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#14894407
No, but I was outside the conference protesting it. :D Did anyone say anything remotely interesting this time or was it the typical vomit-inducing lovefest? I saw a few of Chuck Schumer comments, through others:

#14894508
skinster wrote:No, but I was outside the conference protesting it. :D


Good on you for that, wish I could have been there.


Did anyone say anything remotely interesting this time or was it the typical vomit-inducing lovefest?


There was a lot of talk about the z10n@zis teaming up with Saudi and UAE islamo-nazis to take down the Iranian nazis but really it was just the same old ZOG rally they have every year.

#14894519
skinster wrote:I have no idea what you're talking about, since you can't quote properly.

NATO defines terrorism in the AAP-06 NATO Glossary of Terms and Definitions, Edition 2014 as "The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence against individuals or property in an attempt to coerce or intimidate governments or societies to achieve political, religious or ideological objectives".

Islam is an Antichrist religion that promotes terrorism.
Terrorists are Muslims that believe in Islam.
Muslims are Antichrist terrorists.
#14894677
Sivad wrote:Good on you for that, wish I could have been there.


Come by next year, it's usually much fun. :D

There was a lot of talk about the z10n@zis teaming up with Saudi and UAE islamo-nazis to take down the Iranian nazis but really it was just the same old ZOG rally they have every year.


I'm really glad they made the alliance clear in the last couple of years. They will lose, just like they're losing in Syria. 8)

BDS updates:


















#14908476
“Tide is turning” as Natalie Portman cancels Israel appearance
Israel is crediting the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement for Natalie Portman’s refusal to receive an award in Jerusalem.

On Thursday, the Genesis Prize Foundation announced it was canceling its 2018 award ceremony after the Oscar-winning actor had informed it that “recent events in Israel have been extremely distressing to her and she does not feel comfortable participating in any public events in Israel.”

Portman’s representative told the foundation that “she cannot in good conscience move forward with the ceremony.”

“After decades of egregious human rights violations against Palestinians, Israel’s recent massacre of peaceful protesters in Gaza has made its brand so toxic that even well-known Israeli-American cultural figures, like Natalie Portman, now refuse to blatantly whitewash, or art-wash, Israeli crimes and apartheid policies,” the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) said in a statement welcoming the news.

Awarded by extremists
The Genesis Prize is promoted as the “Jewish Nobel” and is awarded by committees including far-right anti-Palestinian figures such as Israeli politicians Natan Sharansky and Yuli Edelstein; Eli Groner, the director of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bureau; and Fiamma Nirenstein, an Italian-Jewish anti-Palestinian activist and former lawmaker who Netanyahu attempted to appoint as Israel’s ambassador to Rome.

As the prize winner, Portman had been awarded $2 million to donate to philanthropic causes of her choosing.

Another extreme-right Israeli politician, culture minister Miri Regev, stated, “I was sorry to hear that Natalie Portman fell into the hands of the BDS supporters.”

“Portman, a Jewish actress born in Israel, joins those who tell the successful, wondrous founding of the State of Israel as ‘a tale of darkness and darkness,’” Regev added.

Oren Hazan, a lawmaker from Netanyahu’s Likud Party with a history of violent and racist incitement, and harassment of female and Arab lawmakers, demanded that Portman’s Israeli citizenship be revoked.

It is a considerable embarrassment that even Portman, known for roles in the Star Wars movies, is unwilling to associate her name and image with Israel.

In 2015, Portman publicly expressed her opposition to Netanyahu’s government, but said she would not use her “platform” to “you know, shit on Israel.”

Killing protesters
While Portman did not specify which “recent events” she found unpalatable, there is little doubt that this was a reference to Israel’s weeks of calculated violence directed at unarmed protesters in the besieged Gaza Strip that has killed more than 30 Palestinians, including four children and a journalist, and injured thousands.

The International Criminal Court prosecutor has warned Israeli leaders that they could face trial over the lethal crackdown.

But as Great March of Return rallies continued for the fourth week, Israel appears still to be ignoring such warnings.

This Friday, Israeli occupation forces killed four Palestinians, including a 14-year-old boy, and injured hundreds more amid protests along the Gaza-Israel boundary fence.

