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Home > The Israel Lobby's Dangerous Agenda for the US: Attack Free Speech
and Criminalize Resistance
________________________________________
The Israel Lobby's Dangerous Agenda for the US: Attack Free Speech and
Criminalize Resistance
By Max Blumenthal [1] / AlterNet [2]
March 28, 2016
Last week, just a few minutes before the House Foreign Affairs Committee met
for a hearing, one of the Israel lobby's most dependable members of
Congress, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen huddled with twenty supporters of AIPAC,
the lobby's front line organization in Washington. It was a routine affair
for the Florida Republican and her pro-Israel allies, whom she addressed by
their first names. But a member of the public who witnessed the meeting
noticed a startling new agenda was on the table.
The witness told me that Ros-Lehtinen vowed to destroy the mounting
grassroots BDS campaign to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel. To do
so, she pledged to weaken the First Amendment. "Free speech is being used in
our country to denigrate Israel and we need to actively fight against that,"
Ros-Lehtinen declared, according to the source.
Disturbing as her statement might have been, it was consistent with the
rhetoric bellowed out by nearly every presidential contender who appeared on
stage at DC's Verizon Center. Speaking before some 18,000 AIPAC supporters,
Senator Ted Cruz not only pledged [3] to starve educational institutions of
federal funding if they dared to support BDS, he promised that under his
watch, "they will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law." Echoing
Cruz, Republican contender John Kasich announced his intention [4] to "use
the full force of the White House" to destroy what he called "the scourge"
of BDS.
The Democratic frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, was no less draconian.
Reverting to the "Goldwater girl" [5] sensibility of her conservative
college years, and tossing aside her recent appeals to social justice
intersectionality [6], Clinton vowed to punish [7] the campus left for
supporting Palestinian human rights. Slamming BDS as a form of anti-Semitic
hate speech, Clinton offered encouragement to the young, affluent and almost
uniformly white pro-Israel students bused into AIPAC in droves. "Don't let
anyone silence you, bully you or try to shut down debate, especially in
places of learning like colleges and universities," she implored them.
The BDS movement has gathered momentum at a staggering pace since it was
devised by Palestinian civil society groups in 2005. With its call for
grassroots level boycotts to pressure Israel into respecting the human
rights of Palestinians, the movement has spread across European capitals and
found fertile soil on American college campuses. Yet just a few years ago,
AIPAC and its affiliates displayed little interest at all in it. When he
appeared at AIPAC in 2011, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent
his entire speech badgering the Obama administration for not attacking Iran.
He did not feel compelled to mention Palestinians even once. Despite the
influential role played in the 2012 Republican presidential primary by
Sheldon Adelson, a key benefactor of Netanyahu and the Republican
presidential nominee Mitt Romney, BDS was scarcely mentioned by any of the
candidates, nor was it discussed much in mainstream American media.
Almost four years later, with the Iran nuclear deal ratified, the peace
process in shambles and the Green Line that was supposed to separate Israel
from a future Palestinian state fully erased by a settlement movement that
dominates the Israeli government, AIPAC is moving to destroy the last line
of resistance. From Washington to Paris to London, Israel lobbyists are
extracting ritual denunciations of BDS from its political hand puppets and
authoring new laws to forbid its implementation. Repressive legislative
efforts are accompanied by legal subterfuge [8], high-tech sabotage [9],
McCarthy-style online blacklists [10] and carefully orchestrated smear
campaigns [11] against anyone who resists [12]. No target [13] is too small.
With guidance from Jerusalem, where the most right-wing government in
Israeli history is mounting an all-out assault on internal dissent [14], the
lobby has embraced a totalitarian agenda that aims for nothing less than the
criminalization of all political opposition.
On display for the first time at AIPAC, the Israel lobby's
search-and-destroy mission against BDS has already found enthusiastic allies
in governments across the West. In Paris, where President Manuel Valls
vehemently equated anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism [15], a French court of
criminal appeals recently upheld the conviction [16] of a dozen Palestine
solidarity activists for calling for the boycott of Israeli goods. In the
UK, the Conservative government of Prime Minister David Cameron has
introduced legislation [17] to prevent local town councils from divesting
from Israeli products or even from weapons manufacturers. As state
legislatures [18] across the US [19] vote to blacklist companies [20] that
refuse to do business in Israel - a rare and highly unusual instance of
corporate regulation - the University of California board of regents has
taken the unprecedented step of defining anti-Zionism as anti-Jewish
discrimination [21], setting the stage for outlawing a political position
gaining in popularity [22] among Jewish Americans.
