My blog subscribes to New Matilda. It is dirty work but someone has to do it so it may as well be the blog. It occasionally even scans the home page for anything interesting. The Joint is a niche operation and pretty much only ever finds a certain set of issues interesting. They range all the way from Leftist/Islamist racism and imperialism at one end of the spectrum to Islamist/Leftist racism and imperialism at the other.
New Matilda styles itself as "independent journalism at its best". They are "crowd funded" so every now and again I get a puff email asking for money. Sorry guys. Not my crowd.
I got one of these a few days ago that included this paragraph.
New Matilda was the only Australian media outlet to come out strongly against the outrageous attack on academic freedom and freedom of association by Israeli law centre Shurat HaDin, which is pursuing legal action against Professor Jake Lynch from Sydney University.
So I followed the link. As you do. New Matilda and the usual suspects have launched a nasty attack on Shurat HaDin. That is interesting. This is one reason I think ECAJ was wrong to disown the Shurat HaDin initiative. BDS is a sinister movement that will take every opportunity to press its world view that as we know has a wildly disproportionate focus on Jews at every level.
This is what these people do when they think they can do it with impunity. ECAJ made no observations on the merits of the case. New Matilda and the BDS group it harbours are now pressing the issue. This is what happens when you give these people an inch. Surely we know who they are by now.
I noted the Shurat HaDin case and was happy to just watch it unfold. After reading this article I've changed my mind. This is not entirely a simple reflex at the sight of the white of their eyes. They are after all not all British. I am going to stick up for the Shurat HaDin action. Community leaders are squeamish about it but it has drawn the "destroy Israel" mob out into the open and we should take a shot. At least not let their narrative go unanswered.
This is the linked article.
Israeli Law Centre Sues To Outlaw Boycotts
After months of speculation, emails, and a visit to the Australian Human Rights Commission, the self-described “Israeli legal centre” Shurat HaDin has made good on its threat to pursue legal action against the controversial Boycotts, Sanctions, and Divestments (BDS) movement in the Federal Court.
The organisation this week filed a case against University of Sydney academic Jake Lynch, accusing the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies director of breaching Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act by supporting the global BDS movement, which aims to pressure Israel into ending its occupation of the Palestinian territories, returning to 1967 borders, and allowing the return of the Palestinian diaspora.
...and this ...
The announcement of court proceedings has drawn outrage from pro-BDS groups. In a press conference held yesterday in Sydney’s Queen’s Square, University of Sydney academic Stuart Rees said Shurat HaDin was endangering free speech in Australia and conflating critiques of Israeli policy with anti-semitism. Rees, who chairs the Sydney Peace Foundation, rejected accusations that supporters of BDS take an unfairly tough line on Israel and said he and Lynch also worked hard to draw attention to human rights abuses in places like Sri Lanka, West Papua, Cambodia, and Saudi Arabia.
“This notion that because we are also focused on the human rights of people in Israel and in Palestine — that we therefore don’t pay any attention to anything else — is a typical deflection technique,” he said.
Along with Lynch, Rees has collected 2000 signatures from people willing to act as co-defendants, not least of whom is Booker prize winning author Arundhati Roy.
Though Lynch remains on research leave, the small crowd was also addressed by University of New South Wales Associate Professor Peter Slezak. The son of Romanian holocaust survivors, Slezak said he was keenly aware of the dangers of anti-Semitism, but that the BDS movement should not be understood through the lens of racial discrimination.
“It is clearly not about anti-Semitism to criticise violations of international law. Israel is a state like any other state,” Slezak said.
Rees described Shurat HaDin as an aggressive foreign organisation during his press conference, and said they were using the Australian legal system to silence anti-Israeli dissent.
Do read it all.
You see, this is the sort of stuff that I find more than vaguely irritating. Academics engaging in what used to be called "Direct Action" claiming that their political activity as academics that has nothing to do with research and teaching is always covered by academic freedom and free speech.