Boycott goes mainstream
The BNC, the steering group for the global BDS campaign, appears more than happy to take the credit that Israel is offering.

“The Palestinian-led, Nobel Peace Prize-nominated boycott, divestment and sanctions movement for Palestinian rights has been growing in the cultural mainstream in the last few years,” the BNC noted. “Of the 26 Oscar nominees in 2016, none has accepted an all-expense-paid Israeli propaganda junket.”

The BNC also praised Portman for following the lead of Lorde, the New Zealand pop singer who generated global headlines and a fierce backlash from anti-Palestinian groups for her decision last December to cancel a performance in Tel Aviv.

“As was the case in the struggle against apartheid South Africa, the BDS movement calls on all artists and cultural figures to respect the nonviolent Palestinian picket line and stay away from apartheid Israel until the UN-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people are fully respected,” the BNC added.

American Jewish youth pressure politicians
Growing grassroots outrage is also pushing a few more US politicians to break the near-silence on Israel’s slaughter in Gaza.

Last week Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren said she was “deeply concerned about the deaths and injuries in Gaza” and urged Israeli occupation forces to “exercise restraint and respect the rights of Palestinians to peacefully protest.”

She did not go as far as the handful of her Democratic congressional colleagues who have urged Israeli soldiers to defy illegal orders to shoot at unarmed protesters.

And while hardly a full-throated condemnation, and lacking any call for accountability, Warren’s statement contrasts with how the progressive lawmaker fled from questions about Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza in 2014.



Another high-profile Democrat, California Senator Dianne Feinstein, also tweeted that the violence in Gaza is “is exceptionally destructive for both the Palestinians and the state of Israel.”



These mild statements are at least an acknowledgment of the grassroots pressure Democrats have been facing, particularly from young American Jewish activists who have been protesting – and getting arrested – at lawmakers’ offices to demand they speak out.





IfNotNow, a Jewish activist organization that has been spearheading these protests, welcomed Natalie Portman’s announcement as another sign that the “tide is turning.”

Portman joins comedian Sarah Silverman to become the second major American Jewish celebrity to speak out in recent weeks against Israel’s abuses of Palestinians, the group noted.

IfNotNow asked: “Who will be the next Jewish celebrity to reject the status quo of endless occupation and repression for Palestinians?”
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/al ... appearance
#14911918
I don't think it's wise to slap Portman's actions within the BDS sphere - she is Israeli and has specifically said that she does not support BDS.

As Israelis, we have our own problems to contend with - corrupt governments, populist leaders and increasing racism.

We don't want to ally ourselves with another bunch of racists, i.e., BDS.
#14912043
I can agree that Portman didn't state she supports the BDS movement (it was Israeli media that credited her with that, as was stated in the article above).

But also, she did say "recent events in Israel" were "disturbing" her and the cause for her not to go to that Israeli ceremony and accept 2 million from them. Her actions have shown she supports the boycott movement, despite not outright saying it, since it would have her blacklisted, in particular because she's Israeli. Still, even saying what she did say cost her; Israeli politicians demanded she revoke her citizenship for the crime of being upset at children being sniped to death in Gaza for protesting for their rights, not to be racist, but to have equality with those who are controlling the concentration camp they're living in.

The BDS movement is fundamentally anti-racist since one of its 3 demands is equal rights FOR ALL.

Calling those of us who support the movement racists is just you projecting Israel's actual systematic racism on us, danholo. Please, just stop playing victim to racism while endorsing the same with your zionism. You must think people are really stupid...
#14912435
One Of The Most Jewish Colleges In The Country Just Voted For BDS By Nearly 2-1 Margin
Students at Barnard College, the elite women’s school in New York City, voted this week to ask the university administration to divest from eight companies that do business in Israel.

The referendum, which was written by students from Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, listed ways that companies like Hyundai, Boeing and the Israeli national water carrier Mekorot allegedly violate international law, before asking whether the student government should encourage Barnard to divest from companies that “profit from or engage in the State of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.”
https://forward.com/fast-forward/399159 ... or-bds-by/
#14914446
At 70, Israel more than ever deserves a cultural and academic boycott #BDS
Israel’s deportation of a law professor and conviction of a Palestinian poet underscore wrong-headed objections to BDS

Recent events have highlighted why the continuing refusal by many Western academics and artists to take up the Palestinian call for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel is so wrong-headed.