In its bid to criminalize the speech of its opponents, the Israel lobby has
sought to formally redefine anti-Semitism according to the "3 D's" formula
conceived by Natan Sharansky [23]. Promoted as a former Soviet dissident who
champions freedom, Sharansky is, in fact, a hardline Likudnik Israeli
politician and promoter of Israel's settlement enterprise [24] who helped
inspire [25] George W. Bush's Middle Eastern conquests. Sharansky's "3 D's"
abandons the traditional understanding of anti-Semitism, redefining it from
the discrimination against Jews as Jews to any opposition to the political
imperatives of the Israeli government, thereby limiting Jewish identity to
the narrow ideological designs of Zionism. Israel lobbyists have
successfully pressured the US State Department [26] to adopt Sharansky's
definition, and after a long slog [27], have pushed the University of
California regents to endorse it as well. If this highly politicized
understanding of anti-Semitism is ever enforced, anyone who has campaigned
against Israeli human rights abuses could face harsh legal recriminations,
even if they identify as Jewish.
Capitalizing on a campaign finance system deregulated by the Citizens United
decision, which defined corporations as people with unlimited rights to free
speech, the Israel lobby has unprecedented leeway to limit the speech of
actual human beings. Leveraging massive donations from Likudnik oligarchs
[28], it is planting cadres at every level of government, turning Congress,
statehouses and student government councils into a unified platform for
crushing resistance. As the veteran AIPAC operative Jonathan Kessler
declared [29], "We're going to make sure that pro-Israel students take over
the student government and reverse [divestment votes]. This is how AIPAC
operates in our nation's capital."
The lobby's campaign extends well beyond crushing Palestine solidarity. In
the years ahead, pro-Israel forces will serve as the leading edge of
reactionary campaigns to fracture any iteration of solidarity between
marginalized social groups. The smears of Jeremy Corbyn [30], the leader of
the British Labour Party, offer a perfect example of how Israel has been
instrumentalized to break down progressive social movements. Elected in one
of the most dramatic grassroots triumphs in recent political history by a
coalition of university students, blue collar workers and immigrants
outraged by deepening austerity and destructive foreign interventions,
Corbyn has come under sustained fire from the neoliberal Blairites who had
dominated Labour since the 1990's. This February, anti-Corbyn elements
opened up a new front with a torrent of thinly sourced allegations that
Labour had suddenly become infected with "an anti-Semitism problem." [31]
Centered around the resignation of a Blairite Oxford University Labour club
leader who complained that Jew-haters disguised as human rights activists
had made his life unbearable, the unconfirmed claims made their way to the
New York Times op-ed page through a column by Roger Cohen entitled, "An
Anti-Semitism of the Left." [32]
Cobbling together a litany of complaints by anxiety-ridden Zionists about
the tide of Palestine activism rising all around them, Cohen bemoaned the
"identity and liberation politics" that now prevail on university campuses.
Just a few paragraphs later, however, Cohen pronounced his devotion to the
Zionist project, insisting that "the Jewish state was needed. That is why I
am a Zionist - now a dirty word in Europe." Yet Cohen does not live in
Israel; he resides instead in an affluent locale in New York City, where
Jews enjoy lavish lifestyles, political power and a sense of security they
could never dream of in Jerusalem. His connection to Zionism is not grounded
in the facts on the ground in Israel-Palestine, but in an identity politics
that only elites like him can enjoy. When forms of speech that reinforce his
identity have come under attack, as when Islamic fanatics massacred the
staff of Charlie Hebdo, he summoned [33] "the entire free world" to
"ruthlessly" defend liberal values. When his identity has been challenged by
the unrelenting demands of Israel's colonial subjects, however, Cohen
quickly abandoned all pretense to enlightenment. He has become the living
embodiment of Phil Ochs' sardonic classic, "Love Me I'm A Liberal" [34]:
"Ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right
of center if it affects them personally," as Ochs sang.
