Giving BDS the Fingers

A recent commenter left a note which struggled with a central question many of us deal with in our activist lives, namely: how do we contend with a movement like BDS which is perfectly comfortable bending the truth and shredding the rules of propriety to get its way?

Should we become like them and try to exploit the civic and religious organizations to which we belong, dragging them into the Middle East conflict for our benefit, regardless of the pain that might cause other people? Should we infiltrate and trash other people’s cultural events, assuming that our political projects trump every other imaginable human need? Should we throw pies at anti-Israel speakers or assault them verbally (or even violently) and then hide behind rhetoric that says destroying other people’s ability to be heard is a matter of our free speech rights?

The thing is, every Israel supporter I’ve ever dealt with just does not have it in him or her to behave in the same selfish, irresponsible and dishonest way that Israel’s attackers often do. And I don’t think this is a bad thing. Yes, it means that we frequently have to respond to the other side’s nonsense rather than take the initiative ourselves. But if you look at the state of Israel (free, successful, united on the big things) vs. it’s opponents (unfree, failing in all possible measures, murderously divided), you begin to see that refusing to play by the rules of civic society comes at a very high cost.

Which is not to say that we can’t take the initiative ourselves and have fun doing it, especially when confronted by the same old dreary assaults that Israel’s demonizers trot out year after year after year, such as the shrill but discredited BDS movement and the long-in-the-tooth Israel Apartheid Week (yawn).

Take the latter for example (please!). For, as it turns out, those Apartheid Week clowns have scheduled their campaign right smack-dab at the beginning of Buycott Israel Month!

Buycott Month is actually a little project cooked up by some local activists working together with the hugely successful Buycott Israel program in Canada. As you can see from the Success Stories section of the Buycott Month site, there’s not been a single instance of boycott directed at Israeli products that didn’t end up turning into a massive sellout of Israeli goods and an equally massive humiliation for the forces of BDS.

With Buycott Month, we decided to ratchet the fun level up another notch, asking people to send us their own stories of buying and enjoying Israeli products, breaking a boycott, making an investment or taking part in a counter-protest of Apartheid or BDS activity during the month of March. And tying these tales together will be the “Finger-B,” (shown above) a gesture you can make to let the world know that you’re not just enjoying what Israel has to offer, but giving BDS “The Fingers” in the process.

The site provides an easy way to send in your pictures and stories, and it would be great if we can fill it up with 20-30 or more tales during the month of March.

So stop by, act up, spread the word, tell us your story and – most of all – remember, always remember that we’re not only right compared to the endless wrongs of BDS, but that we also know how to do our activists activities with panache.

Descend Tutu

My son started taking ballet lessons about a year ago. I suspect he might not continue it forever, but I can attest to the fact that all of his physical activities (most recently his skiing ability) have improved markedly since he first donned the leotard, and he’s really enjoyed the professional ballet performances he’s gone to in the last twelve months.

Which is why I’m glad we don’t live in Vermont.

A bit of a non-sequitor? Well consider this. Last weekend, the BDS “community” in Burliington, VT seems to have had a revelation. Yes, their attempts to get colleges and universities to divest over the last ten years have ended in nothing but failure. Yes, the Mainline Protestant churches that once flirted with divestment have since abandoned BDS, with democratic majorities of church members turning down divestment by margins of 10-20:1. Yes, every progressive community in North America where BDS has been proposed has rejected those proposals, reducing the boycotters to creating pretend victories in the absence of real ones. But the Divestniks still have one ace up their sleeves: They can still behave like assholes.

In the present case, this assholiness manifested itself in a series of protests in several American cities where the Israeli Ballet Company was performing. In Worcester, MA and Brooklyn, NY this took the form of protests and a little street theater outside the avenues where the group was visiting. But in Vermont, the anti-Israel partisans had the “courage” to stand up during the performance, wave their banners, shout their slogans and live to blog about their “brave and subversive” assault on The Man (or, in this case, several men wearing tights).

If one had to invent a form of political activism that promised zero risk and negative results, you’d be hard pressed to come up with anything better than badgering the attendees of a ballet performance.

As a physical, unspoken art form, dance demands a certain quiet appreciation from audience members, and the long, somewhat rarified history of ballet means those who attend are more likely than most to understand and value the virtues of respectful, appreciative silence. Which is why jumping up and shouting “Free Palestine” in a crowded ballet theater demonstrates nothing so much as the BDSers single most valuable asset: their utter lack of propriety.

