Black Lives Matter's Anti-Semitic Bedfellows

[shira]

With the Black Lives Matter movement’s adoption of a formal manifesto charging Israel with genocide, militant anti-Zionists are threatening to sabotage yet another progressive cause.

Obsessed with spreading demonization of the Jewish state across the Western world by any means necessary and at any cost, time and again anti-Israel campaigners have fought tooth and nail to insert defamatory anti-Israel language into resolutions and bylaws of unions, NGOs, political parties and other institutions advancing unrelated progressive agendas. Time and again, this hijacking has driven more enlightened activists out of the host movement, contributing to its decline....

<snip>

...A related dynamic was evident in the unraveling of Britain’s Labour Party this spring, driven by the reluctance of Jeremy Corbyn and others to disavow a small minority of radical anti-Zionists within the party’s ranks. Britain’s Jewish community, which “once looked to Labour as its natural home,” wrote leftist Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, one of the country’s leading Jewish journalists, “is fast reaching the glum conclusion that Labour has become a cold house for Jews.”

It’s difficult to find a progressive cause that hasn’t been compromised in some way by the so-called Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, from the antiglobalization movement to the fight against sexual assault. “BDS destroys everything it touches,” observes Cornell law professor William A. Jacobson.

Perhaps the most thoroughly wrecked, ironically, is the Palestinian cause. Having occupied the commanding heights of Middle East Studies departments in many major Western universities, anti-Zionist “progressives” have tiptoed around religious extremism, oppression of women and other social maladies in the Palestinian territories for fear of distracting attention away from Israel.

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/black-lives-matters-anti-semitic-bedfellows-17701?page=show