While Israel lobbyists howl about the threat of intersectionality [35] on
campus, they are actively appropriating its identitarian language to
undermine progressive social justice organizing on campus. Mark Yudof, the
former University of California president who tacitly endorsed [36] the
criminal prosecution of Muslim-American students for protesting a speech by
Israel's former ambassador to the US, put the tactic on display by
describing [37] factual claims [38] that Israeli soldiers deliberately kill
civilians as a "microaggression against Jews." At the University of
Michigan, a member of the student governing council justified her vote [39]
against a resolution to divest from corporations involved in the Israeli
occupation on the grounds that it denied "safe spaces" to Jewish students.
And at the University of South California, a pro-Israel student conceded
[40] that the UC regents' decision to classify anti-Zionism as a form of
anti-Semitism was an attack on free speech - but supported it anyway
because, in her view, Jews are "a minority still so unfairly discriminated
against and maligned." Animated by the perceived ethnic slights of a
hyper-privileged overclass, pro-Israel activism is essentially a White Lives
Matter movement protected from accountability by morally inconsistent
liberals. Indeed, many of the Jewish liberals who claim to have battled
South African apartheid [41] and marched alongside the civil rights movement
[42] now seek to destroy a struggle [43] they inspired.
Towards the end of his life, as he watched the occupation of Palestine
deepen and expand, the dissident Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz
described Israel as "the only totalitarian country in the enlightened
world." He was referring to the way that the Jewish state promoted itself as
beacon of liberal democracy while it imposed a brutal, panopticon-style
regime of repression on Palestinians, raiding their homes at night,
shuttering their media outlets, and torturing them at will. Today, Israel is
projecting this regime outwards, recruiting operatives across the West to
eradicate all resistance, even attacking constitutionally protected forms of
protest. Like the country it has enlisted to defend, a borderless
settler-colony that demands special exemption from international law, the
lobby's mission knows no limits. Where the occupation started is well known,
but where will it end?
Max Blumenthal is a senior editor of the Grayzone Project at AlterNet, and
the award-winning author of Goliath [44] and Republican Gomorrah [45]. His
most recent book is The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza. Follow him
on Twitter at @MaxBlumenthal [46].
Share on Facebook Share
Share on Twitter Tweet
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [47]
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ttack-free-speech-and-criminalize-resistance
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/max-blumenthal
[2] http://alternet.org
[3] http://www.policyconference.org/article/transcripts/cruz-2016.asp
[4] http://time.com/4267674/john-kasich-aipac-israel-speech-transcript/
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WycwDYlOCDw
[6]
https://shadowproof.com/2016/02/28/clinton-intersectionality-language-interv
iew/
[7] http://time.com/4265947/hillary-clinton-aipac-speech-transcript/
[8] http://mondoweiss.net/2015/05/standwithus-lawsuit-olympia/
[9]
http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/israel-announces-26-million-cyber-a
ttack-boycott-divestment-and-sanctions-movement
[10]
http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/modern-day-mccarthyists-are-goin
g-extremes-slime-activists-fighting-israels
[11]
http://mondoweiss.net/2016/03/nyt-finally-mentions-goliath-in-rightwing-ad-s
mearing-max-blumenthal/
[12]
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/pro-israel-group-targe
ts-jewish-professor-over-palestine-activism
[13]
http://www.buzzfeed.com/christophermassie/cory-booker-boycott-israel-movemen
t-an-anti-jewish-movement#.jhmz6579B
[14]
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/27/opinion/how-israel-silences-dissent.html
[15] https://vimeo.com/145816483
[16]
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/france-now-more-repressive
-boycott-calls-israel
[17]
https://electronicintifada.net/content/uk-wants-law-stop-councils-boycotting
-israel/15061
[18]
http://www.masslive.com/politics/index.ssf/2015/09/massachusetts_state_repre
senta.html
[19]
http://mondoweiss.net/2016/03/indiana-lawmakers-seek-to-silence-critics-of-i
srael/
[20]
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/new-york-bill-wou
ld-create-official-blacklist-israel-boycott-supporters
[21] http://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/mar16/e1.pdf
[22]
http://forward.com/news/israel/217528/embracing-israel-boycott-jewish-voice-
for-peace-in/
[23] http://forward.com/opinion/4184/antisemitism-in-3-d/
[24]
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2005/03/dissident-interview-natan-sharan
sky
[25]
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/features/want-to-know-what-bush-thinks-
read-sharansky-1.151005
[26] http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/fs/2010/122352.htm
[27]
http://forward.com/opinion/312358/why-u-of-california-should-dump-three-d-de
finition-of-anti-semitism/
[28]
http://forward.com/news/309413/sheldon-adelson-bds-campaign-campus-vegas/
[29]
http://mondoweiss.net/2010/04/aipac-we-make-sure-that-pro-israel-candidates-
take-over-government/#sthash.C6sYv9C8.dpuf
[30]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11749043/Andrew-Gilligan-Jer
emy-Corbyn-friend-to-Hamas-Iran-and-extremists.html
[31]
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/18/labour-antisemitism-jew
s-jeremy-corbyn
[32]
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/08/opinion/an-anti-semitism-of-the-left.html?
