Rotten Luck

I’m still trying to find some time to do a little historical unreality fiction at the expense of my old friends at JVP, but in the meantime here’s one missed news story and one observation on the Olympia boycott (something I threw out on the Co-op’s message board that I thought my reader might enjoy).

On the newfront, it looks like Johnny Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistols), who will be headlining a music festival in Israel next month, has told critics exactly what they can do with their boycott requests. And as a Pistols fan from the 1980s, I think it’s safe to say that when Johnny Rotten gives you the finger, you know you’ve been fingered.

Regarding the Olympia Co-op, it occurred to me that an interesting paradox is afoot with their decision to boycott Israeli products.

For by the co-op's own standards, boycotts are directed at those who are guilty of something that is legally or morally repugnant. The guilt of the party which is being targeted by boycott is not in dispute, even if the specifics of the punishment must be negotiated.

But if you look at the number of co-op members who are voluntarily boycotting Israel since the boycott vote was taken, that number has not risen at all. Certainly members are being forced to shop in a place where the choice to buy or not buy Israeli goods is no longer available to them, but no members have made a personal choice (moral or otherwise) to boycott the Jewish state. In fact, many members seem to be going out of their way to purchase the boycotted and other Israeli products from other stores in the area (which are volunteering to carry these goods).

In contrast, many members have chosen to boycott an institution: the co-op itself. And by the co-ops own standards, an organization targeted by a boycott is guilty (although it remains to be seen if the co-op is guilty of ethical, moral or legal failures or some other crime).

So if an institution (the Olympia Co-op) that has been judged by its own standards (and members) to be unethical, immoral or possibly something worse is now sitting in judgment of someone else (in this case, Israel), then people need to ask by what standards this condemned institution is using to establish its moral superiority?

Playing Catchup

Having inflicted a month of Presbyterian politics on my reader recently, I’m committed to not overdoing the whole Olympia Co-op thing (even though I suspect this will be one of those seemingly trivial cases that turn into a nationwide lesson on the perils of allowing the BDS virus into an organization).

So what have we missed while the Olympians have been turning from a friendly community into armed camps? Well:

1. Thanks to the tireless effort of Code Pink and friends, Ahava sales have gone through the roof. (Nice to know the whole Buycott thing is making its way so strongly from Canada to the rest of the world.)

2. Can you believe it! Another BDS hoax. In this case, the Ma’an news agency announced that Israel’s Tara dairy company had moved its factories off the Golan Heights in order to avoid having their products boycotted in the West Bank. Quite a coup, except for the fact that Tara has no factories on the Golan Heights and never did. Oops! (Hey, why let reality get in the way of a good story.)

3. Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), those tireless BDS activists, have presented their divestment case to TIAA-CREF. And TIAA-CREF has responded by saying “didn’t we tell you guys to fuck off last year?” (I’m paraphrasing.) Like a bad pickup artist, JVP lists receiving a response from CREF as a great step forward, without highlighting the fact that this response took the form of a Dear John letter.

4. My kids and I have watched both Bill and Ted movies (Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey).

You know, those last two items give me an idea. (Are you pondering what I’m pondering?)

Stay tuned…

Olympia Co-op – Consensus

I must admit to a feeling of bewilderment.

As those of you who have been following the Olympia Co-op boycott story on this blog know, I have taken for granted that the Co-op followed its own rules when deciding whether to take part in the latest BDS project to get food co-ops to shun Israeli products.

This is what critics of the boycott were told whenever they brought up the fact that the organization’s membership was excluded from that decision. In fact, I had even urged others to take boycott proponent’s word that procedures were followed properly, asking us all to apply the Principle of Charity in this matter, as well as other matters related to the controversy.

But recent information has come my way which forced me to do something I (possibly naively) chose not to do originally: take a close look at the co-op’s policies on the matter.

