Divestment and the lies of BDS

The boycott movement against Israel is a complete failure. Israel's hi-tech economy is booming (Covvid aside - tourism was booming too) and BDS has nothing to show for 16 years of effort but a few activists taking selfies next to avocados on a supermarket shelf.

Sure, in confined political student circles, 14 students can force through a pro-BDS vote whilst the 22000 non politically active students on campus are busy with their actual studies, but in the real world - however, all of these students use Israeli hi-tech to communicate with each other.

BDS is a noise that spreads antisemitism, demonises Zionism, and hurts Jews in the diaspora but it doesn't actually do damage to Israel. Worse than this, where it does have some effect, it just ends up hurting Palestinians.

Because of this failure, what the BDS movement is forced to do is engage an absurd fake news strategy - any divestment of any Israeli stock or product for any reason - is promoted as a BDS victory.

For example - even when a football club changes kit supplier - something they all do every few years- if it is the brand of kit used by the Israeli team - BDS will falsely claim it is a 'divestment'. In the end, the embarrassed club can even be forced to issue a statement rejecting the claim. This happened to Luton Town FC just last year. Think for a while how pathetic this all is.

And if the evidence is not even there, they make it all up anyway. BDS and toxic organisations such as the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign just love to spread lies. It is all they have.

The latest PSC fiction

This week provided a perfect example. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign ran with a story that the East Sussex Pension fund had divested from Elbit, a successful Israeli arms company.

The news went around. The official BDS movement bragged about it, the thugs at Palestine Action sang about it, and Middle East Monitor wrote an article in celebration.

Ben Jamal, the hapless director of the PSC followed suit.  Incredibly, an industry magazine, 'Pensions Age' ran with the story too, in an article written by Jack Gray, their Brighton-based 'News Editor'.

Except of course the story is simply not true.

It is true that the PSC has been hounding the fund. During the last meetings of the fund committee - the PSC ran a campaign that got a few of their eager soldiers to write letters to ask the fund to divest from Israeli companies.

But in December, the committee gave a written response - that the PSC saw- and it was made absolutely clear that the fund couldn't actively divest from Elbit.

For more on the "Lies and more lies. PSC and the viral BDS fake news circus" go to David Collier

ICC Chamber Decision an Irreparable Stain on the Court

 Read full article by Alan Baker here

It is both tragic and ironic that the State of Israel, one of the founding fathers of the vision of creating an independent International Criminal Court after the unimaginable atrocities committed against the Jewish People during the Holocaust, has now become the target of that very International Criminal Court. It is all the more ironic that Israel now finds itself being accused by the Court based on Palestinian political manipulation.

The irony is all the more evident given the legal acrobatics by the politically oriented and politically influenced prosecutor of the Court and the majority of judges of the Pre-Trial Chamber in their obstinate and flawed insistence on attributing elements of statehood and sovereignty to a Palestinian entity that is distinctly, and by all international standards, not a state.

Nor does such entity have any sovereign territory, and thus, even according to the Statute of the ICC, cannot be the subject of the Court’s jurisdiction. This ironic situation is not surprising, given the prevailing international atmosphere of incitement and hostility toward Israel throughout the UN system.

However, what is shocking is the fact that the one international juridical institution that was hoped and intended by its founders, and stated in its founding document, to be “an independent, permanent International Criminal Court with jurisdiction over the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole”, has allowed itself to be politically manipulated and abused.

The Court has irreparably prejudiced any juridical integrity, credibility and bona fides that it might have had. This decision by the Court’s Pre-Trial Chamber to accept the contention of the prosecutor, based purely on non-binding and non-authoritative political resolutions of the UN General Assembly, that the Court can exercise jurisdiction over disputed territory that is in the midst of an internationally recognized dispute-settlement process, defies all legal logic.