_r=0
[33] https://twitter.com/tinyrevolution/status/554294504099155968
[34] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u52Oz-54VYw
[35]
http://forward.com/opinion/328585/bds-and-the-rising-danger-of-intersectiona
lity/
[36]
http://www.thenation.com/article/free-speech-pro-israel-lobby-and-case-irvin
e-11/
[37]
https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/12/14/colleges-should-commit-robus
t-debate-about-middle-east-conflicts-essay?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&u
tm_campaign=06f09dc32e-DNU20151214&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc
04421-06f09dc32e-197769874
[38] http://www.btselem.org/publications/summaries/201501_black_flag
[39] https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/583116374026809344
[40]
http://dailytrojan.com/2016/03/21/uc-recognizes-racism-may-hide-anti-zionism
/
[41]
http://www.thejc.com/news/israel-news/150198/taking-israel-icc-would-exculpa
te-terror-backers
[42]
http://www.jta.org/2015/07/21/news-opinion/politics/dermer-makes-civil-right
s-appeal-to-black-dems-and-other-iran-deal-politics
[43]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-dershowitz/lets-have-a-real-aparthei_b_48
5399.html
[44]
http://www.amazon.com/Goliath-Life-Loathing-Greater-Israel/dp/1568586345
[45] http://republicangomorrah.com/
[46] http://twitter.com/maxblumenthal
[47] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on The Israel Lobby's
Dangerous Agenda for the US: Attack Free Speech and Criminalize Resistance
[48] http://www.alternet.org/
[49] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > The Israel Lobby's Dangerous Agenda for the US: Attack Free Speech
and Criminalize Resistance
The Israel Lobby's Dangerous Agenda for the US: Attack Free Speech and
Criminalize Resistance
By Max Blumenthal [1] / AlterNet [2]
March 28, 2016
Last week, just a few minutes before the House Foreign Affairs Committee met
for a hearing, one of the Israel lobby's most dependable members of
Congress, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen huddled with twenty supporters of AIPAC,
the lobby's front line organization in Washington. It was a routine affair
for the Florida Republican and her pro-Israel allies, whom she addressed by
their first names. But a member of the public who witnessed the meeting
noticed a startling new agenda was on the table.
The witness told me that Ros-Lehtinen vowed to destroy the mounting
grassroots BDS campaign to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel. To do
so, she pledged to weaken the First Amendment. "Free speech is being used in
our country to denigrate Israel and we need to actively fight against that,"
Ros-Lehtinen declared, according to the source.
Disturbing as her statement might have been, it was consistent with the
rhetoric bellowed out by nearly every presidential contender who appeared on
stage at DC's Verizon Center. Speaking before some 18,000 AIPAC supporters,
Senator Ted Cruz not only pledged [3] to starve educational institutions of
federal funding if they dared to support BDS, he promised that under his
watch, "they will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law." Echoing
Cruz, Republican contender John Kasich announced his intention [4] to "use
the full force of the White House" to destroy what he called "the scourge"
of BDS.
The Democratic frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, was no less draconian.
Reverting to the "Goldwater girl" [5] sensibility of her conservative
college years, and tossing aside her recent appeals to social justice
intersectionality [6], Clinton vowed to punish [7] the campus left for
supporting Palestinian human rights. Slamming BDS as a form of anti-Semitic
hate speech, Clinton offered encouragement to the young, affluent and almost
uniformly white pro-Israel students bused into AIPAC in droves. "Don't let
anyone silence you, bully you or try to shut down debate, especially in
places of learning like colleges and universities," she implored them.