If you read through this document (which the co-op itself has posted in order to explain the policies behind its Israel boycott decision) you will see no role for the organization’s board in the decision-making process related to boycotts. Rather, the power to declare a boycott rests solely with the store’s staff and the threshold they must reach to declare an official boycott is consensus. In fact, the only sentence in the policy that specifies where decision-making power rests is the following:

“The department manager will make a written recommendation to the staff who will decide by consensus whether or not to honor a boycott.”

Now in the world most of us live in, consensus is defined as “an opinion or position reached by a group as a whole.” Under this definition, consensus is either/or. Either the group as a whole agrees to something and thus consensus has been reached, or it fails to do so, in which case there is no consensus.

The recent information I have received is that the staff, in fact, DID NOT reach a consensus on whether to boycott Israeli goods. One would think that, by the Co-op’s own published policies, no consensus translates to no boycott. But apparently in this case, no consensus meant that the board intervened to declare one on its own.

A fair-minded commenter on this subject pointed out that the Co-op’s bylaws establish as one of the board’s duties (#16) to “resolve organizational conflicts after all other avenues of resolution have been exhausted” and indicated that this by-law allowed the board to make the boycott decision in light of no consensus being reached by the staff. But this flies in the face of the boycott policy itself which seems to establish “no consensus” as a legitimate position which would translate to a “no go” choice regarding a particular boycott measure.

With all due respect to the person making the case that the conflict-resolution clause of the by-laws gives the board the power to make its own decision in the absence of staff consensus, if we take this proposition to its logical conclusion then anytime the staff cannot reach consensus to go ahead with a controversial matter that is allegedly its choice to make, the board can make that decision for them, a position that essentially makes the staff decision-making power established in the co-op’s boycott policies meaningless.

At this point, I believe everyone deserves a detailed description of what exactly took place within the Olympia Co-op to determine the level of consensus within the staff and (if relevant) what "avenues of resolution" were tried and exhausted before the board set the organization's boycott policy on its own. Members certainly deserve this information, but so do we outsiders who are now dealing with Olympia’s decision as it is being broadcast around the world as a call for other organizations to also join the BDS program.

Co-op by-laws also include clause #14 which says board members must “maintain free-flowing communication between the Board, Staff, committees, and the membership”.

Let the free-flow of communication begin.

Olympia Boycott – Worse Than You Think

At first, I assumed the Olympia Co-op boycott was just another case of a well-meaning, but naïve organization giving a boycott group a friendly hearing and ending up becoming their hand-puppet. But the more I learn about what’s been going on at Olympia, the more this begins to look like one of the most appalling cases of BDS infection I’ve ever come across.

To start with, at the meeting where the boycott was decided (a meeting that included 40+ BDS supporters and not one member of the community that could represent a differing opinion – a shocking situation in and of itself) an early draft of the boycott proposal apparently anticipated that this action would divide the organization’s membership.

In other words, the co-op’s leaders not only were aware that an Israel boycott could be divisive within the membership, but fully anticipated the damage their action would cause. But they did it anyway, taking into account only the opinions of the BDSers in the room and ignoring the 15,000 other members the board was allegedly elected to represent.

Now boycott supporters have grown fond of pointing out that the organization’s boycott policy does not require boycotts to be put to a member vote (which is apparently true), indicating that the group’s leaders alone have the power to make these decisions. But these leaders must also abide by the organization’s foundational bylaws which include the following explicit board responsibilities:

14. maintain free-flowing communication between the Board, Staff, committees, and the membership;
15. adopt policies which promote achievement of the mission statement and goals of the Cooperative [one such goal including: “support[ing] efforts to increase democratic processes”]

In other words, while co-op boycott policy gives the leadership the power to impose a divisive boycott, the board’s use (or misuse) of this power to do something they knew in advance would divide the membership seems to be in clear violation of the organization’s fundamental bylaws. Did the board “maintain free flowing communication” with the membership over an issue they knew in advance would be divisive? No. Did they support “democratic processes” when they handed everything but the final vote on this decision (including wording of their boycott resolution and veto power over what products fell under the boycott) to an unelected BDS group? No again.