Since the ICC Statute is open to sovereign states only, and since no sovereign Palestinian state exists, and since there exists no Palestinian territory over which the Court could exercise its jurisdiction, the Pretrial Chamber, by any legal logic, should have rejected the contentions of the prosecutor, rather than attempt to prejudge and undermine the outcome of the negotiating process by determining that there exists sovereign Palestinian territory.

Sadly and regrettably, this decision not only irreparably harms the integrity and credibility of the ICC, and can undermine the Middle East peace negotiating process, since the Court, at the behest of its prosecutor, is attempting to prejudge the outcome of that process, contrary to all historic and legal logic.

Excellent Defence of Apartheid Claims

 HonestReporting CEO Daniel Pomerantz was interviewed 

recently on RT, a network that is terribly hostile toward 

Israel and has an enormous global audience.

Daniel talked about vaccines, Iran, and the Abraham Accords - debunking false claims made by former Palestinian political  leader Hanan Ashrawi as well as the program’s host.

Israeli Arab tells Truth about Israel to ICC

I have some important things to say to the ICC

 that intends to investigate Israel for war crimes

Human Rights Violations No One Talks About

 by Khaled Abu Toameh  

• Last year, the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank revealed that Hamas was planning to confiscate large areas of privately-owned lands in the Gaza Strip. According to the PA, Hamas formed the Palestinian Land Authority in the Gaza Strip to facilitate "land-theft."
• A recent report by the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights documented the death in 2020 of at least 30 Palestinians in various "internal violence" incidents in the Gaza Strip, including six children and four women. Another 155 Palestinians were injured, including 17 children and 19 women.
• The ongoing human rights violations by Hamas show that the Islamist movement does not care about reports issued by Palestinian human rights groups such as the Al Mezan Center. The Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip know that they can continue doing anything they want there because the international community only pays attention when there is way to blame Israel.

     *  In 2006, the US and European Union made a mistake by allowing Hamas, whose  charter openly calls for the annihilation of Israel, to participate in the parliamentary election. If the Americans and Europeans repeat the same mistake, Palestinians in the  West Bank will join their brothers in the Gaza Strip and find themselves also living  under Hamas's repressive Islamist regime, which has no respect for human rights.

Is COVID-19 Mutating into Antisemitism?

 By Michael Freund   JANUARY 28, 2021

It’s a tale nearly as old as the Jewish people, one that stretches back to the dawn of our existence as a nation. Targeted by unimaginable hatred, singled out for bizarre and often self-contradictory conspiracy theories, Jews have time and again seen antisemitism flare up throughout history. 

Sadly, in this regard, the coronavirus crisis is proving to be no different, as the dreaded illness wasted little time before mutating into yet another classical and deadly variant: the fear and loathing of Jews.

In its annual report on global antisemitism published earlier this week ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which was marked on January 27, the Diaspora Affairs Ministry highlighted the increasing exploitation of COVID-19 by anti-Israel and antisemitic extremists around the world to stir up malice toward Jews.

Using themes taken straight out of the medieval playbook of European antisemites, various extremist groups on both the far Left and the far Right, as well as rogue regimes such as the one in Tehran, have been blaming the Jews and Israel for the virus. 

Reading through the report is a sobering experience if only because it demonstrates just how pervasive and extensive antisemitism can be – cutting across social, religious and ethnic lines as well as national borders. 

 “Jews, Zionists, and Israel are accused of having created, spread, financed and used the virus to expand their global domination, impose a New World Order, but also as a means for profit,” the study notes, adding that some have gone so far as to allege that COVID-19 is a biological weapon funded by Jews.

Anti-Israel activists have even created and sought to popularize the hashtag #COVID1948 to compare Zionism and the creation of the state of Israel with the spread of the pandemic. 

For the full article read here.  

Iran has Achieved the Impossible

We must give credit to Iran's escalating aggression,

sponsorship of terror, and subversion across the

Middle East for achieving the impossible: convincing

Arab nations to abandon "ardent, age-old antagonism,

to open unprecedented new relations with Israel."