BDS Twofer Takedown in California

Apologies to my reader for not getting out the latest news from California yesterday. With the wife out of town, I’m managing the schedule of two elementary-school kids which, in America today, involves the same level of logistic effort once required to move a Roman legion from The Rhine to Macedonia. (I also have to admit to reticence regarding moving my autographed valentine to Bill Goldberg down one story on the blog.)

But news marches on! And with regard to California where two BDS votes were taken at two University of California campuses on Wednesday night… What’s the phrase I’m looking for? It was right at the tip of my tongue… Oh yes! Now I remember: BDS LOSES AGAIN!

This time it was a double header. Yet again, the boycott brigade dragged the Student Senate (or ASUC) at UC Berkeley through another marathon session (attended by 200 people and mercifully running until just 4 AM this time) to make one last attempt to get the veto of the Berkeley divestment resolution overturned. And despite all efforts and pressures and letters and e-mails and appeals by the BDS demi-Gods of Tutu, Chomsky and Klein (Klein?), student leaders refused to reject the veto. And so divestment remains the official position of no one at the University of California at Berkeley.

Meanwhile, at UC San Diego, a divestment resolution similar to the one at Berkeley was proposed. And by “similar,” I mean “copied from,” or to be more exact, copied and then modified in hopes that it could slip through the UCSD student government by avoiding some of the pitfalls of the Berkeley document (by making the new resolution slightly less hysterical in its accusations against Israel and slightly less hypocritical regarding claims to being neutral in the Arab-Israeli dispute).

That said, the basic framework piloted at Berkeley were there in the San Diego resolution, including language that claimed the document was simply a human rights resolution that just so happened to use Israel as an example of everything it was condemning. But, unlike Berkeley where students had some time to respond to the BDSers, at San Diego the entire issue came up so quickly that pro-Israel students had just three days to get their act together.

But get their act together they did. And having learned about the Berkeley situation through this newfangled Internet thingy, they understood what was really going on and let their student leaders know that spewing venom at the Jewish state, regardless of how such venom has been temporarily sugarcoated by Students for Justice in Palestine types (who were given the driver’s seat in drafting the legislation), was not on.

Once again, at another UC, student leaders were treated to a display of just how poisonous it is to drag the Arab-Israeli dispute onto campus. And at San Diego, those leaders decided to avoid getting onto the merry-go-round Berkeley was in the process of getting off, refusing to pass the divestment resolution and, instead, throwing it into a committee for further review.

It remains to be seen if what comes out of that committee is as ugly as what went in, or if there emerges a consensus human rights resolution that does not single out any one country (guess who). It’s possible that nothing will emerge from this entire exercise (the divestment bill in my old hometown of Somerville, for example, has remained “on file” since 2004 and has never been discussed since).

But bottom line is that it looks like BDS is entering its second decade with a perfect record unsullied by a single victory.

To add one more layer of perspective, remember that the resolutions at Berkeley or San Diego would not lead to any actual divestment. The college and university administrators responsible for those decisions have made it clear for close to ten years that divestment from Israel was not on their agenda. And after the BDS fiasco at Hampshire earlier this year, those administrators now understand that even giving divestment advocates the time of day is fraught with peril.

These were not even votes like the ones that took place at the Mainline Protestant churches five years ago that overturned real plans for actual divestment. They were simply attempts to get student governments to strike poses regarding totally toothless divestment resolutions that would lead to no real action. And still they lost. Twice. In the same night.

Needless to say, the ether was filled with the usual bombast that “This was just the beginning!” “By losing, we really won!” and “Divestment can’t be stopped now!” blah, blah, blah. But I think the defining moment for this chapter of the BDS saga would have to have been the closing minutes of the Berkeley meeting where – as predictable as the cycles of the moon – the BDSers threw a tantrum when they didn’t get their way.

I still savor the moment in 2004 when the Somerville BDS crew watched in shock as their divestment bill was defeated unanimously and then proceeded to storm the Alderman’s podium, break into a rousing off-key chorus of the African National Congress fight song before being ejected from chambers.

At Berkeley, after having made their presentations endlessly for weeks on end, after dozens of news stories, hundreds of blog entries, thousands of e-mails and millions of Tweets, they decided to demonstrate that the ASUC vote against their pet project was an example of – wait for it – them being "silenced" (illustrated by the BDSers covering their own mouths with tape and marching out of the room).

For the sake of sanity and harmony at Berkeley, let’s hope that tape remains on at least through the end of the semester.

Fear Not: Goldberg is in the House

Tonight students at UC Berkeley and UC San Diego (UCSD) will be each taking a stand on the divestment resolutions that have plagued both campuses this semester. I hope to report on any results tomorrow, but in the meantime I was trying to think of what might inspire students at both universities, as well as all of those who have been battling BDS so successfully through the entire academic year.

And then it came to me. Who was the man who inspired me when I was fighting these same BDS heels in Somerville? Who was the man who defeated 173 gigantic 200-400 lb. opponents in succession? Who is now deservedly being inducted into The National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame? The WCW professional wrestling demi-god, the all-time and always heavyweight champion of the world (at least in my heart), one name is all that’s needed: Goldberg!

Bill Goldberg (now, simply "Goldberg"), once a linebacker for the Atlanta Falcons, later became one of the few Jews to obtain superstardom in the pro wrestling circuit (yes, I know Dean Malenko was a lansman, but who cares).

Joining the WCW (Ted Turner's aborted attempt to take on the World Wide Wrestling Federation dynasty of the McMahon family), Goldberg became not just a champion, but a phenomenon. "The Streak," still spoken about in hush whispers among wrestling fans, was Goldberg's uninterrupted string of 173 victories between 1997 and 1999.

Each victory unfurled with the predictability of a Japanese Noh drama: some poor sap would enter the ring, land a few ineffective punches on the Hebrew behemoth, only to end up flattened by Goldberg's trademark closing moves, "The Spear" (in which the 285 pound former linebacker would nail his foe in the midsection with a high-velocity head butt) followed by the Jackhammer (don't ask). After that, the three count was just a formality, with Goldberg once again victorious.

Caught up in the frenzy of Goldbergmania, I began to understand how my father must have felt watching Jewish baseball champions like Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax. Different perhaps, since he was a fan of sports heroes, and I a fanatic for a champion of "Sports Entertainment." But there was also something unique to the nation's Goldberg fascination.

For there on display, week after week, emerging from a shower of sparks with neck muscles resembling a dorsal fin was the rawest example of Jewish strength any of us had ever seen. And fans from across the nation, from around the world, loved it. Nothing exemplified this more than a bout in Alabama when Goldberg single handedly took apart a now-forgotten team of hillbilly-themed wrestlers, with the hillbillies in the audience screaming their heads off… for Goldberg!

And now to the point.

When the usual suspects try to blame each of their endless BDS defeats on "organized Jewish power" this is only partly because they need to salve their wounded pride with fantasies of an all-powerful enemy as conspiratorial as themselves. But another reason for this storyline is their sly understanding of historic Jewish discomfort with power.

When American blacks transformed themselves from a disenfranchised minority to a major political force, effective enough to lobby against domestic racism, and for aid and assistance to black Africa, this accumulation of power through organization is rightly hailed as one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century. Yet American Jews, who spend 95% of their philanthropy and political energy on causes that benefit others (including blacks and other minorities) are frequently vilified for the efforts we expend on our own behalf, even efforts to turn back attempts to smear the Jewish nation we hold dear.

Well Goldberg taught me how to deal with such attacks by a tag-team of ruthless hypocrites: The Spear, followed by the Jackhammer (metaphorically speaking, of course).

Defending the honor of the Jewish state against attack from some of the greatest human rights violators on the planet (and their apologists), fighting for our right to spread the truth against their lies is not just our right, it is our responsibility. As Mark Twain once said when writing to a man bewildered by mob attacks on a supposedly powerless Jewish community in Vienna in the 19th century:

"Who gives the Jew the right, who gives any race the right, to sit still, in a free country, and let someone else look after his safety?"

Over the last few weeks, Berkeley has delivered “The Spear” to BDS trying to muscle its way into college campus politics. Let’s hope tonight that UCSD delivers The Jackhammer.

Rock of Ages

BDS activity in the UK tends to careen between worrying (such as the recent anti-Israel agitation in the British trade union movement) and ridiculous (such as moronic attempts to protest all things Israeli, including violinists and oranges, the political equivalent of a loud, unexpected, public belch).

The latest example from the ridiculous category includes pleadings to the American poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron to cancel a concert he has scheduled in May in Tel Aviv. Now I’m embarrassed to say that I’m not familiar with Mr. Scott-Heron’s work, but that is just testament to the fact that I was as lame in the 1970s and 80s when the musician made his mark (and I was listening to George Thorogood and Sweet) as I am now.

But from these protests I have learned a powerful lesson from the BDSers who have made it clear that any visit to Israel by a famous performer indicates strong support for the Jewish state. They have certainly said that loud and clear in their appeals to Mr. Scott-Heron, just as they have made it a point to claim that any performer who refuses to visit Israel is a tremendous triumph in their march to have Israel made a pariah.

That being the case, and following the boycotter’s own rules, what are we to make of this long list of famous men and women who have made the trek to the Holy Land to sing and dance in front of those dastardly, Apartheid-y Jews?

Iggy & the Stooges
Incubus
Juliet Lewis
Chick Corea
Nine Inch Nails
Paul McCartney
Sean Lennon
Tokio Hotel
Joe Jackson
Mediski Martin & Wood
Joe Cocker
Lauryn Hill
Erika Badu
Branford Marsalis
The Streets
Lord of the Dance
Macy Gray
The Breeders
Pet Shop Boys
Lady Gaga
Kaiser Chiefs
MGMT
Faith No More
Air
Cypress Hill
Jethro Tull
LCD Soundsystem
Madonna
Paul Anka
The Wailers
Myslovitz
Depeche Mode
Lou Reed
Susan Vega

Now I can’t claim to recognize all of those names (except, perhaps Jethro Tull), but this long list of the famous who trooped to Israel in 2009 (with an even longer list of high-profile visitors expected in 2010) seems by the boycotter’s own logic to indicate that support for the Jewish state has never been higher.

Rock on!

BDS and Human Sacrifice

I promised myself to give the whole Berkeley thing a rest, which I plan to do although not before using the last few week’s experience to illustrate a theme I’ve written about in the past (although not much on this blog): the sacrifice BDS demands of those institutions it tries to bring into the fold.

When the leadership of Mainline Protestant churches like the Presbyterians and Methodists were embracing divestment between 2004 and 2006, they did not do so simply as organizations with multi-billion dollar pension and retirement funds looking to modify their ethical investment policy to include the Middle East. Rather, their pronouncements on the matter were written in the most religious of rhetoric, again and again noting that their political divestment program was coming from a sacred place, was (using a phrase that’s appeared again and again in their communication) an example of “bearing witness” to human suffering.

It is no accident that the Palestinian organizations (notably the Sabeel Eccumenical Liberation Theology Center) which lobbied these churches for years provided a religious (rather than a political framework) to undergird the Presbyterian and Methodist divestment projects. For someone making a political choice can always change his or her mind. But if you’re asked to place everything you hold sacred onto the alter, to claim that a political choice is actually a religious requirement, it then becomes harder (if not impossible) to reverse course, even when doubt over the effectiveness or morality of your choices comes to the fore.

To take another example, when leaders of the UCU (the British educator’s union) chose to join the BDS bandwagon, they did not go the divestment route but rather spent year after year trying to begin academic boycotts of their Israeli colleagues. Echoing the churches, what is more sacred to educators than academic freedom? And so, naturally, it was the commitment to academic freedom that the UCU was asked to sacrifice in order to join “the movement.”

In both these cases, the cost for these sacrifices has been high. In the UK, teachers have faced one economic blow after another during the last few years. Yet the one thing that would give this union a moral platform when asking for public support (their devotion to academic freedom) was jettisoned years ago to make room for their impotent attacks on the Jewish state. And when was the last time political leaders or the media turned towards the Presbyterians or Methodists for answers to moral or religious questions of the day?

At Berekely, it seems that battle lines of the recent divestment debate were drawn between the two major political parties in student government. Now I won’t pretend to understand that political landscape in any great detail (having been surprised that any university can sustain organized political parties for decades, as has Berkeley). But while the party that’s been driving divestment votes (called CALSERV) would never consider itself a wholly own subsidiary of Student for Justice in Palestine (SJP), I suspect that SJP does not return the favor.

And so, even with the vote all-but lost the BDS partisans have used parliamentary maneuvers to ensure the issue gets dragged out for weeks on end, hoping that they can sway (i.e., bully) a crucial Senator needed to override the veto that doomed divestment weeks ago. And, possibly in violation of the Senate’s rules, these meetings have been held behind closed doors. While I can understand the desire to avoid more circuses like the recent all-nighters where the fate of divestment was recently debated, it seems the decision to go behind closed doors was made to allow some kind of BDS “surprise” resolution to be put on the books before the year is out.

Why the rush? Well apparently the other major campus political party (Student Action), which has pretty much stood against BDS during the recent conflict, won a handy majority in an election that fell right in the middle of the whole divestment brouhaha. In other words, rather than taking their recent loss at the polls as a possible example of students having a say on the divestment matter, the pro-boycott partisans are doing everything they can to stuff the BDS message into the mouth of that student body before their term expires.

So just like with the churches or the unions, student government is being asked to sacrifice the things upon which their authority rests (in this case, democratic responsibility), hiding behind closed doors in order to ram something down the campus’ throat, even after it seems pretty clear that they have no mandate to do so.

No doubt the pro-divestment Senators would claim that they are “bearing witness,” that a higher calling requires them to bend or break the rules in order to screw their constituents. But, in fact, they are simply being asked by their SJP/BDS handlers to throw everything under the bus: the rules, their reputation, those people they claim to serve, not to serve a higher calling, but to do something that the boycotters (and the boycotters alone) are telling them is their only moral choice.

BDSers: Please Don't Listen to Hussein Ibish

Hussein Ibish is back again with his take on the recent defeat of BDS at Berkeley. I’ve written on the interesting politics of Mr. Ibish a few months back and, once again, he seems determined to play the iconoclast within Palestinian partisan politics, asking the obvious question of why, if BDS is truly on the march, it can’t seem to take hold even in one of America’s great strongholds of liberal politics.

Remember that BDS is only ever tried within progressive institutions (universities, Mainline Protestant churches, unions, etc.), meaning that if divestment from Israel was ever voted on (or even polled) within the US as a whole, support for punishing Israel economically would barely register as something the public supports. But if even a toothless, symbolic, student divestment resolution (one which would have no impact on the college’s administration or investment strategies, even if it had passed) can’t make progress at Berkeley, then it’s a good question as to where it can ever succeed.

Ibish identifies on place where Berkeley, like other BDS “victories” are being celebrated: within the fantasy world of BDS activists. And, indeed, BDS is seeming less and less like a political movement and more like a sexual act normally performed by one person being taken up by large groups of anti-Israel activists simultaneously.

To extend this vulgar metaphor one step further, given that the one success BDS has had has been to create anti-bodies in the body politic of every institution it infects (political victories for divestment opponents at Berkeley, 95-100% majorities rejecting divestment at the Presbyterian and Methodist churches, college administrators put on notice of the true face of BDS, me and the Mayor at Somerville, etc.), the tendency of activists to double down on their boycott and divestment bets each time they get thrashed begins to look more like the political equivalent of auto-erotic asphyxiation than rational politics.

As the title of this piece indicates, I truly hope that those who hug BDS to their chests and condemn all those (including friends and supporters) who argue against this tactic win the day. Not only does it provide me an endless stream of material for my little hobby, but it also creates an environment where we can assume whatever tactic the Israel-dislikers try next, it is likely to blow up in their face and further de-legitimize the attempts to de-legitimize the Jewish state.

Missed these BDS Fiascos

I’ve been so busy covering BDS getting kicked down the stairs at Berkeley over the last couple of weeks, I’ve neglected a few additional divestment defeats during that period, including:

* The Swedish Cooperative Union has ruled out boycotts of Israeli goods at Swedish cooperative stores. (Perhaps they are following the Rochdale Principles on political and religious neutrality cited by the Davis Food Co-op when they unanimously rejected a boycott last year.)

* Canada (the land where the Buycott was born) is issuing a postage stamp commemorating 60 years of Canada-Israel diplomatic relations. The usual suspects are planning a boycott. It’s unclear how they will do this, given that no one buys stamps any longer.

* At last week’s Israel-bashing blarney-fest at the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, the local Israeli union representative gave the assembled delegates what for after the Irish Foreign Minister criticized the union’s boycott calls and former Irish President Mary Robinson refused to attend the meeting. This was all largely moot since the recent volcanic eruption in Iceland, which has halted most European airline travel, meant few people were actually able to make it to the event.

For that last victory, credit has to go to Yakov Shmiplewitz, the Learned Elder of Zion currently responsible for the earth’s crust.

Berkeley BDS and Democracy

Most of the “by losing, we really won” arguments from the BDSers defeated in last week’s Berkeley divestment battle are like this piece by Jewish Voice for Peace/Muzzlewatch Queen Cecilie Surasky, who substitutes the excitement of getting hundreds of people in a room to bash Israel for ten hours for actual political success. If such arguments rang a hollow ten years ago when groups like JVP begun providing a Jewish face to every BDS initiative on the planet, claiming unstoppable momentum seem positively bizarre after a decade of watching divestment fall flat on its face time and time again.

Now there is one argument the boycotters are making that’s worth dissecting: their claim that they actually won a majority of votes in the Senate (16/20 in the original vote, and 12/20 in the veto override) and should thus be considered the winner of the democratic process (implying that their win was undone by undemocratic political maneuvering by their foes). Not that this argument holds any more water than the other ones they trot out, but it does open up some interesting discussions vis-à-vis BDS and democracy.

For Berkeley’s student government (like the US government) is not an Athenian democracy (where all citizens/students vote on every issue), but is rather, like the US, is a constitutional representative system. Because the word “democracy” is used to describe these very two different kinds of systems, it can get confusing why simple majorities do not always get their way.

Berkeley’s student leaders face the same conundrum as leaders from any representative government: is their responsibility to represent the people who voted for them, or to take positions without knowing what those constituents actually want? Fortunately, most decisions that fall into this latter category are ones where knowing public opinion is not vital. We elect leaders to manage a host of routine issues that requires that these representatives do the work we’d rather not (draft budgets, craft rules and policies, etc.). While not strictly “democratic” in an Athenian sense, trusting leaders to develop the expertise to manage these tasks is certainly more effective than having 35,000 Berkeley students show up the quad to ratify every budget line item by voice vote.

But what happens when the issue under consideration is whether or not Berkeley’s name is going to be used to shore up a political statement about which student leaders cannot claim any unique insight or expertise? For example, can a majority of 20 Senators decide that Israel is guilty of war crimes via a mechanism that will be communicated around the world as the voice of the entire student body? In such cases, Student Senators face a higher threshold regarding knowing the will of the campus before deciding they can represent the conscience of that student body.

So… Do those Student Senators possess (or did they acquire) unique insight into the Middle East conflict or international law before making pronouncements regarding which participant in the former was guilty of violations of the latter? No doubt anyone who gets into Berkeley is extremely clever, but such a description applies to all 35,000 students on that campus, many of whom are enrolled in the #1 or #2 History, Middle East Studies, Political Science, and Law programs in the world. Given this, it’s not clear that the Berkeley Student Senate has more information at its fingertips than 20 students randomly chosen off the quad.

In fact, given the wealth of expertise the Student Senate could have tapped into to inform their decisions, it’s shocking to hear claims that participating in two all nighters consisting mostly of emotive testimony from partisans on both sides of the issue provided the education needed to make decisions on international politics and law in the name of every student on campus.

For a vote of this nature in which the Student Senators were presuming to speak in the name of those they represent, knowing the will of those voters/citizens/students is critical to determining whether such a vote represented 12 or 16 out of 20 (a majority), or 12 or 16 out of 35,000 people with opinions on this matter (a tiny minority).

That being the case, how can the will of the public be determined? Well one could put the whole divestment matter to a campus-wide vote, but this was already dismissed as too expensive. (It also opens up another challenge of whether or not the means to determine which question would be put on a ballot should also be put to a majority vote of the Senate.) Some type of professional survey could help us understand campus opinion better, but that too is expensive and would at best only provide a snapshot.

If ASUC leaders had a mandate for their divestment vote (i.e., had campaigned on this particular issue and won) we would have certainly heard about it during the hours of arguments on the matter (we didn't). But we do have some electoral data in the form of last week’s ASUC Presidential election which the leader and party most against divestment won handily.

Add to this some substantial anecdotal data (including hundreds of people yelling at each other at marathon ASUC meetings, hundreds of comments appearing in Daily Cal articles and thousands of e-mails directly to student leaders) and I think it’s a fair conclusion that campus opinion on this matter is, at best, bitterly divided. And thus, those 16 or 12 leaders who voted “Yes” to divestment can make no claims to represent anything other than themselves.

And this is where we get to the “constitutional” part of constitutional representative government. For such forms of government provide ways for the public to be heard if and when one part of that government seems to do something that does not represent public will. The veto wielded by an elected President is one such mechanism, as is the high threshold required to overturn a veto. In other words, the outcome last week is an example of student government working to make sure a bitterly divided campus was not represented as having one mind on the Middle East, simply because a dozen Student Senators said it did.

Of course, the whole democracy argument rings a bit hollow from BDS advocates who cried foul when the elected board of directors at the Davis Food Co-op (an organization comparable to the Berkeley Student Senate in every way) rejected their boycott proposals unanimously. In fact, the few temporary successes BDS ever enjoyed (such as with the Presbyterians) only happened because divestment activists successfully appealed directly to leaders behind the backs of the people those leaders represented. I have yet to hear an argument about “democracy denied” by Jewish Voice for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine or anyone else when those members rejected divestment by majorities of 90-100%.

As ever, a discussion of divestment and democracy is far more interesting once you can get past the BDS formula which self-servingly states that democracy only manifests itself when they get their way.

Berkeley BDS: Untangling the Final Vote

Well it took a little doing, but I was finally able to figure out the Byzantine nature of decision-making at UC Berkeley to determine that yesterday’s “tabling” of the final divestment vote was just a way to ensure that headlines the next day read “No Final Decision” vs. “Divestment Loses at Berkeley.” While this has worked with regard to how web sites and blogs sympathetic to BDS portray yesterday’s defeat, most news sources are calling it like it is: ASUC Fails to Override Divestment Bill Veto.

It was kind of a surreal experience following yesterday’s debate via a Twitter feed hosted by BDS supporters. It brought to mind those professional wrestling matches where a heel (or evil wrestler) is allowed to provide color commentary on a match between a fellow villain and a face (or good wrestler):

Ringcaller: What’s that? It looks like The Executioner has somehow snuck a live hand grenade into the ring. And he’s pulling the pin!

Heel Color Commentator: I don’t see any grenade, but look at how Virtuous Vinnie is cowardly fleeing the ring! I guess we can all agree that the Executioner is the only real man in this match!

Honestly (if I can use that word in the context of BDS), with the #UCBDIVEST Twitter feed hailing the courage of every divestment champion and sneering at every critic, I suspect everyone following the debate was shocked when the final vote was taken and their hopes of being able to fan out across the country claiming “Berkeley’s on board” came crashing to the ground. Perhaps that's why they spent the last half hour before the vote screaming: YOU HAVE NO CHOICE! THIS IS A MORAL ISSUE! VOTE NOW!!!!!!!!, only to switch sentiments an hour later and hail the decision to avoid making the vote they demanded final.

Note to self: Learn to Tweet. Second Note to Self: Get someone from our side (or, even better, a neutral journalist) to live feed any similar event in the future.

Anyway, what appears to have happened is that divestment supporters used a procedural move to avoid a final vote while they worked on the one Senator who had abstained for two more hours. And once it was clear that no one was going to change his or her vote, they “tabled” the motion in order to avoid that being the final say on the matter. It doesn’t look like the same motion will be brought up again this semester (or possibly ever), although new resolutions that are not quite so ludicrously dishonest might make it onto the floor before the end of the year.

So, as ever, eternal vigilance is the watch-phrase of the day (and every day). This is OK for me since I take great pleasure in watching BDS get its ass handed to it week after week, month after month, year after year, but I know that other people (including, I expect, 95% of the population of Berkeley) would prefer it if those devoted to bashing the Jewish state in order to inflate their own sense of importance would do so on their own time and leave everyone else out of their personal psycho-dramas.

BDS Loses Big at Berkeley

Update: In the time it took to write this, it looks like the divestors, knowing the vote was going down for them, decided to table the motion until their next meeting, extending Berkeley's pain for at least another week. (Was it just me, or did anyone else following the meeting via the UCBDIVEST Twitter feed recall BDSers screaming IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS just an hour or two ago that a vote MUST BE TAKEN NOW!) Anyway, I'm letting my write up stand until I hear more from people on the ground about this latest delaying tactic.

Well, it looks like the Berkeley Student Senate (or ASUC) wasn’t “in the bag” for divestment after all.

After a debate that began at 7 PM last night and looks to be just wrapping up now (at 6:30 AM, West Coast Time), a vote was finally taken with regard to overturning the Student President’s veto of the UC Berkeley divestment bill. An override required 15 votes to pass (or two-thirds of the Senate) and the final count turned out to be 12 for, 7 against and 1 abstention (down from 16 for and 4 against the first time around).

And so BDS loses again. (I never tire of typing that sentence.) And this time, they not only lost on friendly ground (the most sympathetic-to-their-issue campus in America), but they managed to pull off a defeat with virtually the entire BDS pantheon (Chomsky, Tutu, Klein) behind their efforts. They lost despite support from virtually the entire global BDS network applying pressure to ASUC members. They lost with the support of vast stretches of Berkeley’s Balkanized student organizational leadership behind them. And they lost after arguing this issue in an all-night session that ended with what sounded like some serious bullying of Senators who chose to not join the boycott crew.

Now this is not to say that anti-divestment forces didn’t also have inside and outside support. In fact this article, while a bit sensational, does point out the individuals and organizations supporting each side in this debate. But given that the BDSniks would have hailed a victory as a clear-cut repudiation of the people and organizations who urged a no vote (like Hillel, AIPAC, AJC, etc.), doesn’t this mean divestment’s defeat represents a similar reputation of Chomsky, Students for Justice in Palestine, etc., and everything they stand for? (Just asking.)

Needless to say, the post-vote chatter falls along the familiar lines of “even though we lost the vote, we actually won.” And depending on how you define “victory,” this morning’s losers do have a point. Clearly if we mean by “win” that you actually are victorious in a political battle, then BDS clearly lost (again, I love typing that phrase). And if you define “win” as showing support for the Palestinians, remember that BDS is really a way to tell those Palestinians: “don’t compromise, don’t negotiate, help is on the way!” Given how well that’s worked out for the people in the region over the last six-and-a-half decades, I would think the boycotters (who claim to care about the Palestinian people) might at least give this matter a little bit of thought.

But that brings us to where the divestment victory really lay. For if you define “victory” as allowing a bunch of people who fantasize that they are part of a great revolutionary vanguard to spew anti-Israel venom for twelve hours straight and now huddle together to talk about how they were defeated by a vast conspiracy of powerful forces, their tiny voices stilled, then indeed last night was a victory for them. If Palestinian suffering has to be extended for another decade or three, or the UC Berkeley campus turned into a war zone of competing factions divided along ethnic and religious lines to allow SJP and its friend and allies to dwell in such a fantasy world, then so be it.

But in the end, I can point out two real (vs. imagined) winners in this struggle: the Berkeley students who valiantly fought against this resolution, holding their ground (and their principles) against what looked at times to be a snarling mob. And the second winner is UC Berkeley itself.

Despite hours of be-fogging rhetoric about human rights and fair play, what last night’s twelve-hour session really demonstrated is what the campus could expect for the coming months and years if this resolution passed. Just as in other communities where divestment has been attempted (Somerville, PCUSA, etc.), the Berkeley BDS resolution succeeded only in dividing another community into warring camps. One needed to only look at all the ASUC meetings, or read the comments that accompanied Daily Cal articles on the subject, or (one guesses) look at the 13,000 e-mails Student Senators each received to see that a “Yes” vote would have turned a campus founded on mutual respect to a place where students ran the gauntlet between partisans waving bloody photos at each other.

Just as there are winners, there are also heroes to this tale, the top of the list being the eight Senators who decided not to inflict the mayhem they were exposed to for hours and hours to the entire campus for months or years on end. While most of the 13,000 kibbitzers who communicated with them (including me) were telling them where their conscience should lead them, conscience is a personal thing. And as much as it would be nice to think that a Zionist heart secretly beats in the chest of each of these people, their vote against divestment demonstrates something more powerful and profound: their desire to put their campus and their constituents first despite unprecedented pressure to do otherwise.

I’ll have a few more things to say on this matter over the coming days (including thoughts on those representatives and their constituents). But for now, it’s safe to congratulate Berkeley for dodging the BDS bullet just in time.

Now take a nap everyone!

Berkeley Nu?

While I'd hoped to have some news vis-a-vis Berkeley by this morning, it sounds like the debate which started last night at 7 PM is still going on...at 3 AM West Coast time!

Perhaps this wasn't just a simple little generic human rights resolution (with Israel just used as an example, of course) after all...

Think Globally Act Locally

Given how the Berkeley divestment vote is playing out almost day-by-day like one that first introduced me to the BDS issue in Somerville, MA, I thought I’d re-release something I wrote on the eve of that vote. It’s a bit more political than usual (and some references may seem dated), but it does represent my thinking as to why this issue is so much bigger than just divestment or just Israel. So take it for what it’s worth…

A close friend, whose opinion I respect on all matters, is having trouble figuring out my devotion to seeing the divestiture motion defeated this week.

Over beers, and between trading tips on raising young sons, he wondered why this issue raised such dander when there was so much else going on in the world. For example, we discussed at length the prisoners in Guantanamo and whether or not their nebulous status represented a slippery slope that would lead to the dismantling of the Geneva Conventions, the last century's formal rules on war.

While our debate focused on prisoners, I've been reflecting more on the "slippery slope" part of our conversation since it seemed apparent to me that the slippery slope towards warfare unrestrained by rules actually began four decades ago.

That was the time that modern terrorism was born, represented by the persona of the recently deceased Yassir Arafat. Over the first twenty years of Palestinian war against the state of Israel, the new battlefield became airplanes hijacked from Europe, the Olympic Village in Munich, and a schoolyard in Maalot, in Northern Israel. Airline passengers, Olympic athletes and school children became the new targets for "military" action, contravening every known rule of war going back decades, if not centuries.

And with each Palestinian outrage, the rules of warfare were carefully rewritten or reinterpreted to allow murderous assaults against Israeli civilians to pose as something other than a war crime. The slippery slope became steeper over the next twenty years until now when we cannot even gain worldwide consensus that blowing up a pizzeria in Jerusalem represents an act of terror.

Point of fact, we are well past the slippery slope. Today, we are at the bottom of the hill, with the Geneva Convention and all known human rights conventions in tatters, the shredded remains burned and those that destroyed them laughing over the ashes. At the same time, those that declared a war against all as a national (if not divine) right are simultaneously demanding that the rules they just incinerated still apply, but only to preventing any defensive action being taken against them.

As in the last century, tyrants have demanded the rules of humane behavior be rewritten to make room for ruthlessness directed against the Jews. And just like the last century, these exceptions, meant originally for just the Jews, has allows us to define deviancy down to where anyone in the world is now a legitimate target in a war directed primarily against civilians, from disco dancers blown up in Bali, to Kurds gassed in Iraq, to a million Rwandans hacked to pieces, to 3000 dead in a cemetery that was once a high-rise building in Manhattan.

So by a strange twist of fate, this supposedly narrow goal of defending the honor of tiny Israel has universal implications. Similarly, those who use universal ideals like human rights and the rule of law as a smoke screen for their narrow attack on the Jewish state are the ones sacrificing global principle for provincial aims.

I at this word processor, we in this town do not have the wealth or the power to turn back the clock to when warfare had boundaries. We cannot, unaided, repair organizations like the UN and the recently debauched World Court that have been so corrupted by oil wealth and the power such wealth brings.

But we can do something. We can say NO to this odious assault on a small, beleaguered country, dressed clumsily as a humanitarian call for socially responsible investing. We can say it stops here. And with courage, and by example, we may be able to take back noble ideals like human rights from those who have stolen them in support of ruthless and intolerant ends.

It's easy to talk about thinking globally and acting locally, but tonight Somerville [Berkeley] has a chance to do both. Let's hope our leaders have the wisdom to make the right choice.

Irish Labor and the High Cost of BDS

I’ve written before about the difference between the American labor movement (one of the most pro-Israel institutions in America) and labor organizations in Europe which are a bit more fickle about where they place their labor solidarity. Last year, for example, the UK’s Trade Union Congress (TUC), decided to willfully expose themselves to the BDS virus. If they want to catch a glimpse of a more advanced stage of this particular infection, they need look no further than their equivalents across the sea: the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU).

Unlike the British TUC, where boycott entered the bloodstream via political maneuvering of a single group (the Fireman’s union as it turns out – no, I’m not kidding), BDS within the Irish labor movement most resembles the dynamic that’s been seen in Mainline Protestant churches in the US.

As with the Presbyterians and Methodists, an alliance of pro-Palestinian organizations working behind the scenes with key union leaders/executives have made decision which they then characterize as the “unanimous” opinion of Irish workers. Those workers have since been sent a 70,000 Euro ($100,000) bill (in the form of a levy on each member) to cover the cost of an ICTU “fact-finding” mission to the Middle East, and to organize a conference that will take place this Friday where those "findings" will be presented.

The parallels to the churches uncannily continue. Like the Presbyterians, ICTU members had no actual real say in what their union’s international policies would be, how their dues would be spent, or how an international research mission would be conducted. And like other organizations with pre-ordained agendas, the ICTU mission made no attempt to actually find facts, but simply took the familiar steps needed to ensure all of their original prejudices were confirmed (talking with few Israelis and treating the few they did talk to with skepticism and suspicion, while treating every Palestinian claim as unquestionable holy truth).

The rest of that hundred grand will be spent this Friday at an event at Dublin Castle that makes plain the ridiculously lopsided nature of this whole exercise: a day-long ICTU conference on the Middle East entitled “The Way Forward for Trade Union Solidarity.” A spokesperson for the Israeli labor movement is to be given 30 minutes to speak about the Israeli labor perspective (negotiated up from the 10 minutes the organizer’s originally planned to give them). The remaining nine and a half hours of the program is pledged to a series of local and international spokesperson dedicated to bashing Israel.

It’s hard to know how the average Irish worker feels about how their money is being spent or what is being said and decided in their name. But while the rank-and-file European union member (like the rank-and-file European citizen) is likely to have less sympathy for the Jewish state than the average American, one would think they would be uncomfortable about their union choosing to spend that kind of money on a program easily characterized as being more about self-righteous propaganda than union solidarity or justice.

This is particularly relevant given the current state of the labor movement in Ireland. Like a number of other European unions, Irish organized workers have thrived over the last 25 years through a carefully-constructed relationship with the national government which balanced limited union demands for increased wages with a government commitment to limit tax increases on those workers. This combination of labor peace and low taxation (as well as major international investments in Ireland which was seen as the gateway to Europe) has helped the tiny country (smaller than Israel, as it happens) to prosper economically in the age of globalization.

That golden age came to an end last year when the economic downturn forced the government to abandon its partnership with the ICTU, leaving both institutions to go their own way. But the ICTU finds itself at an interesting cross-road now that its central role as a partner with government has ended.

While still a major force in Irish society, labor now represents 31% of the Irish workforce (down from 62% in the 1980s). And 60% of its members are public sector workers, which means that industrial action such as strikes would much more likely be taken by doctors and air traffic controllers than by cloth-capped factory workers picketing outside a cement works. And when recent public-sector strikes (a la France) have been attempted, they have been met not by public support but outrage by a population that has gotten used to not having to deal with the inconvenience of France-like work stoppages for a generation.

In other words the ICTU, despite being the largest civic institution in Ireland, is an institution in crisis (again, similar to most of the other major organizations that have flirted with BDS). And at the exact moment when it is trying to connect with members, expand its base, discover what it stands for in the new world of Irish and European economic politics, and attempting to reconnect to the public, along comes this week’s Middle East conference which somehow pulls off being both monstrous and frivolous at the same time.

Clearly there is nothing preventing the ICTU leadership from taking union Euros and handing them over to Omar Barghouti, and there’s no question what the BDS crew is getting out of the deal. The question is, is it is worth it to hollow out the Irish labor movement just to let a single-issue partisan organization win a propaganda victory while letting a group of labor leaders strike a pose?

One Irish writer waggishly characterized the ICTU’s boycott politics thusly:

"...vainglorious hypocrisy, is perhaps one of the most defining of all Irish characteristics, the loud statement of a Consensually Agreed Piety [CAP], which is accompanied by absolutely no personal intention whatsoever to bring that piety about.

The greatest CAP of Irish life is that Ireland should be an Irish-speaking society; but what most individuals actually mean by this is that other people should go the trouble of learning the language, and then speaking it, not they themselves."

Having watched what happens when the BDS infection really hits, I shall dare a prediction that the Israeli labor movement (born in a land that also decided to resurrect it’s ancient language, but in this case actually did it) will be alive and relevant long after the ICTU (like the Mainline Protestant churches in the US) becomes an afterthought in any serious moral or political discussion.

Blast from the Past: Power

As we await what comes next at UC Berkeley, I thought I'd dredge out some real old stuff, things I wrote years ago when divestment came-a-calling at Somerville, Massachusetts. It's interesting to note that now that BDS is attempting to use the paddles of life to resurrect itself, how little their arguments (or required rebuttals) have actually changed...

Does anyone ever wonder why the Palestinians, alone among peoples without a state, have their own seat at the UN (an organization that spends almost a quarter of its time fighting on their behalf)?

Why does the Palestinian refugee problem have its own international organization (UNWRA) with annual budget of $350 million, while every other refugee in the world (almost twenty million at last count) are lumped together in the "other" category, supported by the United Nationals High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR)?

Why is Palestinian statehood one of the planet's top foreign policy goals, yet independence of for Kurds, Tibetans and Basques has been permanently removed from the international agenda? Why is Palestinian suffering on the West Bank being debated in universities, cities, towns and churches unendingly as Sudanese bury two million people unlamented?

Given what other nations (including the Kurds and Sudanese) have suffered over the years (often at the hands of those who denounce Israel the loudest), it's impossible to make the case that Palestinian suffering is the greatest in the world and thus deserves the most attention. However, there is one key difference between the Palestinians and every other group whose similar yearnings for a land to call home are routinely ignored.

At last count, there were not 22 Tibetan nations, or 22 Basque nations, or 22 Kurdish nations, much less 22 such countries that control half of the world's oil reserves. However, there are 22 Arab countries that have pumped enough resources out of the ground to keep the Palestinian issue on the front burner forever (resources that are also useful in buying Arab human rights abuses off the international agenda).

Look at in economic terms; the prominence of the Palestinian "struggle" makes perfect sense. It's simply another example of the rich and powerful getting what they want.

Given this reality, the pose of most of Israel's critics as "speaking truth to power" seems particularly ludicrous. How can the divest-from-Israel movement simultaneously be "silenced, stilled voices" and also be allied with the goals of dozens of oil-rich potentates, and all of the friends in oil-company boardrooms, foreign-ministries and UN agencies that money can buy?

This is where the rhetoric of human rights comes in so handy. By wrapping an anti-Israel propaganda project in a smothering blanket of human-rights vocabulary, critics of Israel get the best of both worlds: the ability to ally themselves with wealth and power, while posing as battling for the underprivileged, embracing Goliath while claiming to be Gandhi.

There are occasions when wealth and power are harnessed to admirable, even moral purposes, so there is no necessary reason that the divest-from-Israel groups should be embarrassed by its alignment with the goals of rich, powerful countries. At the same time, the pretence of being a voice in the wilderness would seem a little less absurd if they did not own a megaphone provided by the oil industry.

Ruthlessness

In previous versions of this piece published during past divestment campaigns, I have described the tactics of those who advocate divestment the hardest, those that push organizations to put the divestment agenda ahead of all other considerations, as "ruthless." Yet what does this term mean, beyond highlighting the aggressive, "by-any-means-necessary" nature of these people's behavior?

For most of the ideas that follow, I am indebted to Lee Harris, author of Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History, whose remarkable book defines ruthlessness not simply as a way of engaging in activities involving power politics. Rather, he sees ruthlessness as one of the great foes of civilization, indeed its oldest, original enemy.

Primitive man thought nothing of stealing food from his fellow pre-human, but only the ruthless were willing to murder others for food they could otherwise obtain through honest means or simple theft. As mankind clawed its way to some kind of order, with civilization advancing, halting, reversing and advancing again, the ruthless were always there to threaten any progress towards establishing some kind of peaceful living space where trust and cooperation replaced bullying and butchery as the organizing principles of society.

The power of the ruthless comes from their willingness to engage in activities that the rest of us would never even imagine. In a world traumatized by the global conflagration of World War I, Europe's nations were willing to do anything to avoid another conflict of that scale or worse. While a worthy sentiment, it provided ruthless actors, like Nazified Germany, the ability to have their way by simply threatening to trigger another World War if their demands were not met.

Turning to a far more mundane example of the phenomenon, when those driving the most radical divestment agenda have come closest to meeting their goals, it has not been through imaginative political tactics or devotion to a cause, but through simple ruthlessness.

It does not require much creativity or organizational skill to bring a campaign like divestment into an open-minded, caring institution such as UC Berkeley. If, for example, I was committed to scoring points against Israel's Arab foes, I could begin a drive tomorrow to have the ASUC take an official position against the brutal discrimination against women, homosexuals and religious minorities in Islamic lands. I could blanket the campus with images of women stoned in Saudi Arabia, gays being hung in Iran, or Christians brutalized in Egypt and demand that progressives have no choice but to take a stand on the issue. I could insist that student leaders advocating women’s or gay rights must publically join my cause or be accused of hypocrisy or of having blood on their hands for not supporting my positions. And I could continue to do this week after week, month after month, year after year, regardless of how little progress I make, regardless of the torture it would inflict on the campus, and not let any argument distract me from forcing my agenda into everyone else’s face.

It would not be difficult to take these steps, except for the fact that I (and everyone else who forcefully battles anti-Israel divestment) would never inflict the pain and conflict such a campaign would cause on the campus just to publicly embarrass Israel's critics. Indeed, not only would I never do such a thing, I would never even have imagined this kind of behavior before the divestment advocates provided us all a template from which to work.

And therein lies the difference. What most of us, until recently, could not even imagine, ruthless players like divestment's champions wake up every morning and do. Subverting the language of human rights for short-term political gain, forcing colleges and religious organizations to take a stand or risk possibly permanent schisms, dragging the bitterness of the Middle East into a struggling, multiethnic college, city, union or church, these are all acts with potentially long-term damaging effects. Yet the ruthless do not care about the consequences of their actions. To them, the leaders and members of UC Berkeley are mere props to be manipulated so that leaders of the divestment movement can feel part of some great, global, revolutionary struggle.

Even the Palestinians, in whose name the divestment-at-all-costs crowd professes to speak, are simply props in a vulgar, political game. As anyone with eyes can see, the only path the Palestinians have from their present misery is through peaceful negotiations. Yet by holding out the prospect of victory through war, supported by propaganda efforts like divestment, these "friends of the Palestinian people" are leading them towards an even darker blind ally than the one into which they want to drag Berkeley and other institutions.

While divestment proponents might be able to convince themselves that the ends justify the means as part of some fantasized higher, noble calling, in truth their means have become their ends. For what defines such movements outside of their willingness to say anything, do anything, hurt anyone, sew conflict, corrupt democracy, abuse the language of human rights and free speech, i.e., to behave in a manner that defines ruthlessness?

While some may wish for a day when mankind has evolved to a point where ruthlessness has been eradicated from the human species, there is nothing more dangerous than imagining that such a day has already arrived when it so clearly has not. Ruthlessness has been with us since humans first interacted, and wishing it away or blaming its victims for keeping us from an imagined utopia has been a recipe for the 20th (and now the 21st) century's most unimaginable disasters.

Berkeley Divestment and AIPAC

Just when I thought I could take a little break from Berkeley, Muzzlewatch drags me back...

The Presbyterians Teach Us a Lesson

As promised, I’m laying off the Berkeley subject for a bit in order to focus on another upcoming matter: July’s gathering of representative voting members of the Presbyterian Church of the US at this year’s bi-annual PCUSA General Assembly (or GA).

Long-term readers may recall a number of references I’ve made to a 2004 vote by the Presbyterian Church in favor of beginning a process of “phased selective divestment” from Israel. This vote was taken at the 2004 GA and while it was reversed two years later at the church’s next General Assembly, during the two years between ’04-’06, PCUSA became the “anchor client” for BDS, the example divestment activists pointed to when advocating for divestment from schools, unions, cities and other churches.

Just as PCUSA was divestment’s anchor in ’04 and ’05, so it became the lynchpin which caused BDS to unravel once church members rejected divestment by an overwhelming majority of 95-5%. Other churches followed the Presbyterians’ lead, with the Methodists rejecting divestment unanimously, and the Presbyterians confirming their 2006 decision when divestment was pushed again in 2008.

Sadly, in 2010 the church has decided that virtually any anti-Israel resolution, regardless of how hostile, unbalanced or inaccurate, can be brought to the floor of the General Assembly so long as it avoids the call for divestment that members have made abundantly clear they absolutely reject. This year’s ugly controversies have already started. But, as one long-time Presbyterian Church member (a woman I was stuck in a security line with at this year’s AIPAC conference, as a matter of fact) told me, the vast majority of PCUSA members no longer pay attention or care about what comes out of the GA.

According to her, church leaders have become so detached from members that the entire GA has turned into an irrelevant game where these leaders push their own political agenda (in the guise of supporting resolutions from a small number of Presbyteries who have made it their life’s work to nail Israel to the cross), only to have it shot down at the General Assembly, the only forum where church members have a voting say.

I was wondering why this year’s PCUSA gathering felt so much less threatening than in years past, until I read this piece by my friend and fellow activist Dexter Van Zile. In addition to being the only activist I tend to run into in civilian life (most recently at the Department of Motor Vehicles), Dexter has also forgotten more about church-related BDS and other anti-Israel dynamics than I will ever know.

GA meetings are Webcasted, and when I watched divestment play itself out in 2006, I couldn’t help noticing that a general budget discussion unrelated to Middle East politics was based on the assumption that the church would lose tens of thousands of members before the next PCUSA conclave and should plan accordingly. Understanding from my other (business) life that budgets are where the rubber meets the road, this reinforced the difficult fact that the Presbyterian Church, like nearly all of the once-powerful Mainline Protestant churches in America, is dying.

Now these churches have been declining for decades, struggling with competitors such as Evangelical churches but mostly losing people to secularism and indifference. But as Dexter points out, this loss has accelerated over the last 25 years with the church losing over a million members (or 31+%) between 1983 and 2008. Few church members have managed to convince their children to stay, which makes the average age of an enrolled Presbyterian somewhere in the high 50s.

Now it would be unfair to say that the church’s decades-long attacks on Israel are responsible for their present predicament. But I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that these attacks and the church’s general decline are both symptoms of the same malady.

In this case, the illness is the PCUSA’s desire to substitute secular political advocacy for religious experience, all the time dressing up the former as the latter (best exemplified by the tendency to wrap church pronouncements on the Middle East conflict or other international and domestic issues as examples of “Christian Witness”). Yet by embracing politics in such a way the churches provide wavering members with clear-cut alternatives to staying in the church: (1) joining straightforward political organizations if their interest is politics; and/or (2) joining another type of church if they are looking for a religious experience.

Now this is not to say that the Presbyterians (or any religious group) should stick their nose out of political matters. After all, issues such as slavery and Civil Rights became political matters because churches (headlined by the Mainliners) embraced them as moral causes. But just as the church derived deserved praise for thoughtfully and courageously taking on difficult matters, it also loses credibility when it embraces political positions simply because another group of people (such as anti-Israel activist from Middle East churches) tell them it’s their only choice.

Now I started this discussion by saying it was not about Berkeley, but in fact the PCUSA story is about every organization that is tricked, cajoled, maneuvered or threatened to hand its reputation over to the BDS movement, a hand-off that is always leaves internal strife and diminished perception of integrity of the institution that’s gone down the divestment route.

Leaders of PCUSA and other Mainline Protestant churches complain bitterly that the media no longer comes to them to get quotes on the burning moral/political issues of the day. But could it be that the media know something these church leaders don’t? And could it be that a vote for divestment by organizations like the Berkeley Student Senate represents a similar means to announce to the student body, the school’s administration and the whole world that they are a group not to be taken seriously, especially when they start talking about serious matters?

Berkeley BDS: De-Klein and Fall

I was going to give the Berkeley divestment issue a rest for a little while, but the arrival of Naomi Klein into the Berkeley story warrants a quick response.

I’ve written on Klein’s contribution to the BDS debate in the past, so I won’t repeat my question about why Klein – allegedly the intellectual hyperpower of anti-globalization and now the boycott, divestment and sanctions “movements” – cannot provide a perspective beyond what you might find at any garden-variety anti-Israel blog.

That said, her letter is a reasonable articulation of most of the BDSers talking points which, while not deserving a point-by-point “Fisking,” does require a rejoinder to her call for Berkeley’s student leaders to fight against “intense pressure to reverse your historic and democratic decision to divest…”.

As I’ve pointed out, pressure to get Student Senators to vote one way or another on the veto override are clearly coming from both sides of this debate. Now one can try to determine the volume and nature of “pressure” coming from each side (as well as explain when a Berkeley student or third party expressing his or her opinion on the matter crosses from free speech to applying “intense pressure”). But given that she only seems to be discussing “pressure” when it comes from those who want to see Berkeley reject divestment, we seem to be in familiar Klein/BDS territory whereby those that agree with the divestment party line are simply exercising their democratic rights, while those who disagree are conspiring to “pressure” a decision (just as they are frequently accused of “muzzling” debate on the Middle East by contributing to it).

And speaking of democracy, from what I can tell the ASUC (a democratically elected body) passed the divestment resolution (which is their constitutional right), and that resolution was nixed by the Student President (another democratically elected office) who exercised his constitutional right to veto the bill. Now if a veto override does not go her way it will be interesting to see if Klein is ready to accept that particular democratic decision or whether, like most divestment advocates, she only considers votes that her sides win to be true examples of democracy.

Of course, Klein sidesteps the issue I’ve been discussing here regarding whom student leaders are representing when they take votes that are clearly outside the mandates upon which they were elected. I have yet to hear from anyone that divestment represents anything other than a minority opinion on campus (not a majority, not a consensus), so unless Klein feels that those in power owe nothing to those they represent (a strange position, given her other political stances), I would think the fact that these votes are being taken without any regard to whether or not they represent campus opinion would at least be worth mentioning.

But that assumes Klein, like other divestment advocates, actually care about Berkeley beyond the symbolic value they would love the university to provide their noisy but flailing BDS project. While her letter is steeped in flattery for those that originally voted to pass divestment, it fails to mention that BDS has been rejected by every campus in America for the ten year’s it’s been on the agenda (a start date of 2001, not the 2005 one that divestment advocates prefer since it helps mask the decade-long extent of their defeats at schools, cities, churches and other organizations).

Even for a political celebrity like Naomi Klein, it’s hard to throw up enough verbal fog to obscure a decade spent being rejected by every progressive institution in the country by overwhelming margins. And thus the hope of the divesetniks that by bringing in their “big guns” (i.e., Klein) they can make Berkeley’s student government swoon and do their bidding.

Time shall tell if they made a good bet.