What has this got to do with free speech? This is about the boycotting of private businesses and individuals entirely on the basis of their perceived association with Jewish nationhood as manifest in the State of Israel. What's there to talk about there?
What has this got to do with academic freedom? How does that work? Does this mean academics are always exempt from the consequences of political acts they carry out as academics that have nothing to do with research, publishing and teaching? Does that mean academics on strike must still be paid because to cut the flow would infringe their academic freedom?
So I left this comment and to their credit NM published it.
Posted Wednesday, November 6, 2013 - 16:00
I don't know how I missed this. If it wasn't for that begging email asking for money I would have overlooked this fatuous piece entirely. Better late than never.
I applaud the actions of Shurat HaDin and I wish them well. This is an important case that defines limits in more ways than one. I also support the Government's decision to cut funding to this academic unit and hope that it is kept to its promise to cut ALL funding including for projects that are claimed to be not specifically for BDS or other antizionist or antisemitc and racist attacks on a besieged minority in both the Middle East and Australia.
There is no question that Shurat HaDin is acting in the spirit of the Southern Poverty Law Center on which it is based.
You need to understand that what we have here is a fundamental ideological dispute. I am as appalled by you as you are by me. When I see a BDS rally on the news I could not be more sickened than if it was a march by the KKK in Birmingham, Alabama, circa 1961. For exactly the same reasons.
Claims that this is not discrimination are risible. Lynch and Rees say they draw attention to "human rights abuses" in places like Sri Lanka, West Papua, Cambodia, and Saudi Arabia. How come no one ever hears of this? Apart from the fact there is no remote comparison, in none of those cases, or any other even more egregious examples they ignore are they demanding and imposing boycotts, organising political meetings, demanding the dispossession of people from their land on the basis of their ethnicity or nationality or working for the dissolution of a state with concrete foundations in international law.
If you do not understand that this is discrimination and double standards of the ugliest kind then maybe you might get it if we sang it too you.
This has got nothing to do with free speech. Rees and Lynch can say what they like. This has got nothing to do with academic freedom. Lynch and Rees have crossed the line into political activism they have no right to complain if they are treated as political activists.
It has nothing to do with Palestinian rights. If Rees and Lynch and the whole BDS mob gave a damn about the Palestinians they would be howling for their liberation from the death grip of Hamas and cold, brutal, corrupt hold of Fatah. They would be demanding that they treated as equal human beings in the places they live such as Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt. Invariably the places of their birth.
Rees and Lynch call for boycotts. They implement them. They want private businesses and individuals cut off from that which nurture them; including other academics. By what special pleading do they claim exemption from that which they demand for others?
And today this :
Is It Anti-Semitic To Protest Injustice?
After a recent public speech, I received an email from someone I don’t know named Bloom, who said that I should have perished in the Holocaust with the rest of my family.
Ironically, the insult was prompted by my support of an academic colleague, Professor Jake Lynch, who has been charged in Federal Court with racial discrimination against Jews, but who is, in fact, a distinguished defender of human rights, justice and international law. Acting in accordance with the growing movement for institutional Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), Lynch chose not to collaborate with an Israeli academic from a university deeply complicit in the brutal 46-year occupation of Palestine.
Non-Jewish critics of Israel are accused of anti-semitism for supporting causes such as BDS, while Jewish critics regularly receive vile denunciations and even death threats from other Jews. Most common is the label "self-hating Jew" – a pseudo psychological diagnosis of a mental disorder for which the only criterion is criticism of Israel.
Support for the BDS movement is not anti-semitic. Even its critics must acknowledge that BDS is based on the call from Palestinian civil society to protest Israel’s serious violations of human rights and international law.
Palestinians have long been condemned for violent resistance to the Israeli occupation, so the emergence of peaceful protest through BDS should be welcomed. Instead, it is denounced and slandered as racist. But BDS is a rights-based movement which is against racism in all forms, notably and explicitly against anti-semitism.
