunned reporters and Palestinian activists by stating that the Palestinians do not support a general boycott of Israel. He supported, however, a boycott of settlement products.^[41]

In February 2015, activists from Fatah launched a new campaign in reaction to another Israeli punitive withholding of taxes. They called on people to boycott products made by six major Israeli food companies. Abbas apparently did not openly support the boycott, but rather asked the Fatah-led Palestine Liberation Organization to lead the campaign.^[42] At the 25th African Union assembly in the South Africa in June 2015, President Abbas urged the African countries to boycott goods produced by settlement companies in the West Bank.^[41]

Reactions by Israeli authorities

On 11 July 2011, the Knesset passed a law making it a civil offence to publicly call for a boycott against the State of Israel, defined as "deliberately avoiding economic, cultural or academic ties with another person or another factor only because of his ties with the State of Israel, one of its institutions or an area under its control, in such a way that may cause economic, cultural or academic damage". According to the law, anyone calling for a boycott can be sued, and forced to pay compensation regardless of actual damages. At the discretion of a government minister, they may also be prevented from bidding in government tenders.^[43]

The law drew a lot of criticism. 32 Israeli law professors signed a petition arguing that the law is unconstitutional and does grievous harm to freedom of political expression and protest.^[44] Other critics include BDS opponents, such as Gerald Steinberg from NGO Monitor and Morton Klein from the Zionist Organization of America, who criticize the law noting the many better avenues with which to counter BDS.^[45]

On 10 December 2012 the Israeli Supreme Court froze the law and issued an interim order to the State of Israel to explain why the law should not be struck down. The court order gave the state until 14 March 2013 to respond. The final hearing on the issue was to be before a nine-justice panel of the court presided over by Asher Grunis, President of the Supreme Court of Israel. Yehuda Weinstein Attorney General of Israel is reported to have called the law "borderline" defensible and admitted in defending the law in the hearing that it had serious problems.^[46] The court's 2015 ruling upheld most provisions of the law but struck down the ability for lawsuits to go forward without plaintiffs needing to show damages.^[47]

In March 2016 the Israeli Intelligence and Atomic Energy Minister Yisrael Katz argued that Israel should employ "targeted civil eliminations" against leaders of the BDS movement. The expression puns on the Hebrew word for targeted assassinations.^[48]

In June 2016, Haaretz reported that Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister was going to establish a "dirty tricks" unit to "establish, hire or tempt nonprofit organizations or groups not associated with Israel, in order to disseminate" negative information about BDS supporters.^[49] The news came on the heels of a report that Israel's efforts to fight the BDS movement have been ineffectual, in part because the responsibility had been transferred to the Strategic Affairs Ministry from the Foreign Ministry. "Despite receiving expanded authority in 2013 to run the government's campaign against the delegitimization and boycott efforts against Israel, the Strategic Affairs Ministry did not make full use of its budget and had no significant achievements in this area," Haaretz quotes the report as saying. "In 2015, it still did not carry out its work plans."^[50]

Academic boycotts

Business boycotts

United Nations Special Rapporteur, Richard A. Falk,^[58] in his 2012 report to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) recommended that "businesses highlighted in the report – as well as the many other businesses that are profiting from the Israeli settlement enterprise – should be boycotted until they bring their operations into line with international human rights and humanitarian law and standards." He specifically named the United States' Caterpillar Inc., Hewlett Packard and Motorola; Israel's Ahava, Elbit Systems and Mehadrin; Sweden's Volvo Group and Assa Abloy; France's Veolia Environment; United Kingdom's G4S, Belgium's Dexia Group, Netherlands' Riwal Holding Group and Mexico's Cemex.^[59]

Effects of business boycotts on Palestinian employment

Opponents of BDS argue that BDS destroys employment for Palestinians. They argue that companies in settlements are beneficial for Palestinians. They claim that they offer employment with high wages compared with Palestinian factories and that the Palestinians are happy with their jobs and do not feel exploited.^[22] Proponents of BDS allege that in 2011 many Palestinians worked in settlements without permits and earn less than the Israeli minimum wage or even less than half the minimum wage.^[60] In the former SodaStream factory in Ma'ale Adumim, for example, for entry-level employees there was not much difference in the salaries between SodaStream and Palestinian factories. The majority of Palestinian employees at SodaStream had renewable seasonal contracts that last only three months each. Palestinians work in settlements because they have no other choice and 82% of Palestinians working in Israeli settlements would quit those jobs if viable alternatives were available. Omar Barghouti said that the fact that "tens of thousands" of Palestinians work in settlements is the direct result of Israeli policy. For decades, Israel has been "systematically destroying Palestinian industry and agriculture, confiscating our most fertile lands and richest water reserves, and imposing extreme restrictions of movement preventing many from reaching their workplaces".^[22] According to Who Profits, all of the Palestinian trade unions and labor unions and almost all Palestinian civil society organizations, including political parties, support the BDS call for boycott, divestment and sanctions.^[60]