The BDS movement has gathered momentum at a staggering pace since it was
devised by Palestinian civil society groups in 2005. With its call for
grassroots level boycotts to pressure Israel into respecting the human
rights of Palestinians, the movement has spread across European capitals and
found fertile soil on American college campuses. Yet just a few years ago,
AIPAC and its affiliates displayed little interest at all in it. When he
appeared at AIPAC in 2011, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent
his entire speech badgering the Obama administration for not attacking Iran.
He did not feel compelled to mention Palestinians even once. Despite the
influential role played in the 2012 Republican presidential primary by
Sheldon Adelson, a key benefactor of Netanyahu and the Republican
presidential nominee Mitt Romney, BDS was scarcely mentioned by any of the
candidates, nor was it discussed much in mainstream American media.
Almost four years later, with the Iran nuclear deal ratified, the peace
process in shambles and the Green Line that was supposed to separate Israel
from a future Palestinian state fully erased by a settlement movement that
dominates the Israeli government, AIPAC is moving to destroy the last line
of resistance. From Washington to Paris to London, Israel lobbyists are
extracting ritual denunciations of BDS from its political hand puppets and
authoring new laws to forbid its implementation. Repressive legislative
efforts are accompanied by legal subterfuge [8], high-tech sabotage [9],
McCarthy-style online blacklists [10] and carefully orchestrated smear
campaigns [11] against anyone who resists [12]. No target [13] is too small.
With guidance from Jerusalem, where the most right-wing government in
Israeli history is mounting an all-out assault on internal dissent [14], the
lobby has embraced a totalitarian agenda that aims for nothing less than the
criminalization of all political opposition.
On display for the first time at AIPAC, the Israel lobby's
search-and-destroy mission against BDS has already found enthusiastic allies
in governments across the West. In Paris, where President Manuel Valls
vehemently equated anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism [15], a French court of
criminal appeals recently upheld the conviction [16] of a dozen Palestine
solidarity activists for calling for the boycott of Israeli goods. In the
UK, the Conservative government of Prime Minister David Cameron has
introduced legislation [17] to prevent local town councils from divesting
from Israeli products or even from weapons manufacturers. As state
legislatures [18] across the US [19] vote to blacklist companies [20] that
refuse to do business in Israel - a rare and highly unusual instance of
corporate regulation - the University of California board of regents has
taken the unprecedented step of defining anti-Zionism as anti-Jewish
discrimination [21], setting the stage for outlawing a political position
gaining in popularity [22] among Jewish Americans.
In its bid to criminalize the speech of its opponents, the Israel lobby has
sought to formally redefine anti-Semitism according to the "3 D's" formula
conceived by Natan Sharansky [23]. Promoted as a former Soviet dissident who
champions freedom, Sharansky is, in fact, a hardline Likudnik Israeli
politician and promoter of Israel's settlement enterprise [24] who helped
inspire [25] George W. Bush's Middle Eastern conquests. Sharansky's "3 D's"
abandons the traditional understanding of anti-Semitism, redefining it from
the discrimination against Jews as Jews to any opposition to the political
imperatives of the Israeli government, thereby limiting Jewish identity to
the narrow ideological designs of Zionism. Israel lobbyists have
successfully pressured the US State Department [26] to adopt Sharansky's
definition, and after a long slog [27], have pushed the University of
California regents to endorse it as well. If this highly politicized
understanding of anti-Semitism is ever enforced, anyone who has campaigned
against Israeli human rights abuses could face harsh legal recriminations,
even if they identify as Jewish.
Capitalizing on a campaign finance system deregulated by the Citizens United
decision, which defined corporations as people with unlimited rights to free
speech, the Israel lobby has unprecedented leeway to limit the speech of
actual human beings. Leveraging massive donations from Likudnik oligarchs
[28], it is planting cadres at every level of government, turning Congress,
statehouses and student government councils into a unified platform for
crushing resistance. As the veteran AIPAC operative Jonathan Kessler
declared [29], "We're going to make sure that pro-Israel students take over
the student government and reverse [divestment votes]. This is how AIPAC
operates in our nation's capital."
