GFM/BDS – Screwing Your Allies

In Boston, the Gaza Freedom Marchers came, they annoyed some New Year’s celebrants, they gathered under a banner asking “AMERICA STOP FIGHTING FOR THE JEW” (later, slightly modified with the addition of “ish STATE” – possibly written using a large red crayon).

In San Francisco, they donned foam-rubber puppet heads and frightened children walking by the Israeli consulate. And in solidarity with their fellow Gaza Freedom Marchers in Cairo, they held a series of two-hour hunger strikes (no doubt forgoing appetizers once the hunger strikers took a break for lunch).

But it was in Cairo that the true believers gathered in force, having spent thousands of dollars each to travel to Egypt, only to wind up making their “historic” Gaza Freedom March around their hotel lobbies. And what was the message they delivered to the world? Only the now-obvious fact that Gaza has two borders (which means that the “siege” the GFMers were protesting could end immediately once Hamas started using their Egyptian border to import food rather than missile parts).

Given the self-congratulations ringing in the Israel-bashing corners of the blogosphere, one would have thought that the GFM’s attempt to re-ignite the anti-Israel hysteria that accompanied last year’s Gaza conflict consisted of more than a concentrated fiasco in Cairo and some self-indulgent street theater in major metropolitan areas like Waterville, Maine.

But it all begins to make sense once you realize that theater is the point of it all. There is a reason the Internet is filled with photos of Code Pink “activists” stripped to their underwear, smearing themselves with Ahava mud in department stores, despite the fact that this particular form of “direct action” has barely ever taken place. It’s because those photos are the first and foremost goal of such activities. The purpose of Code Pink is to make its members feel significant, important, edgy. And if over a thousand people have to go broke dragging themselves to Cairo only to get arrested, beaten or ignored, that’s a small price to pay to let the Code Pink crew continue to dwell in their fantasy world.

It’s become more and more clear with each passing year that participants in BDS (including the Gaza Freedom March leadership now looking for a new activity to distract the world from their recent Cairo fuck-up) could not care less about Palestinians or any of the “downtrodden” in whose names they claim to speak. But with the GSM/Galloway/Code Pink fiasco starting out the year, we’ve turned a new page where the BDS mixture of self-indulgence, indifference to others and complete lack of any sense of consequence for their decisions is now primarily targeted at the rank and file participants in their own movement.