Opponents of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement argue that such penalties harm, rather than assist, solidarity with Palestinians.

That, for example, was the conclusion of the 18,000-strong Modern Language Association (MLA) in the United States when it rejected a boycott motion last year. Academic freedom was presented as paramount and a route to dialogue with Israeli scholars that could influence Israeli society for the better.

It is also claimed that Israel's arts community is largely progressive and that continuing cultural engagement will bolster voices expressing solidarity with oppressed Palestinians.

But in reality, the space in Israel for academic dialogue, as well as cultural freedom, is shrinking rapidly. And the few Israeli academics or artists who are taking a stand on behalf of Palestinians are more isolated than ever before.

This week, Palestinians mark the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, the dispossession of their homeland that they describe as "the catastrophe". But with the conflict still unresolved after many decades, the signs are not only that Israel fully deserves an academic and cultural boycott, but that without such external pressures, the oppression of Palestinians will intensify.

No welcome for law professor
It emerged last week that two human rights activists – one a prominent legal scholar – were barred entry to Israel. They were due to lead a delegation of lawyers and academics assessing the human rights situation in Israel and the occupied territories.

Katherine Franke, a law professor at New York’s Columbia University, was among four of the group detained at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport. She was deported after a lengthy interrogation during which she was shouted at and accused of lying.

Franke found herself falsely characterised as a leader of the BDS movement. She and Vincent Warren, head of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, posted on Twitter a photo of themselves under an airport "Welcome" sign, with the caption: "Don't let the ‘Welcome’ sign fool you. It doesn’t apply to #humanrights.”

Earlier this year, Israel's police minister, Gilad Erdan, issued a blacklist of 20 organisations accused of supporting BDS whose leaders were barred from entering Israel.

But in fact, the evidence cited by airport officials came from another source: two far-right websites, the Canary Mission and Amcha, that seek to damage the reputations of students and academics in the United States who have taken public positions critical of Israel.

It was for this reason that Franke observed: "The [Israeli] government is essentially outsourcing their security to rightwing trolling websites."

It is bad enough that Israel is relying on bullying, virulently anti-Palestinian groups to determine which foreign academics will be allowed into Israel to conduct dialogue with Israeli academics and community leaders.

But, given that Israel also controls the entry points into the occupied Palestinian territories, these same hate groups are also deciding whether overseas academics will be able to meet and work with Palestinian academics and civil society leaders.

Critics barred entry
There is nothing new about this policy, though the trend has gotten significantly worse in recent years. Israel has long denied visas to professors and students hoping to teach in the West Bank and Gaza. Two famous US Jewish scholars, Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky, were barred from entering the occupied territories in 2008 and 2010 respectively.

Significantly, neither supports BDS – the pretext now claimed by Israel for banning academics. But both have spent years arguing for a two-state solution – opposed by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu – that would give Palestinians the power of self-determination and end Israel’s oppressive rule.

Israel has also denied entry to Richard Falk, a Jewish American professor of international law who served as the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the human rights abuses faced by Palestinians. All this, of course, comes on top of Israel's ever more stringent restrictions on the freedoms of Palestinians, including university staff, and repressive policies towards Palestinian institutions of learning.

While BDS opponents worry about the potential harm Israeli academics would suffer from a boycott, they ignore the fact that Gaza’s universities, for example, have been cut off by Israel from contact with the outside world for a decade. Academics there are little more than prisoners, their knowledge and skills atrophying as the blockade denies their institutions research tools and they themselves are prevented from attending conferences and postings overseas.

Now Israel is compounding these restrictions on Palestinian scholars with equally harsh measures against overseas academics trying to break the isolation of colleagues in the occupied territories.

Selective academic freedom
Israel is not defending itself from a supposed BDS threat, but making it as difficult as possible for experts to conduct research into Israel’s systematic violations of Palestinian rights. It does so because it is worried that such studies will have two consequences.

First, they will provide the ammunition needed by war crimes investigators, such as those at the International Criminal Court at the Hague, to bring Israelis to trial in the future.

That was the lesson learned by Israel from the UN fact-finding mission led by Richard Goldstone, a former Jewish South African judge. His report concluded in 2009 that Israel had committed extensive war crimes during its military attack on Gaza a few months earlier.