The lobby's campaign extends well beyond crushing Palestine solidarity. In
the years ahead, pro-Israel forces will serve as the leading edge of
reactionary campaigns to fracture any iteration of solidarity between
marginalized social groups. The smears of Jeremy Corbyn [30], the leader of
the British Labour Party, offer a perfect example of how Israel has been
instrumentalized to break down progressive social movements. Elected in one
of the most dramatic grassroots triumphs in recent political history by a
coalition of university students, blue collar workers and immigrants
outraged by deepening austerity and destructive foreign interventions,
Corbyn has come under sustained fire from the neoliberal Blairites who had
dominated Labour since the 1990's. This February, anti-Corbyn elements
opened up a new front with a torrent of thinly sourced allegations that
Labour had suddenly become infected with "an anti-Semitism problem." [31]
Centered around the resignation of a Blairite Oxford University Labour club
leader who complained that Jew-haters disguised as human rights activists
had made his life unbearable, the unconfirmed claims made their way to the
New York Times op-ed page through a column by Roger Cohen entitled, "An
Anti-Semitism of the Left." [32]
Cobbling together a litany of complaints by anxiety-ridden Zionists about
the tide of Palestine activism rising all around them, Cohen bemoaned the
"identity and liberation politics" that now prevail on university campuses.
Just a few paragraphs later, however, Cohen pronounced his devotion to the
Zionist project, insisting that "the Jewish state was needed. That is why I
am a Zionist - now a dirty word in Europe." Yet Cohen does not live in
Israel; he resides instead in an affluent locale in New York City, where
Jews enjoy lavish lifestyles, political power and a sense of security they
could never dream of in Jerusalem. His connection to Zionism is not grounded
in the facts on the ground in Israel-Palestine, but in an identity politics
that only elites like him can enjoy. When forms of speech that reinforce his
identity have come under attack, as when Islamic fanatics massacred the
staff of Charlie Hebdo, he summoned [33] "the entire free world" to
"ruthlessly" defend liberal values. When his identity has been challenged by
the unrelenting demands of Israel's colonial subjects, however, Cohen
quickly abandoned all pretense to enlightenment. He has become the living
embodiment of Phil Ochs' sardonic classic, "Love Me I'm A Liberal" [34]:
"Ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right
of center if it affects them personally," as Ochs sang.
While Israel lobbyists howl about the threat of intersectionality [35] on
campus, they are actively appropriating its identitarian language to
undermine progressive social justice organizing on campus. Mark Yudof, the
former University of California president who tacitly endorsed [36] the
criminal prosecution of Muslim-American students for protesting a speech by
Israel's former ambassador to the US, put the tactic on display by
describing [37] factual claims [38] that Israeli soldiers deliberately kill
civilians as a "microaggression against Jews." At the University of
Michigan, a member of the student governing council justified her vote [39]
against a resolution to divest from corporations involved in the Israeli
occupation on the grounds that it denied "safe spaces" to Jewish students.
And at the University of South California, a pro-Israel student conceded
[40] that the UC regents' decision to classify anti-Zionism as a form of
anti-Semitism was an attack on free speech - but supported it anyway
because, in her view, Jews are "a minority still so unfairly discriminated
against and maligned." Animated by the perceived ethnic slights of a
hyper-privileged overclass, pro-Israel activism is essentially a White Lives
Matter movement protected from accountability by morally inconsistent
liberals. Indeed, many of the Jewish liberals who claim to have battled
South African apartheid [41] and marched alongside the civil rights movement
[42] now seek to destroy a struggle [43] they inspired.
Towards the end of his life, as he watched the occupation of Palestine
deepen and expand, the dissident Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz
described Israel as "the only totalitarian country in the enlightened
world." He was referring to the way that the Jewish state promoted itself as
beacon of liberal democracy while it imposed a brutal, panopticon-style
regime of repression on Palestinians, raiding their homes at night,
shuttering their media outlets, and torturing them at will. Today, Israel is
projecting this regime outwards, recruiting operatives across the West to
eradicate all resistance, even attacking constitutionally protected forms of
protest. Like the country it has enlisted to defend, a borderless
settler-colony that demands special exemption from international law, the
lobby's mission knows no limits. Where the occupation started is well known,
but where will it end?
Max Blumenthal is a senior editor of the Grayzone Project at AlterNet, and
the award-winning author of Goliath [44] and Republican Gomorrah [45]. His
most recent book is The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza. Follow him
on Twitter at @MaxBlumenthal [46].