Since the vote was adopted, there also seems to be a concerted effort to portray all critics of that decision as crazed “right wingers” whose only response has been to threaten the staff and members of the organization. And from material that’s been forwarded to me, it seems as though the call has gone out to the global BDS movement to parrot this characterization of boycott opponents.

As an outsider myself, I can only express mild irritation that arguments I’ve been making (which I hope have been reasoned, regardless of whether or not they convince) are being ignored or mischaracterized as “right wing” taunts. But within the organization, what is one to make of the fact that one set of members (boycott supporters) are calling on outside BDS activists to smear fellow members (boycott critics) who don’t toe the BDS party line?

Olympian Folly - In Whose Name?

As noted (and accepted) yesterday, decisions regarding who and what the Olympia Co-op boycotts apparently rests solely with the co-op’s board. I say “apparently” because my only source for this information is co-op members defending that decision online. But the Principle of Charity described yesterday means one should treat such sources of factual information as reliable.

Given this, it’s safe to concede that the board acted within the organization’s rules. (There has also been some debate as to whether the co-op is violating US anti-boycott law in its decision, a less interesting question to me right now, albeit one I’ve taken up in the past.)

So if the co-op’s leadership is playing by the rules, by what right can members (and non-members like myself) be complaining?

Well consider the content of that decision for a moment. Some defenders of the boycott decision claim that we critics are interfering with the free choices of others. But remember that the Oly Co-op board did not make a decision regarding its own personal choice. Each member of the board, indeed each member of the co-op (like all of us) is free to buy or not buy whatever it pleases. If a member wants to not buy Israeli crackers in protest of this summer’s Flotilla incident, a free society allows them to make that decision, just as it would allow another member to stop buying Turkish candy in protest of Turkey’s role that incident.

But the co-op’s board is not making a personal choice. Rather, they are restricting the personal choice of others, just as they would be if they chose to ban all Turkish products, or all products containing honey, or all products that began with the letter “P” from the shelves. Now the claim is that the co-op’s board is allowed to restrict member’s choices based on its own political decisions regarding whom to boycott. But even if the organization’s bylaws allow this exercise of power, the organization’s leadership has an extra obligation - an ethical and moral obligation - to ensure that this limitation of member freedom is in the interest of more than just themselves (or of a loud but potentially small minority of members demanding the board begin a boycott).

More importantly, Oly’s boycott (which even its initiators claim covers a trivial number of Israeli goods) was meant from the beginning to be symbolic. It’s a political act to demonstrate that the Olympia Co-op, as an organization, finds a nation so repugnant that it must be punished economically (even if only in small symbolic ways). Indeed, the message being delivered worldwide by supporters of the boycott is that this is a significant event, a great step forward in the boycotter’s plan to have Israel branded an Apartheid state and punished accordingly.

In other words, the board was not voting on a simple boycott but was rather voting to add the name of the organization to the worldwide BDS program which has as its mission not the furthering of the goals of the Co-op movement, but the furthering of its own goals to de-legitimize the Jewish state. And they were making that decision not in their own individual names, but in the name of everyone who has ever been a member.

Their action, their vote, declared that this boycott represents the Co-op as a whole, not just the board but its members. Going even further, this board is simply the latest of many that have been elected since the Co-op was founded in the 1970s. But in making their decision, they are staking the reputation of the organization, a reputation built on the hard work of hundreds if not thousands of people over the course of decades, to the BDS message.

As I’ve been describing for years, this is what the BDS movement does: it tries to get well-known institutions to take part in some form of boycott or divestment so that the BDSers can claim to be speaking in the name of others, leveraging the reputation of a famous university, a age-old church, a well-known municipality, a popular retailer in order to punch above their own limited weight.