Examples of business boycotts

In December 2012 the New Zealand Superannuation Fund excluded three Israeli companies from its portfolio because of their involvement in the construction of Israeli settlements and the Israeli West Bank barrier. The New Zealand Herald described "the fund's investments in the [Israeli] firms", which amounted to less than $83,000, as "insubstantial".^[61][62]

In 2013, Luxembourg's state pension fund, FDC, "excluded from [its] authorised investment universe" eight major Israeli firms, including Bank Hapoalim, Bank Leumi, and AFI Group. FDC also excluded American firm Motorola Solutions.^[63][64] In January 2014, the government of Norway announced that its pension fund will no longer invest in two Israeli companies (Africa Israel Investments and Danya Cebus).^[65] Norway's YMCA-YWCA joined the boycott in 2014, announcing that it will support "[a] broad economic boycott of goods and services from Israel and Israeli settlements".^[66][67][68] In January 2014, Danske Bank, blacklisted Israeli bank, Bank Hapoalim. Previously, Danske Bank had withdrawn its investments from Africa Israel Investments Ltd. and Danya Cebus.^[65] On 21 July 2014, the government of the Maldivesannounced the annulment of three bilateral trade agreements with Israel, and a government boycott of all Israeli goods. Mohamed Hussain Shareef, the minister at the President's Office, also announced that the government planned to ban the import of Israeli goods into the state.^[69][70] In February 2016, Crepes & Waffles^[71]terminated its security transport contracts with British company G4S."^[72]

Cultural boycotts

The organizers of the week long Rototom Sunsplash music festival held in Spain in 2015, cancelled the scheduled appearance of Jewish American rapper Matisyahuafter he refused to sign a statement supporting a Palestinian state. Matisyahu stated that it was "appalling and offensive" that he was singled out as the "one publicly Jewish-American artist".^[32] After criticism from Spain's daily paper El País^[73] and the Spanish government as well as Jewish organisations,^[74] the organisers apologised to Matisyahu re-inviting him to perform. They stated that "it made a mistake, due to the boycott and the campaign of pressure, coercion and threats employed by the BDS País Valencià."^[75]

Impact of BDS

The effectiveness of the movement has been questioned. Many reports from both in and outside of Israel indicated that the movement had made very little impact on the Israeli economy, and suggested that it was unlikely to for the foreseeable future.^{[76][77][78][79][80]}

In June 2015, an analysis carried out by the Rand Corporation concluded that a successful Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel, if it could be maintained for 10 years, could potentially cost the Israeli economy $47 billion - this figure, which was not published in the report, was reportedly determined by using a model examining previous attempts to boycott countries. However, the Rand Corporation also noted that "evidence on the effectiveness of sanctions is mixed, making an assessment of the potential economic effects of the BDS movement problematic".^[81][82]

Support

Supporters of BDS include Pink Floyd musician Roger Waters,^[83] Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Alice Walker.^[84] In 2014, an international Jewish group, Jews for Palestinian Right of Return, issued a list of signatories endorsing the American Studies Association academic boycott of Israel.^[85] The Israeli activist organization Boycott from Within supports the BDS campaign. Boycott From Within regularly releases statements calling on musicians to cancel concerts scheduled in Israel.^[86]

Political organizations

The African National Congress endorsed BDS in 2012. The party declared itself to be "unapologetic in its view that the Palestinians are the victims and the oppressed in the conflict with Israel".^[87] Following Israel's ground invasion of Gaza in 2014, the Green Party of England and Wales's conference supported "active participation in the BDS movement".^[88] Scotland's Green Party endorsed a boycott of Israel in October 2015.^[89] Members of the Green Party of Canada voted to endorse BDS in August 2016, despite the objections of the party's leader and sole MP Elizabeth May.^[90]

Trade unions

The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) supports the campaign for BDS against Israel, fully endorsing it in July 2011.^[91] During the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict, COSATU vowed to "intensify" their support for the campaign, picketing Woolworths for stocking Israeli goods.^[92]

In April 2014, the UK's National Union of Teachers, the largest teacher's union in the EU, passed a resolution backing boycotts against Israel.^[93] In July of that year, the UK's Unite the Union voted to join BDS.^[94]

In April 2015, the Confédération des syndicats nationaux, Quebec, Canada, representing 325,000 in nearly 2,000 unions, voted to join the campaign for BDS and support a military embargo against Israel.^[95]