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Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [47]
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ttack-free-speech-and-criminalize-resistance
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/max-blumenthal
[2] http://alternet.org
[3] http://www.policyconference.org/article/transcripts/cruz-2016.asp
[4] http://time.com/4267674/john-kasich-aipac-israel-speech-transcript/
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WycwDYlOCDw
[6]
https://shadowproof.com/2016/02/28/clinton-intersectionality-language-interv
iew/
[7] http://time.com/4265947/hillary-clinton-aipac-speech-transcript/
[8] http://mondoweiss.net/2015/05/standwithus-lawsuit-olympia/
[9]
http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/israel-announces-26-million-cyber-a
ttack-boycott-divestment-and-sanctions-movement
[10]
http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/modern-day-mccarthyists-are-goin
g-extremes-slime-activists-fighting-israels
[11]
http://mondoweiss.net/2016/03/nyt-finally-mentions-goliath-in-rightwing-ad-s
mearing-max-blumenthal/
[12]
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/pro-israel-group-targe
ts-jewish-professor-over-palestine-activism
[13]
http://www.buzzfeed.com/christophermassie/cory-booker-boycott-israel-movemen
t-an-anti-jewish-movement#.jhmz6579B
[14]
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/27/opinion/how-israel-silences-dissent.html
[15] https://vimeo.com/145816483
[16]
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/france-now-more-repressive
-boycott-calls-israel
[17]
https://electronicintifada.net/content/uk-wants-law-stop-councils-boycotting
-israel/15061
[18]
http://www.masslive.com/politics/index.ssf/2015/09/massachusetts_state_repre
senta.html
[19]
http://mondoweiss.net/2016/03/indiana-lawmakers-seek-to-silence-critics-of-i
srael/
[20]
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/new-york-bill-wou
ld-create-official-blacklist-israel-boycott-supporters
[21] http://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/mar16/e1.pdf
[22]
http://forward.com/news/israel/217528/embracing-israel-boycott-jewish-voice-
for-peace-in/
[23] http://forward.com/opinion/4184/antisemitism-in-3-d/
[24]
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2005/03/dissident-interview-natan-sharan
sky
[25]
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/features/want-to-know-what-bush-thinks-
read-sharansky-1.151005
[26] http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/fs/2010/122352.htm
[27]
http://forward.com/opinion/312358/why-u-of-california-should-dump-three-d-de
finition-of-anti-semitism/
[28]
http://forward.com/news/309413/sheldon-adelson-bds-campaign-campus-vegas/
[29]
http://mondoweiss.net/2010/04/aipac-we-make-sure-that-pro-israel-candidates-
take-over-government/#sthash.C6sYv9C8.dpuf
[30]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11749043/Andrew-Gilligan-Jer
emy-Corbyn-friend-to-Hamas-Iran-and-extremists.html
[31]
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/18/labour-antisemitism-jew
s-jeremy-corbyn
[32]
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/08/opinion/an-anti-semitism-of-the-left.html?
_r=0
[33] https://twitter.com/tinyrevolution/status/554294504099155968
[34] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u52Oz-54VYw
[35]
http://forward.com/opinion/328585/bds-and-the-rising-danger-of-intersectiona
lity/
[36]
http://www.thenation.com/article/free-speech-pro-israel-lobby-and-case-irvin
e-11/
[37]
https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/12/14/colleges-should-commit-robus
t-debate-about-middle-east-conflicts-essay?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&u
tm_campaign=06f09dc32e-DNU20151214&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc
04421-06f09dc32e-197769874
[38] http://www.btselem.org/publications/summaries/201501_black_flag
[39] https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/583116374026809344
[40]
http://dailytrojan.com/2016/03/21/uc-recognizes-racism-may-hide-anti-zionism
/
[41]
http://www.thejc.com/news/israel-news/150198/taking-israel-icc-would-exculpa
te-terror-backers
[42]
http://www.jta.org/2015/07/21/news-opinion/politics/dermer-makes-civil-right
s-appeal-to-black-dems-and-other-iran-deal-politics
[43]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-dershowitz/lets-have-a-real-aparthei_b_48
5399.html
[44]
http://www.amazon.com/Goliath-Life-Loathing-Greater-Israel/dp/1568586345
[45] http://republicangomorrah.com/
[46] http://twitter.com/maxblumenthal
[47] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on The Israel Lobby's
Dangerous Agenda for the US: Attack Free Speech and Criminalize Resistance
[48] http://www.alternet.org/
[49] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