And that is why Omar Shakir, the local director of the New York-based Human Rights Watch, which monitors Israel’s human rights abuses, had his work permit revoked this week and has been ordered to leave. Again, Israel used the pretext of a support for a boycott to justify the decision.

Second, Israeli officials are worried that, if reputable scholars come face to face with the reality of Israel’s system of oppressing Palestinians, they will advocate for the Palestinian cause and strengthen international solidarity movements like BDS, especially on campuses.

Effectively, Israel wants to be selective about academic freedom. It encourages the kind of research and dialogue that allows Israeli universities to remain at the forefront of profitable scientific, technological and medical research. But it does not want scholarly freedom of a sort that enables foreign researchers to witness and document Israel’s abuses of Palestinians to audiences outside. It wants the occupation to remain largely invisible.

Scholarly hypocrisy
Even more problematic for those opposed to BDS, the Israeli research that is so in demand from overseas institutions depends in many cases on abuses of Palestinians in the occupied territories. Israel’s so-called hi-tech industries are mostly a lucrative collaboration between Israeli academia and the army.

Israeli universities regularly cooperate with the military, turning the occupied territories into giant open-air laboratories in which it is possible to test weapons, as well as surveillance and biometric technology, develop crowd control and cyber warfare, study a supposed “Arab mentality”, and reinterpret international law.

Joint projects with Western academic institutions make them indirectly complicit in these human rights abuses.

That is why Columbia University not only has vigorously opposed BDS in the past, but had nothing to say about Israel’s abuse of the academic freedoms of Franke, one of its faculty.

Franke told the New York Times that her law school dean's chief of staff had said the university "would not get involved in defending” her because there were “pro-Israel centres" at the law school.

The university president, Lee Bollinger, meanwhile, has just returned from a visit to Israel for preliminary talks about a joint project to establish a global centre in Tel Aviv committed to the "exchange of people and ideas".

The hypocrisy of Western academic institutions should not need underscoring. They have been building ties with Israel on the back both of Israel's ever-intensifying violations of Palestinian academics' rights and of ever-tightening restrictions on foreign academics who wish to show solidarity with their Palestinian counterparts.

Solidarity moves suppressed
They do so with an Israeli academia that has shown it is prepared to offer no institutional support to Palestinian colleagues.

This month, Evelyn Fox Keller, an 82-year-old scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, accepted the Dan David Prize at Tel Aviv University – on condition that she could donate the prize money to Israeli human rights groups.

She criticised academics in Israel for failing to show solidarity with Palestinians. "They don't want to and don't have a voice. … None of the universities in Israel have a will [to speak out]."

Worse, Israeli university heads not only fail to speak up, but actively seek to suppress solidarity with Palestinians.

Ben Gurion University’s president, Rivka Carmi, cancelled an award from the politics department for the whistleblowing Israeli soldiers' group Breaking the Silence in 2016. She justified the move on the grounds that the organisation was "outside the national consensus".

And last year, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem cancelled a conference on Palestinian prisoners, apparently bowing to rightwing political pressure.

In February, Israel's Higher Education Council raised no protest as the Netanyahu government brought for the first time three academic institutions located in illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank under its auspices. Shortly afterwards, the same council rubber-stamped a new code of conduct intended to silence the few Israeli academics who have dared to speak out against the violation of Palestinian rights.

The paradox is that Western academic organisations like the MLA, in shunning the BDS movement, have preferred to ally themselves with Israeli universities that persecute not only Palestinians but dissident Israeli academics.

Poet convicted
The justification for a cultural boycott is no less clear-cut. This month, an Israeli court convicted Dareen Tatour, a 36-year-old Palestinian poet with Israeli citizenship, of incitement to violence and support for terrorism.

She had already endured two and a half years of jail and harsh house arrest – denied access all that time to computers and phones – while the wheels of Israel’s legal system turned slowly. Now, she risks a sentence of up to eight additional years in prison.

Poetry invariably exploits complexities of language and ambiguities of meaning. But over the protests of scholars of the Arabic language, the court relied on translations of Tatour’s poetry by an Israeli policeman.