Opposition

Political

Political parties that oppose BDS include the Liberal Party of Australia and both major political parties in the United States.^[96][97] The European Union has also expressed opposition to boycotting Israel.^[98] A common reason given for opposing BDS is that it attacks Israel's legitimacy and fosters antisemitism.^[99][100]

In April 2015, Tennessee became the first state in the United States to pass a resolution condemning BDS. There was one vote against the resolution, which passed the General Assembly with bipartisan support.^[101] In June 2016, New York governor Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order directing state agencies not to conduct business with companies and organizations that boycott Israel.^[102] In September 2016, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law a measure that that requires companies contracted by the state to certify that they aren't boycotting any foreign nation, including Israel.^[103][104]

Artists and writers

Israeli-born musician Gene Simmons, lead singer of Kiss, said that artists who avoid Israel would be better served directing their anger at Arab dictators. "The countries they should be boycotting are the same countries that the populations are rebelling," he said.^[105]

Other artists include John Lydon,^[106] Umberto Eco,^[107] Joel and Ethan Coen,^[108] J. K. Rowling,^[109] Hilary Mantel,^[109] Helen Mirren,^[109] Ziggy Marley,^[110] Jon Bon Jovi,^[111] and Howard Stern.^[111]

Novelist Ian McEwan, upon being awarded the Jerusalem Prize, was urged to turn it down, but said that "If I only went to countries that I approve of, I probably would never get out of bed. [...] It's not great if everyone stops talking."^[107]

Creative Community for Peace, founded in late 2011, is an anti-BDS organization made up of music executives and music representatives of bands including Aerosmith, Celine Dion, Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez, and Justin Timberlake.^[112]

Public figures

Israeli President Reuven Rivlin describes Israel as a land that is used to debate, criticism, and controversy, but that BDS is an attempt to influence healthy discussion in unhealthy ways. "Boycotts, violence, and incitement only deepen divides, and don't bring us any closer to a solution. When BDS takes over, criticism turns into camouflage for the de-legitimization of the existence of the State of Israel," Rivlin wrote in a 2016 op-ed published on Ynetnews.^[113] He added, "I'm sorry to say that some parts of BDS even include factions which are connected to enemies of the State of Israel, and who work in order to eradicate Israel as a Jewish state. Some of them are even worse, and hide their anti-Semitism by calling their actions 'criticism of Israeli policy.'"^[113]

The long-standing pro-Palestinian activist and political scientist Norman Finkelstein deemed the BDS movement a "cult". He argued that the worldwide movement was overly controlled by the Ramallah headquarters, made unrealistic claims so as to hide a wish to destroy Israel, and accused the movement of exaggerating its achievements and its capacity, most notably by maintaining that it represents the entire pro-Palestine movement. Finkelstein also asserted that the movement misrepresented and misinterpreted Israel's obligation under international law as defined by the International Court of Justice.^{[114][115][116][117]}

Former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, says "I think BDS is an unfair, discriminatory movement based on a moral double standard that is, in the final analysis, anti-Semitic [...] BDS is in fact trying to harm every Israeli citizen and not only the government. In reality what BDS wants is to make life in Israel intolerable so the Jewish nation will not be able to have a normal existence in its state. BDS does not only want to change the government's policy, it wants to empty the country of Jews."^[118]

Former British Prime Ministers Tony Blair and David Cameron have both condemned the calls for an academic boycott Israeli educational institutions. President of Al-Quds University Sari Nusseibeh similarly opposes academic boycotts of Israel.^[119]

Noam Chomsky warned that the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign could end up harming the Palestinian cause since the demand for a "right of return" for Palestinian refugees has failed to muster significant international support.^[120]

According to an editorial by Judea Pearl, the BDS campaign has an anti-academic character.^[121]

Trade unions

In December 2015, the executive board of the United Auto Workers struck down a vote by UAW Local 2865 to support the BDS movement. Local 2865 represents students workers on the University of California.^[122][123]

BDS

War Crimes Against Palestinian Civilians

Surveillance of the US–Mexico Border

Pain/Heat Ray Less-Lethal Weapon

Other Controversies

The Moral Authority of Marc Rowan

Maureen Tkacik

Massachusetts Mapping Project Linked to Terrorists

Ryan Mauro

Appeals

New power to stifle activism

Contents

Background

Goals of the BDS campaign

Methods

Responses by Palestine and Israel

Reactions by Palestinian authorities

Reactions by Israeli authorities

Academic boycotts

Business boycotts

Effects of business boycotts on Palestinian employment

Examples of business boycotts

Cultural boycotts

Impact of BDS

Support

Political organizations

Trade unions

Opposition

Political

Artists and writers

Public figures

Trade unions

Reaction