Why is it that so many anti-Israel propaganda events involve shredding the fabric of civil behavior? Activist teachers dragging propaganda organizations into their classrooms; churches being morally blackmailed into lending their name to political stances completely out of touch with member’s desires; the trashing of artistic events; the booing of pro-Israel speakers off-stage; these are the hallmarks of BDS as we enter the first year of its second decade.

No doubt, those who choose to behave in this manner can construct a self-serving chain of logic that justifies their activity. The Israeli government subsidizes the country’s ballet. Israelis want their country to be known for something other than the Arab-Israeli conflict. So, QED, those who chose to shout down ballet dancers are simply ensuring that “The Conflict” stay front and center whenever Israel is involved in any conversation.

But if the personal (or, in this case, the cultural) must always be political, what limits does that place on anyone’s behavior? And can anyone follow this twisted line of reasoning? Should I be allowed to stand below a mosque minaret with a megaphone, shouting condemnations of Islam’s treatment of women and homosexuals whenever the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer? How about showing up at a Muslim circumcision ceremony, waving a banner and screaming at the top of my lungs the moment the knife is hitting flesh?

Needless to say, the type of disruptive activity that happened in Vermont (and the mental gymnastics needed to justify it) is pretty much a one -way street. For those that have dedicated their lives to delegitimizing the Jewish state, nothing matters more than their fantasy self perception as edgy and subversive warriors dedicated to “direct action” (even if – or especially if – such action is directed against people who are guaranteed to never return the favor).

Results

Apologies to my reader for the quiet around here the last week. In addition to vacation, I’ve been working on a little project that should be of interest to the anti-BDS community which I’ll be writing about sometime next week.

In the meantime, some quick thoughts about a topic I’ve mentioned here before: how to best measure the success (or failure) of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) “movement.”

In thinking about this subject, I was reminded of the one and only performance review I ever received at work. Having led my own company for 20+ years, I was anxious to be on the receiving end of one of the external reviews I had been giving others for so long once I sold my company and now had a (what’s the word for it?) oh yes, a “boss.”

It helped that I was growing fond of this relatively new supervisor, and was sure she’d be impressed by the fact that my division was the only one in the company that had managed to hit its numbers in the midst of the 2008 economic meltdown.

Imagine my surprise when that achievement was met with a grade of “Meets Expectations.” Her explanation was simple: we had promised to hit a certain threshold of revenue, we accomplished that goal, and thus we met the expectation we had set for ourselves. The fact that we had done so under extremely challenging economic conditions, and were the only group to have accomplished this goal in the company did not change the fact that the results we had obtained were no more than what we had set out to do at the start of the year.

I think about this lesson in consistency and the importance of measureable results when looking at how the BDS movement not only asks it be graded on a steep curve, but also demands that it be allowed to constantly change the terms under which its’ success is to be judged.

After all, the BDS “movement” started close to ten years ago at the now notorious Durban I conference. And during that period, it certainly achieved some early successes (raising the profile of BDS on college campuses and getting divestment passed within Mainline Protestant churches), only to see those successes collapse as colleges across the country rejected their divestment calls, and churches voted down divestment by margins of 95-100%.

So what did divestment advocates do? They simply erased those troubling first five years of their project, and now claim that all of their activity was inspired by “a request from Palestinian Civic Society,” by which they mean the PACBI organization which began in 2005. Now I’ve have issues with PACBI which I’ve discussed in detail here and here, but even putting those aside, a restart of BDS in the second half of the last decade turns out to be an ideal way to flush half a decade of failure down the memory hole.

Divest-niks also seem to want to be given not an E, but an A+++ for effort rather than be graded based on any actual success.

They spend a decade calling for colleges and universities to divest. None do. But then the BDSers insist their movement be judged by the fact that they still have people on the ground pushing their project after so many years of failure.

Boycotts target Israeli products in the US and Canada. Counter-boycott activities drive up sales of Israeli goods by hundreds of thousands of percentage points. And yet the Internet is strewn with stories, photos and videos of boycotters hailing not any achievement, but simply their own existence. And whenever they do announce (or, more frequently, thunder) a “triumph” (like Hampshire College), more often than not this turns out to be a complete fraud.

When you add it all up, the BDS crowd seems to want to be given credit for simply talking, writing and doing stuff, in hopes that no one will peer behind their curtain of words and hand-waving and notice what a bust their “movement” has been, even after a decade of intense effort.

So here’s a challenge the divestment crew can take up if they want to prove the potency of their squalid little project. In December of last year, Israeli exports were up 30%, representing billions of dollars in new income for the Jewish state. Now by the boycotters own standards (which says economic activity translates to political support), the world loves Israel several billion dollars more than it did in November of last year (when the BDS movement was telling us all their support was exploding worldwide). That being the case, perhaps the divestment crew can tell us what they accomplished in December to match this figure. Comments remain open for their input.

Film Boycott Update

For this blog's 100th post, I wanted to provide updates on the James Cameron-Israeli film boycott flap. The latest news come from The King of the World himself who basically tells the boycotters in no uncertain terms to fuck off (I'm paraphrasing).

Check out the latest here and here.

Oh and I just noticed that his colleagues at York University are none-too pleased with the originator of this hoax and have overwhelmingly voted to take part in the Israeli film program their colleague was calling on the film world to boycott.

As with all attempts at cultural boycott directed at Israel, every action by BDS activists creates an overwhelming and opposite reaction.

BDS and the One State Fantasy

I’ve been meaning to write about an intriguing interview with Hussein Ibish that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly a few months ago.

Now Ibish is a highly controversial character, going back to his days at U Mass where, as both a student and teacher, he was notorious for bullying his allies and baiting (including Jew-baiting) his political foes.

That said, the Arab-Israeli conflict creates partisans of all stripes and Ibish clearly represents an “old-school” Leftist critique of Israel (and the US), one that rejects the “New” Leftism that has found common cause with reactionary fundamentalist Islam within the so-called “Red-Green Alliance”.

This perspective puts Ibish in a unique position to focus a critical eye on the so-called Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions “movement” (BDS), especially as it relates to what he refers to as the “fantasy” of a One State Solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In Ibish’s view, the One State idea (in which Israelis and Palestinians would somehow turn themselves into a jointly-managed nation, similar to Belgium) is based on two ideas so divorced from reality they could only be held by certain college students, faculty or the mentally deranged.

First, he rightly points out that a One-State solution would require both parties to agree to such a plan and Israelis (recognizing what would likely happen to them as a religious minority in the Muslim world) reject such a plan almost unanimously.

He then goes on to point out that even if Israelis could somehow be convinced that a One-State solution was somehow in their interest, those who advocate such a One-State plan have chosen not to convince Israelis about their proposal but to bully them via the mechanism of BDS.

Think about this for a minute. Putting aside everything that you or I might dislike about the One-State agenda, at the very least advocacy for such a cause would require engagement with all parties, including Israelis. But these same One-Staters have made it clear they have zero interest in such an engagement, only the willingness to issues threats of boycott and sanction which can only serve to increase the Israeli public’s disinterest in their ideas and distrust in their motives.

This is where fantasy plays such a powerful role, and I found myself appreciating Ibish’s identifying of the fantasy factor in recent anti-Israeli polemics. As I’ve been noting since this blog began over a year ago, most BDS “successes” have proven to be failures or hoaxes, sustained as successes only in the imaginations of BDS advocates gripped in the fantasy of their own political relevance and potency.

But, as Ibish points out, the fantasy goes deeper than this. For their entire endeavor is based on the premise that by hectoring Israelis of all political stripes (including boycotts of Israeli academics who have traditionally supported the Palestinian cause), by threatening economic sanction and political isolation, they will bring Israelis to their knees and force them to take action that would threaten their national and, very likely, personal survival.

Now many nations throughout history have had to withstand political, military and economic sieges for years and decades on end. The siege of Israeli by its numerous and powerful neighbors is simply an extreme example of this phenomenon. And if you’ve withstood such a siege for so long, the notion that a Danish retirement fund selling of a few thousand shares of Israeli equities represents a threat (especially at a time when international investment in the Jewish state has never been higher) seems ludicrous, or – more accurately – something only a fantasist can believe.

Ibish, whatever his other faults, is no fantasist. And even if his goal is to simply turn his political allies towards more practical and realistic ways to win out against the Jewish state, his analysis is sound and compelling, regardless of his motives.

Of course, it’s possible that Ibish is on the Road to Damascus taken by the most noteworthy Leftist iconoclast of our generation: Christopher Hitchens, a man who defies political pigeonholing (at least to those unread in Orwell). While I’ve not seen anything that demonstrates Ibish possesses Hitchens’ breadth of experience and intellectual firepower, he has certainly demonstrated a willingness to hold a mirror up to the stupid and nasty face of BDS and a readiness to give “the movement’s” dirty laundry a well-needed public airing.

Cameron BDS-Hoaxers: We're a Joke!

Well, it looks like the James Cameron – Boycott story has hit the papers. And, surprisingly, the people responsible for circulating this letter (who never fail to pipe up whenever one of their beloved film boycotts is the subject of media coverage) have chosen to go mum (at least with regard to answering reporter’s inquiries).

Apparently, the paper was able to obtain an e-mail that contained one of the boycotter’s explanations for this apparent hoax: It was a joke.

Just to be clear, the person explaining the behavior of the “Team Boycott” is a fully grown adult. I need to mention this because I occasionally have to deal with similar excuses for inexcusable behavior, but usually from my children (both of whom are below the 11-year-old age threshold needed to attend Hogwarts).

It was a joke, it was a parody, it was a pun… That’s their response to why a letter sent to film schools, written in a deadly earnest tone, asking them shun their fellow film makers because of their Israeli nationality, concluded with fake signatures from not just Cameron, but Jane Fonda as well.

“Take me seriously!!!” cries out from every sentence of their original letter. “We care about the suffering masses more than you do! We are the moral lodestone you should follow! Do what we say because we are serious thinkers, serious activists, serious people!”

And then when their hand gets caught in the cookie jar, and this turns out to be just the latest in a long, long line of boycott-and-divestment related hoaxes, their only response is to say “just kidding” and pretend the whole thing never happened.

I’ve written before about how many BDSers seem to live in a fantasy world constructed to make them feel far more significant than they in fact are. But dwelling too long in such a land seems to be leading to an extreme case of self-infantilization – at least among certain university film professors.

A Hampshire Hoaxy Anniversary Special

It almost escaped my notice that Feb 7 was the anniversary of the great Hampshire Divestment Hoax, that is until I discovered this stunningly self-aggrandizing announcement by the jesters who started it all: Hampshire’s Students for Justice in Palestine (HSJP).

So I said to myself:”Self, how best to mark this important date?”

Should I Fiske the SJP’s self-celebrating announcement, pointing out that their BDS “movement” actually began in 2001 and has not enjoyed a single success on any campus in the country despite nearly ten years of effort? (HSJP and the like-minded prefer to reset their project with the 2005 PACBI letter, thus flushing most of the last decade of BDS catastrophe down the memory hole.)

Or perhaps I should put their Frantz Fanon quote into context, which (in its original paragraph) reads:

“Anti-Semitism cuts me to the quick; I get upset; a frightful rage makes me anemic; they are denying me the right to be a man. I cannot associate myself from the fate reserved for my brother. Every one of my acts commits me as a man. Every instance of my reticence, every instance of my cowardice, manifests the man."

Now I could leverage this full Fanon quote to note that HSJP’s friends the allies in the Middle East are the major manufacturers of the very anti-Semitic propaganda that cut Fanon “to the quick” (a Vesuvius of Jew hatred that even Israel’s harshest critics don’t deny emanates hourly from Tehran to Damascus to Gaza and beyond). But this presumes the members of HSJP actually know who Fanon is, beyond a source for quotes on Google.

But in the end, it seems best to mark the anniversary with some links to the various parodies I’ve done over the last year that seem to have gotten up the nose of those who still insist on pushing the Hampshire divestment fraud with all their might. And so…

Here’s the parody that came to mind last February, once I discovered that the Hampshire divestment story running its course through the media was a hoax.

And here’s a mock planning transcript for last November’s BDS conference at Hampshire (some BDSers still get upset that half the Google links on a search for “Hampshire BDS” brings up this parody).

And finally, my epic time-waster: Hampshire and the Brain.

Paraphrasing William Shatner from Trouble with Tribbles: I take the issues of peace and justice in the Middle East extremely seriously. But Hampshire’s SJP? Not so much.

What's Behind BDS?

I’m still waiting for more news on the latest apparent BDS hoax coming out of Canada, but in the meantime a commenter’s point about previous hoaxes involving, among other organizations the Red Cross, alerted me that it might be worth mentioning one of the main theses of this site (especially to the many new readers who have joined us in the last few days).

I’m ready to admit that there are strong arguments for and against the use of boycott and divestment to solve political problems. But whether you’re talking about divestment programs launched against South Africa, Iran or Sudan, or boycotts that go back to their origins in 19th century Ireland, there is one thing that distinguishes these political projects from the anti-Israel BDS program we’ve seen over the last decade: truth in advertising.

There is no question that when people signed up to divest from South Africa (or when institutions are lobbied to pull funds from Iran or Sudan), that those campaigning are being absolutely clear about what they are advocating. While there is serious and legitimate debate about the effectiveness or efficacy of such campaigns, these projects are not being carried out in secret or behind anyone’s backs.

Not so BDS which only achieved its limited successes in the mid ‘00s by secretly negotiating with leaders of institutions like the City of Somerville or the Presbyterian Church whose citizens or members only discovered divestment from Israel was being carried out in their name at the last minute or when it was too late. And once these citizens or members discovered that their institutions were being manipulated, they revolted and rejected divestment by overwhelming majorities.

Remember that divestment is all about stuffing the political message of divestment advocates (that Israel is an “Apartheid State” alone in the world at deserving economic punishment) into the mouth of an organization more well known that the BDS advocates themselves. And given the tiny minority the BDS crew represents, the list of better known institutions includes just about everyone.

Thus divestment becomes a way to attach the BDS message to an institution by any means necessary. In the past, this involved manipulating people behind the scenes. But once initial BDS successes achieved in this way were defeated or reversed, a new strategy emerged involving outright fraud.

Adding false signatures to divestment petitions seems to have happened in both Canada and the UK, but before this practice came to the fore you had countless examples of BDS advocates pretending that decisions that had nothing to do with Israel were in fact anti-Israel divestment successes. Hampshire, TIAA-CREF, Blackrock and Motorola come to mind, but – as my commenter pointed out – there are other examples across the country of such divestment hoaxes.

It’s an open question as to whether these fraudulent campaigns are part of a deliberate strategy to deceive the public (in hope of creating momentum for the BDS “movement” based on fake success) or whether divestment advocates are primarily deceiving themselves in order to imbue their lives with fantasies of political importance and success.

But ultimately, it does not matter if the list of people BDS-niks are trying to deceive includes themselves or not. The result is the same: a political movement that bears no resemblance to boycott or divestment campaigns against South Africa or anyone else, a campaign of failure and fraud that has achieved nothing in ten years beyond poisoning the atmosphere of colleges campuses, churches and other civic organizations who have been slow to understand the true nature of the snake oil BDS is selling.

BDS Avatar?

The best BDS hoax story yet has just arrived from Canada, causing one of those truly “you can’t make this stuff up!” moments.

I spent much of last year chronicling the tendency of boycott and divestment activists to make fraudulent claims of victory, from the academic hoax at Hampshire, to false claims that the financial firms Blackrock or TIAA-CREF or companies like Motorola had made financial decisions for political reasons.

More recently, the forging of signatures on boycott petitions made its debut in the UK, so it was just a matter of time before this practice found its way to North America.

The story actually begins last Fall when a relatively obscure Canadian film maker, John Greyson (also a teacher at York University), pulled his work from the Toronto Film Festival in protest of that festival’s inclusion of movies from Tel Aviv in their celebration of international urban cinema. This action was accompanied by a petition declaring the festival was, in effect, celebrating Tel Aviv and thus the brutality of “The Occupation,” the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza who struggle to live while Tel Avivians make movies, blah, blah, blah.

This non-story got some ink when a collection of celebrities (including Jane Fonda) signed onto the petition, with some of them (again, Jane Fonda) eventually signing off. As usual, supporters of Israel rallied, the press railed at this attempt at censorship masquerading as artistic “solidarity” and Israeli films were the hit of the Festival.

Flash forward to 2010 when a new petition began circulating around film schools asking them to not participate in this June’s Tel Aviv Student Film Festival because (you know the drill).

The letter itself is worthy of dissection as an example of mental gymnastics (trying to portray an unambiguous attempt to punish a country by boycotting its film makers as something other than the shunning of artists in the name of someone else’s politics). But the real interesting part of the story is the signature section which features none other than “The King of the World” himself: James Cameron.

Now (as far as I know) the Canadian-born Cameron has never had a word to say about the Arab-Israeli conflict, and his name on such a letter would certainly represent a coup for boycott promoters. If it was real. Which it’s not.