So even if the rules allow the Co-op’s leadership to do so, those leaders have an extra level of obligation to make sure they are not making a statement on a controversial matter in the name of a broad membership whose opinions they do not know. And they have an even greater obligation to not hand over the reputation of the organization – a 30+ year reputation they cannot claim to own by simply being the latest in a long line of elected boards – to the boycotters, simply because they are told (again, loudly) that BDS is their only moral choice.

If we take it as given that the formal rules allow the board to do what it did, we also have to take it as given (seeing how bitterly many members oppose the decision) that this choice was not made after gaining consent (or even talking with) members before attaching the Olympia Co-op’s name and reputation to a project many members find repulsive.

This is not the first time that BDSers have gotten their way by maneuvering the leaders of an organization to act behind the backs of the people they are supposed to represent. If you read through the divestment tale of Somerville, MA (the first BDS battle I fought), you’ll find the same dynamic.

Now Somerville survived that ordeal by coming to its senses after the doors were thrown open to outside opinions and a spotlight shown on the divestment advocates trying to manipulate the city leaders to hand Somerville’s centuries-old reputation to them before the citizenry found out what they were doing. One hopes the same dynamic eventually takes hold in Olympia.

The Principle of Charity

I had forgotten about the “Action Alert” effect whereby activists on both sides of a BDS debate call on their bases to write to decision makers at organizations like the Olympia Co-op, as well as to flood the comments section of news stories covering a boycott story like the one unfolding in Washington. So my prediction that comments would level off at the 100-150 mark (at least in the newspaper) has already been proven wrong.

With so many things being posted in reaction to the Co-op’s boycott decision, it’s tempting to shine a spotlight on clear anti-Semitic comments such as one that added the collapse of the Global Economy to the list of Israel/Jewish crimes that should be punished by BDS. Similarly, BDS advocates would probably like to highlight the stray bigoted comment posted by an anti-boycott critic to “prove” that their opponents are motivated by racism. But while throwing the other side’s nastiest anonymous commentary into your opponent’s face (while ignoring extremism on your own side) has become a familiar online debating tactic, it misses two important contributions (one broad, one narrow) that online (mostly anonymous) commentary can make to a more enlightening debate.

On the broad side, while no single anti-Israel or anti-Palestinian nastygram says that much, in aggregate the aggressive and frequently ugly debate taking place online is a good indication of what Olympia is likely to experience throughout the community in the coming weeks and months. Whenever a BDS project pitches its tents, it’s just a matter of time before the entire community degenerates into a flesh-and-blood version of an online flame war. So look to the bulletin boards to see what the Co-op’s board has given as a gift to the organization’s membership.

On a more narrower front, an active online debate does allow many if not all arguments about a controversial subject to appear in one place and while some of these arguments may be spurious or weak, many (on both sides of an issue) can be logical and strong. But are partisans on either side of a debate under any obligation to focus on their opponent’s strong arguments, rather than mercilessly take apart their weak ones? In fact (at least philosophically) they are.

In philosophy, there is a “Principle of Charity” which requires participants in debate to extend certain “benefits of the doubt” to one another. One manifestation of this principle would be to consider an opponent’s arguments in the best possible light. In a detailed discussion of this principle, the philosopher Nigel Warburton uses this example to illustrate the concept:

“… in a debate about animal welfare, a speaker might state that all animals should be given equal rights. One response to this would be that that would be absurd, because it would be nonsensical, for example, to give giraffes the right to vote and own property since they would not understand either concept. A more charitable approach would be to interpret the claim ‘All animals should have equal rights’ as being a shorthand for ‘All animals should have equal rights of protection from harm’ and then to address that.”

Of course, the Principle of Charity does not (and should not) be automatically applied to every argument and every debater. Assuming the best of a proponent of perpetual motion machines or conspiracy theories, for example, could lend legitimacy to arguments which are, on their face, simply bad or mendacious, requiring no further interpretation generous or otherwise. At the same time, much of our political debate could be made much calmer and more illuminating with a healthy dose of this Principle.