In schoolboy fashion, he translated the Arabic word "shaheed", which for Palestinians refers to any victim of Israeli oppression, to the reductive notion of a "terrorist". "It is not a trial, it is a theatrical play," Tatour said of the legal proceedings.

A handful of Israeli literary figures, including the noted author AB Yehoshua, have protested at the unprecedented move to jail a poet, something they noted that even the most repressive regimes usually avoid doing.

A Hebrew literature professor, Nissim Calderon, warned: "What begins by undermining the freedom of a Palestinian poet will surely continue by undermining the freedom of Israeli poets."

Demands for artistic loyalty
The attack on Tatour is part of a much wider campaign of intimidation and surveillance of social media that is almost exclusively targeting the free speech of Palestinians, including artists, both in the occupied territories and Israel.

But more traditional venues for art are also under relentless attack. Most Israeli artists and cultural institutions have already been cowed by a nearly decade-long campaign of threats to funding from successive Netanyahu governments.

The culture minister, Miri Regev, a former military censor, has in recent years all but nationalised the arts in Israel, forcing cultural producers to submit to the government’s far-right agenda.

Art companies must now declare that they are willing to perform in the settlements to receive public grants, and those that do receive bonuses. Funding bodies, meanwhile, are under growing pressure to vet projects for “anti-Israel bias”.

Chen Tamir, the curator of Tel Aviv's Center for Contemporary Art, told the New York Review of Books recently: "Public funding here is being manipulated to become a mechanism of censorship."

Theatre shuttered
Palestinians in Israel, a fifth of the population, receive only three percent of the government’s culture budget. The al-Midan theatre in Haifa, Israel’s only publicly subsidised Palestinian theatre, has been shuttered after one of its plays incensed Regev.

Last year, organisers of a theatre festival in Acre effectively closed it down to prevent the performance of a play about Palestinian prisoners.

The play’s author, Einat Weizman, has reported that the hate campaign against artists like herself – “from people who wanted to kill me and rape me” – has moved from social media to the street. She now needs to be escorted in public.

But such artists are the exception. As Palestinian actor Lamis Ammar noted recently: "Most Israeli art, at the end of the day, serves to justify Israeli wrongdoing, instead of addressing and eliminating it."

Goodwill from Brand Israel
While Israel is crushing artistic dissent at home, it is busy exporting a depoliticised Israeli culture as part of a programme known as "Brand Israel". The aim is to encourage overseas audiences to overlook Israel's role in oppressing Palestinians by, paradoxically, emphasising Israel as a vibrant, tolerant, multicultural society.

Western popular culture, like the Eurovision Song Contest, whose finals will be held this weekend in Portugal, are plundered as ways to raise goodwill for Israel. Participation in the contest falsely suggests not only that Israel is physically part of Europe, but that it adheres to Europe’s multicultural, liberal-democratic norms.

Israel’s entry this year, Netta, the bookies’ favourite to win, is the epitome of good-time plastic pop, and repeatedly references a Western cultural icon – Wonder Woman – that has recently been "Israelised" by actress Gal Gadot.

Similarly, this month, Israel hosted the major European cycling race Giro d’Italia, the first time the competition has been staged outside Europe.

An Israeli "culture" funded by the Israeli government permeates international film festivals, overseas theatre tours and art exhibitions. Celebrity chefs, restaurants and food manufacturers introduce Westerners to a healthy "Israeli cuisine", much of which – like falafel, hummus and salads – has been appropriated from Arab and Palestinian heritage.

Normalising the abnormal
All of this is normalising the highly abnormal – Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestine.

It is further evidence of Western complicity not only in Israel’s systematic abuse of Palestinians, but in its continuing efforts to assist Israel in making Palestinians disappear, in transforming them into a non-issue.

That has to stop – and it won’t as long as Israelis face no financial or even psychological penalties for refusing to end the oppression of Palestinians.

For 70 years, Israel has been expanding a process of cantonisation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, while Western leaders have turned a blind eye. In fact, through economic, diplomatic and military support, Western governments have actively abetted Israel in dispossessing Palestinians.

At the very least, academics and artists ought to be taking a lead, objecting to the complicity of their own governments and finally finding their voice to support an academic and cultural boycott of Israel.
http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/wh ... -451153942
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