After Paris, Whither the BDS Movement? [View all]

[shira]

Showing no empathy and spinning crazy theories, Israel’s fiercest critics show that it’s Jews, not the Jewish state, they despise

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...Instead of the sort of empathy you’d expect any sane person to express at a moment like this, the most vocal proponents of the BDS movement took radically different paths. Jewish Voice for Peace, for example, one of the leading radical leftist organizations focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, published a blog post that indicated precisely where its priorities lay. Entitled “The Paris Murders & the Islamophobic Backlash,” it contained many wise observations like the one alerting readers that “Muslims are at greatly heightened risk from the forces of bigotry,” but almost nothing about the fact that other forces, no less bigoted, had just taken the lives of 17 people, many of them Jewish. Even if you subscribe to the moronic theory that believes the concrete threat to be not the men with the semiautomatic weapons but some future affront to somebody’s feelings, you can still take more than half a sentence to express genuine sadness at the thought of so many wasted lives. JVP had no time for such normal, human sentiments; nor did many others who make assailing Israel their cause. Writing in Mondoweiss, for example, and never once mentioning Jews—quite a feat, considering that one of the attacks took place in a kosher supermarket—Chloe Patton argued that we westerners needed to embrace “the ways in which the historical traumas of the global south continue to haunt the postcolonial present.” Even without judging the intellectual merit of such an argument, it’s not too hard to see that one thing that makes it particularly vile is that it assumes that only one side has any right to a hearing, while the other, even when slaughtered, ought to do nothing but listen and empathize.

Such uncaring, coming at this particular moment from anyone professing to be an activist working on behalf of universal values is deafening. As it happens, however, it beats the alternative.....

....To those among us unfortunate enough to follow the BDS movement closely, such vitriol is no news. But cataclysmic events have a way of rattling people into sudden awakenings. And so here’s a simple suggestion: before you engage in conversation with critics of Israel, take a moment and check their digital footprint from the past week. If they’ve taken the time and the trouble to condemn these horrific murders without equivocation, if they sound genuinely remorseful, proceed. But if all they can muster are musty cliches or steely dogmas, if they can’t take a moment away from their politics to be ordinary, feeling humans, and if they can’t miss an opportunity to see even this tragedy as yet another proof of the exceptional nefariousness of the Israeli regime, then they’ve proven that the true object of their vitriol is not the Jewish state but the Jewish people.

http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/188290/bds-after-paris

Ain't that the truth?