Applying the Principle of Charity to the debate taking place at Olympia (or Oly as local fans seem to call it) does not mean agreeing to the boycotter’s mendacious presentation of Middle East history or accepting their self-serving explanation of why they demand only Israel (and not far greater human rights abusers) be boycotted. Nor does it require us to shut up in the face of emotive arguments, whether those take the form of photos of blood Palestinian babies or the invocation of the dead Rachel Corrie. Rather, it requires us to search past manipulative rhetorical for an argument that is reasonable, compelling and unquestionably true.

In this case, the strongest argument I’ve come across was in response to something I posted contrasting the behavior of the Oly Co-op board with the decision by a Co-op in Davis to reject similar boycott calls. While I happen to think that Davis’ decision was based on sound judgment that Olympia would have been well served to listen to, at least one commenter has pointed out that Oly is not Davis and that the rules of the Olympia Co-op make it clear that the board has full authority to make decisions regarding whom to boycott with minimal requirements to determine if such a boycott represents the will of the membership.

In this argument, boycott supporters are saying something that is absolutely true (those are apparently the rules at the Oly Co-op) and compelling (every organization, after all, gets to make its own rules after which it is only obligated to apply those rules consistently – which the Co-op has done). So what is there to say in response to such a sound argument?

Quite a bit, as it turns out, which I’ll get to tomorrow.

BDS's Latest Victim

OK - Another institution has decided to take the plunge into the BDS waters. So let’s all set our watches for what is going to happen next.

The Olympia Co-op story is similar to Somerville and Berkeley in that the decision to join the world-wide boycott movement against Israel was made by a group of leaders (the co-op’s board) working closely with BDS activists to craft their decision, but taking into account virtually no one else that the board was supposedly elected to represent.

Now co-op rules apparently say that the board can boycott anyone they like without consulting the membership. So if we are to get into a debate about the board’s responsibility (which we will on another day), it will be a discussion of propriety and judgment vs. breaking the law or the organization’s own rules.

For now, however, we can classify Olympia as comparable to those other BDS “victories” where members of an organization, church, or city wake up one morning to discover that a community in which they’ve been a member for years is now being touted on Al Jazeera as holding a political opinion (such as the BDS Israel=Apartheid analogy) that many members finds abhorrent .

Apparently a meeting will be held in early August to discuss the decision the Co-op has already made regarding handing their reputation over to the boycott brigade. If history is any guide, this will lead to a second meeting and then finally a third when the co-op (which by now will have realized the consequences of their original decision) will have to vote to reject or double-down on this ill-conceived boycott project.

So I predict three meetings in August and September that will be increasingly populous, increasingly long, and increasingly shrill, with people who once smiled at each other in the food aisles shoving photos of bloody babies into one another’s faces, after giving many speeches that include such phrases as “blood on your hands,” “international law demands” and (of course) “Speaking as a Jew…”.

You can all get a little taste of what the Olympia Co-op’s board has wrought unto the organization by scanning the comments section of the Co-op itself, the local newspaper and this poll. As usual, comments on this subject outnumber any other discussion by a factor of 10x heading to 30-50x. And (equally as usual) those comments have degenerated into accusations of bad faith, apologia for murderers, bigotry and criminality (directed against Israel and its supporters, and the boycotters and their supporters). Given the small size of the Olympia community, I predict these comments will top out at the 100-150 mark (vs. the usual 300-500), but it should give everyone a taste of what delightful topics of conversation are in store for the community for the rest of the year.

And so BDS injects its toxins into another institution. And, as usual, it’s a friendly, welcoming organization that prides itself on its commitment to justice and human rights, even if its political choices are based more on moral vanity and political fads than an understanding of facts and issues.

While I’m no fan of politics based on striking poses, I must say there are worse sins in the universe than vain overreach. Which is why I’m left feeling kind of sorry for the Olympia Co-op over what is about to hit their community due to the ill-conceived decisions of a few, acting at the behest of a not-so-innocent BDS “movement” that is smacking its lips at the thought of dragging the circus to another community, no matter what the cost.