Dear me. Do read it all. This does require a response and I've made a start (below). But there's so much material here it will require several posts.
Posted Thursday, November 7, 2013 - 14:40
What I said here. But without the typos.
I never cease to be astounded that BDS supporters always, always, seek to pre-emptively deflect the mantle of racism by hiding behind a Jew upfront saying what they want him to say for them when in fact this merely confirms it.
"... while Jewish critics regularly receive vile denunciations and even death threats from other Jews. Most common is the label "self-hating Jew" – a pseudo psychological diagnosis of a mental disorder for which the only criterion is criticism of Israel."
I simply do not believe this. Any "vile denunciations" would be from someone's cousin probably over dinner.
"Self-hating Jew" is a phrase I never use myself. It's too "touchy feely". Almost hippy. A bit too west of Byron Bay.Anyway I've never seen it defined that way.
I prefer the term, "antisemite".
More coming in a post near you soon.
OK. More posts coming. Do look through the comment thread under the Shurat HaDin post. There's a comment from Jake Lynch himself. It includes the most chilling rationale for why BDS is not discriminatory I have ever seen.
Cross posted Geoffff's Joint
Cross posted Geoffff's Joint
Empress Trudy,
ReplyDeleteThe difference of Ian Lustick and John Kerry is merely one of degree not of kind. Lustick is simply more honest about the outcome.
And when you say the Jew's presence in parts of his own homeland is "illegitimate" as Kerry did yesterday, nothing more needs to be said.
Self-hating Jews are not self-hating.
ReplyDeleteIt is the rest of us that they cannot tolerate due to our lack of sufficient dhimmitude.
David Harris-Gershon represents a nice example. He doesn't hate himself, certainly. Quite the contrary, he adores what he thinks of as his own moral superiority. So-called "self-hating" Jews are actually very flattering toward themselves. It's the rest of us that they do not like very much.
Not going to register at New Matilda, but you may communicate this sentiment:
ReplyDeleteWhen people are so oblivious in self proclaimed moral superiority that they cannot see they, themselves, are acting in a discriminatory way, then it shows how lost they actually are. Not to mention that they are ignorant of the history and facts, and therefore wholly subject to indoctrination and being duped. Why would anyone who seeks truth and objectivity rely on anything they say, when their goal is to impose on us all a contorted vision of what constitutes social justice, for our own good, of course.
People do not flock to them in spite of their racist idiocy, they flock to them BECAUSE of it. It's always better to simply admit that what's in front of you is in front of you, what is, is.
DeleteHow significant is Open Zion?
ReplyDeleteI never go over there and I consider Peter Beinart to be a weasel.
The man is considered a lefty, yet he favored the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Peter Beinart is Marty Peretz's biggest mistake.
Hardly significant and now Beinart's made a huge public spectacle of announcing he's shutting it down because mean Jews disagree with him and make his life horrid. So he's going to Ha'retz in January - I guess to mate with Amira Haas to make little half Jewish suicide bomber bloggers or something like that. In either case if you though that the Beeb was Die Sturmer with a better accent, just wait till the Max Blumenthal brigade gets to write for Hamas' only Hebrew language newspaper.
ReplyDeleteIt was an amazing reflective information and this blog is a great source of information that is useful.The claims pages
ReplyDeleteGeoffff,
ReplyDelete"When I see a BDS rally on the news I could not be more sickened than if it was a march by the KKK in Birmingham, Alabama, circa 1961. For exactly the same reasons."
Exactly!
This is precisely the terminology that we should be using.
The reason that Palestinian-Arabs mask their faces when attacking Jews is for the very same reason that the Ku Klux Klan masked themselves when attacking black people.
The difference between black Americans in the early part of the twentieth century and Jews in the Middle East is not that one represented an oppressed group and the other represents an oppressor group, but that black people integrated into American society and Jews came together in their own self-defense and freed themselves via the offices of the State of Israel.