{Originally posted to The Lid website}
The NY Post reports that A Jewish mom and her young son were assaulted in Brooklyn — the fifth anti-Semitic attack this week, police said Friday. Ayana Logan, 42, approached the 34-year-old woman and her 3-year-old son on Avenue U near West 5th street in Gravesend at around 4 p.m. Thursday, yelled out an anti-Semitic slur, and then hit the victim with her bag, cops said. “You f–king Jew, your end is coming!” Logan allegedly shouted, police sources told The Post. The alleged assault comes as cops are investigating at least four other anti-Semitic attacks in the city this week. The New Anti-Semites
These are just the latest examples of the rise of Antisemitism in the United States and across the world. A new report which is embedded below demonstrates how the BDS delegitimization campaign against Israel is fueling such incidents.
As Alan Dershowitz once wrote
BDS is an antisemitic tactic directed only against Jewish citizens and supporters of Israel. Its purported protest is not against Israeli policies but a protest against Israel’s very existence. It has nothing in common with a grassroots protest campaign, because it is led by a small number of extremely well-funded and closely coordinated organizations, who together decide on strategies and tactics – hiding behind a façade of promoting international law and human rights. (…)As someone who has held sacred the right to freedom of expression and assembly all of my life, it is important to say: Discrimination based antisemitism is not an exercise of free speech. It is an offense. And it should concern every person of good will.
This new report, “The New Anti-Semites: The Radicalization Mechanism of the BDS Movement and the Delegimitization Campaign Against Israel” seeks to expose “the BDS faux ‘civil rights’ movement for what it is—a delegitimization campaign with genocidal aims, rather than the human-rights movement that it purports to be.”
The 120-page report was endorsed by 23 Jewish and Christian American NGOs. It comes soon after US President Donald Trump signed an executive order to combat antisemitism on American college campuses. The order clarified the definition of Antisemitism to address the growing hate stemming from BDS.
The report highlights approximately 100 individual instances of Antisemitism within the delegitimization campaign against Israel. Those incidences were carried out by 30 organizations, in addition to leaders and activists. It demonstrates the process the BDS proponents use to radicalize the discourse surrounding Israel. Starting with legitimate criticism, then delegitimization, and finally, blatant antisemitism.
One of the problems with fighting Antisemitism is that until the President’s executive order, the government had no standard definition of what constitutes Antisemitism. According to “The New Anti-Semites,” report BDS groups exploited this lack of definition to declare their campaign as not being antisemitic.
“The same humanitarian pretense affords the campaigns leaders and prominent organizations the ability to express their antisemitic beliefs freely and perpetuate the radicalization of the discourse on Israel. As a result, individuals, although sometimes unknowingly, are being used as pawns to promote hate and lend legitimacy to what is, in fact, a radical antisemitic movement,” it adds. “The legal loophole of anti-Zionism not being explicitly defined as a form of antisemitism must be closed by incorporating the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition into all federal and state anti-discrimination laws.”
Last February, Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs released a report, “Terrorists in Suits” that found that Hamas and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine activists had infiltrated organizations that call for the boycott, divestment, and sanctions of Israel. The report, which examined 13 international BDS organizations, discovered that senior positions were held by 30 terror activists—20 of whom who had actually spent time in prison for their crimes, including murder. The report also determined that global interconnections between BDS and terror organizations were vast, with more than 100 connections being identified.
According to the AMCHA Initiative, a nonpartisan organization that tracks Antisemitism on American campuses. Anti-Semitic acts involving the unfair treatment of Jewish and pro-Israel students or attempts to exclude them from campus activities more than doubled. Per their report, many of those acts calling for the total boycott or exclusion of Zionist students or expression from campus life nearly tripling. Most troubling is that it’s not just the students pushing hatred. The report reveals a dramatic increase in faculty participation in academic BDS promotion and implementation and Israel-related anti-Semitic expression.
Along those lines, the “New Antisemites” report is the latest in a string of mounting evidence that links the BDS movement to terrorist groups:
The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) is the coordinating body for the BDS Movement worldwide. The first and primary member of the BNC is the Council of National and Islamic Forces in Palestine, known outside of the Palestinian territories as the “Palestinian National and Islamic Forces” (PNIF). PNIF was founded by Yasser Arafat and is comprised of five US-designated terrorist organizations including: Hamas, The Popular Front For The Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), The Popular Front – General Command (PFLP-GC), the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF), and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). In addition, members of PNIF include Khalid al-Batsh, senior member of the PIJ and Jamil Mezher, a member of the political bureau of the PFLP. Ghassan Zeidan, now deceased, was a Central Committee member of the PLF and a member of PNIF, as was Iz Al-Din Kasab, a Hamas representative. Further, Haidar Eid, a BNC representative, made it clear that Hamas and other Islamic movements were represented on the BNC.
The New Anti-Semites: The Radicalization Mechanism of the BDS Movement and the Delegimitization Campaign Against Israel” embedded below is a must-read, not only because it exposes what is behind the growth of anti-Jewish hatred in the U.S. and the world, but an additional connection between terrorism and Antisemitism: