Why is the ardently pro-Israel Jewish senior at Brandeis University, Joshua Nass, offering $5000 to promoters of anti-Israel propaganda?
The answer is, Nass wants whoever deceitfully inserted a news clip of him into a promotional trailer for Israeli Apartheid Week to come out of hiding, admit his wrong doing, and debate Nass in the public square.
Joshua Nass, a native New Yorker, is now in his senior year at Brandeis University, located in Waltham, Massachusetts. Nass is unusual in many ways. He began his own non-profit organization – Voices of Conservative Youth – he has appeared on Fox News dozens of times, and he has his own YouTube channel.
On national television, Nass has debated such hot topics as whether or not Obamacare will lead to job loss, how the Republican party needs to focus more on smaller government and less on social wedge issues, and on the marketing of Obamacare.
On Jan. 2, 2014, Nass was on Varney & Company with Stuart Varney, on the Fox Business Channel.
Nass was on air speaking about the decision of the American Studies Association to boycott Israeli academic institutions, and the response by (at that time, it’s now well more than doubled) more than 90 university presidents, who rejected the ASA’s boycott.
Varney was incredulous that the boycott of Israel proponents had gotten a toehold onto the American college campuses. Nass explained that this effort was rooted in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement, which had met with some success in Europe.
“The BDS movement is rooted in intellectual dishonesty. They try portraying the Israelis as occupiers, there is no such thing as Israeli occupiers, there is no such thing as occupied territories, there is no such thing, in my opinion, as disputed territories,” Nass explained.
Varney says, “Five thousand American academics voted to boycott Israel? It is absolutely incomprehensible, that the only democracy of any sort in the Middle East, the only one, and they are going to boycott it?” and Nass responds, nodding, “it is astounding.”
The clip goes on a bit, with Nass ultimately ending the segment by calling on the universities to fire every academic who voted in favor of the boycott.
Nass thought he was done with that segment, until he was riding in a bus on his way back to Brandeis this past Sunday, Feb. 23. As he was riding, he received an email from someone he knew back in sixth grade. Nass hadn’t heard from the guy in all those years, so when he read the email, which said “Josh, when did you start working for the other side?” he was doubly confused.
The friend from his past forwarded a promotional clip for the upcoming Israel Apartheid Week. In it, Nass appears, nodding, as if he is in agreement with the views of those promoting BDS and Apartheid Week.
Nass was incensed.
Since Sunday, Nass has received dozens of emails, asking him how he could be promoting the BDS movement and supporting those that say Israel is an Apartheid state.
“To be honest, it has been gratifying to publicly and resoundingly reject any association with that despicable movement,” Nass told The Jewish Press on Tuesday afternoon, “and it is helpful to be able to show, point blank, how desperate and despicable are the people behind the BDS movement.”
“Still, it is beyond distasteful to in any way be associated with those who spew such thinly veiled anti-Semitism.”
When asked why he thought the clip of him was inserted into footage that include such outspoken opponents of Israel as Roger Waters, Stephen Hawking and Fareed Zakaria, Nass had an interesting reply.