As near as I can tell (and details are still coming in) this letter was initiated (and/or promulgated) by the same people involved with Toronto Film Fest boycott fiasco. Supposedly a press conference on the matter was scheduled for today, but was mysteriously called off. This may just have something to do with the fact that someone who saw the letter contacted Cameron’s people and discovered he not only didn’t sign the document, but he’s never seen it and is demanding answers as to how his name got onto such a letter.

In short, the hoaxers who seemed to be trying to leverage famous names to give their project credibility now face the wrath of one of the world’s richest and most powerful film makers. Forgive me a little shadenfreude, but what I would give to be in the home/apartment/dormroom/studio of those who thought they could get away with such an obviously exposable fraud.

I’ll post more details on the story as they become available, but we seem to have clearly entered an age when the sheer scale of BDS failure after a decade of so much intense effort has left boycott and divestment advocates somewhat unhinged. That, or they simply continue to believe that their self-righteous fury allows them to do absolutely anything, even if (or especially if) it involves treating the public (or, in this case, peers in the film making world) like absolute idiots.

BDS State of the Union

An interesting comprehensive write up of what the BDSers themselves think about the state of their movement was published recently by Australians for Palestine. I’ll likely have more to say about their self analysis in the weeks that follow, although allow a few initial observations:

* Interestingly, outside of the US the BDSers seem to have no problem linking their project with the anti-Israel boycotts that began before the creation of the Jewish state (although they only go back as far as 1936, when Arab boycotts of Jewish businesses can be traced back to the 1920s). Since complying with the Arab boycott is illegal in the US, American boycott/divestment activists have never tried to make this connection, and while (for reasons outlined here) no one in the US has perused a legal strategy against BDS, it’s interesting to see that significant parts of the “movement” consider themselves the heirs of the dubious Arab-boycott legacy.

* Like most lists of BDS successes, this one is packed with fiascos masquerading as triumphs. For example, the Presbyterian Church’s rejection of BDS by a margin of 95%-5% is described egregiously (and hilariously) dishonesty as: “in 2006, the US Presbyterian Church urged various companies, including Caterpillar, ITT, Motorola, and others to invest in West Bank and Gaza companies;”

* On a less amusing note, the number of individuals and organizations that the article lists who are involved with pushing BDS around the world is no laughing matter. While it’s important to point out that ten years of effort by such a hoard has led only to a few paltry, quickly reversed “victories” (highlighting the objective fact that BDS is a bit of a loser), the number of people committed to this effort means that eternal vigilance remains the order of the day.

Don't Mess with Julie Burchill

My world-favorite, acid-tongued, philo-Semite Julie Burchill has managed to find something to say about the Israel divestment antics currently playing havoc with what remains of the British union movement and political Left.

Julie won my heart with one of her parting columns for the Guardian in the UK, an all-guns-blazing broadside against Judeophobia masquerading as pro-Palestinian virtue, which included this delightfully nasty passage that I suspect could only see the light of day in the wacky pages of the British press:

"I can't help noticing that, over the years, a disproportionate number of attractive, kind, clever people are drawn to Jews; those who express hostility to them, however, from Hitler to Hamza, are often as not repulsive freaks."

"Think of famous anti-Zionist windbags - Redgrave, Highsmith, Galloway - and what dreary, dysfunctional, po-faced vanity confronts us. When we consider famous Jew-lovers, on the other hand - Marilyn, Ava, Liz, Felicity Kendal, me - what a sumptuous banquet of radiant humanity we look upon!"

You go girl! You can read more of Julie’s love-letters to the Jewish state here.

Blame Canada

I'm hoping to get to the hundred-post mark sometime in February (which is why you may see some shorter pieces here than usual over the next couple of weeks ;-) ).

Word has it that Carleton University is the next target for the BDS “juggernaut.” “For the past four and a half years, BDS has spread like wildfire,” BDS proponents claim, naturally anchoring their effort to the signature “triumph” at Hampshire College (“The most notable victory came at Hampshire College, where in February 2009, the administration gave in to massive student pressure to divest from six companies complicit in the Israeli occupation.”) Does anyone else want to give them the bad news?

So far, I’ve only had the chance to write something on Carleton here at Muzzlewatch-Watch, but if they manage to stray from the same-old-same-old of 36-page denouncements-by-committee and bombast, you’ll hear about it here first.