A New Kind of War: a Report and Analysis

A NEW KIND OF WAR: A REPORT AND ANALYSIS

ON THE U.S. CAMPAIGN TO END THE ISRAELI

OCCUPATION’SWEST COAST PLANNING

CONFERENCE SEPT. 19-21, 2014

By Lee Kaplan

A New Kind of War on Israel and the Jews Just Took Place at BDS Conference in San Diego: Something To Be Afraid Of

By Lee Kaplan

I attended undercover the west coast national planning conference of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation last September 19-21 in San Diego, California. The US Campaign is, in fact, the International Solidarity Movement, sometimes known as Palsolidarity, having been renamed and repackaged to serve as the main nerve center for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel in the United States. Over 400 groupsstatewide dedicated to bringing down the Jewish state were represented.

A repetitive theme of this event was that truth was irrelevant if it stood in the way of destroying Israel or interfered with the BDS movement’s goals. Lying by omission was a favored tactic that presented just enough information to convey a false impression without telling the whole truth or story at this event. Where this tactic failed, outright lying was the method of the day.

Deconstructing the truth about Israel and its irredentist terrorist neighbors like Hamas to fool an unknowing American public was the main goal and, in terms of training new legions to go out and do that, the event was successful. This wasn’t about peace, but about de-legitimizing Israel to strengthen Hamas, nor was it about academic freedom or accurate scholasticism as it tried to suggest it was.

What also distinguished this planning event over previous years was that of the approximately 350 individual attendees and leaders, at least half were disaffected “Jews” who were dedicated to discrediting American Jewish and Christian institutions that support a Jewish state. The Arab front group Jewish Voice for Peace and the Jewish anti-Zionist Network were prominent promoters of schemes and propaganda working alongside Arab groups and BDS leaders to devise “direct actions” and other methods of supporting Hamas and Palestinian terrorist goals under the guise of doing “humanitarian work” and fighting an imaginary “apartheid” and “genocide.” Such atrocities are allegedly perpetrated by Israeli and American Jewish groups against “innocent” Arabs according to the conference. A few radical homosexuals, some Jewish, also attended the event from Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT) to lend support to Arab irredentist goals despite the Arab world’s persecution of gays.

At no time during the three day event was the idea of “peace” used in any context where Israel’s survival as being part of a two state solution conveyed. Instead, assorted student leaders from the Students for Justice in Palestine, assorted Arab and U.S. academics, a large contingent of retirees and even some Christian pastors all gathered to find out how best to boycott the Jews and de-legitimize Israel. Only here the word “Jew” was substituted with the word “Zionist”, followed by a plethora of false accusations, stale communist revolutionary slogans and assorted pseudo-academic anti-colonialist rhetoric so popular on college campuses. “Racism” was also mentioned frequently while advocating racism against Jews in Israel as part of the program. Hamas was scarcely mentioned, nor terrorism unless the words “Israeli terrorism” were used. Rockets being fired into Israel from Gaza were also not mentioned, save one remark from attorney Marjorie Cohn from the National Lawyers Guild who spoke about what she termed the “one single little rocket” that was fired on Israel from Gaza (there were actually over 3,000 and many Israelis, even Arabs, were killed).

Terrorist Enablers Led the Charge

The conference began on a Friday night with a panel that featured Rahim Kurwa of the UCLA Students for Justice in Palestine chapter; RababAbdulhadi, an Ethnic Studies “scholar” who is really more of an activist from San Francisco State University;Bill Mullen from the American Studies Association; and MarjorieCohn from the National Lawyers Guild.

Kurwa introduced the audience to the event: “For what promises to be an amazing weekend of education and organization in solidarity work in the Palestinian struggle for liberation,” and said the event would serve for “the refreshing of Palestinian solidarity activism.” He recounted changes in the BDS Movement from 2009, 2010 and 2012 to 2014 today. In 2009, he said, “Professor William Robinson at UC Santa Barbara was called to task for using his university website to promote boycotting Israel outside his field of study and objections were raised then by Jewish groups.” Robinson managed toweather the campaign when the University decided he could do so as part of “academic freedom,” Kurwa said. Part of Robinson’s campaign back then, which Kurwa didn’t discuss, was his use of photos of Palestinian “victims” of Israeli “atrocities” placed alongside photos from the Holocaust. In fact, many of the photos of alleged Palestinian “victims” were actually photos of Israelis being beaten by Israeli police as they were deported from their homes in the West Bank, or staged scenes of Arabs that had no comparison with the Holocaust despite claims to the contrary:

Robinson photos above. Left, Jewish boy arrested by Nazis; Arab boy detained for throwing rocks at police. Jewish boy went to death camp, Arab boy turned over to parents. On right, Nazi policeman beats a Jew in Warsaw; Robinson said mounted policeman (to right) was a Jew beating Arab on ground; mounted policeman was Israeli Jewish poliemanforcibly deporting another Jew from settlement in the West Bank as part of Oslo.

Kurwa declared also that in 2009 that Jewish groups had attacked UCLA’s Center for Near East Studies as being biased against Israel particularly during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. He declared these attacks as being engineered solely because the Jewish groups didn’t like the message rather than being due to academic bias or propaganda. “What they are doing today,” he said, “is asking for the same thing they asked for five years ago: for Middle East studies to stop producing scholarship.”

He went on to describe the disruption of Israeli ambassador Michael Oren’s speech at UC Irvine by UC Irvine’s Muslim Students Association and some Students for Justice in Palestine as a “brief disruption” (the event was closed down) that the Orange County district attorney misrepresented from “an exercise in free speech to an illegal conspiratorial act” (a conspiracy was proven about the event in court) and various chapters of the SJP considered the action as part of a valid new system of “disrupting pro-Palestinian speakers throughout the UC system so they could not speak.”Kurwa accused the Orange County District Attorney of “twisting the law.”

Kurwa also alluded to the case of Palestinian activist RasmeaOdeh in Chicago who is currently facing deportation hearings due to what he again termed “twisting” of immigration laws to punish her for being pro-Palestinian. He conveniently ignored the fact that Odeh murdered two men in a supermarket bombing in Israel in 1989 for which she was sentenced to twenty years in prison but paroled by Israel after ten. Odehlater lied on her entry papers to the United States saying she had never been convicted of a felony. To avoid the deportation, Odeh and her supporters fabricated claims of torture while she was in prison in Israel, and of her father being brought to her cell in front of 45 Israeli policemen and being forced to disrobe in front of her and coerced to rape her in front of everyone. This is her argument for not being deported and it is a lie, especially since people do not realize that if Odeh’s deportation orders go through, she would not be sent back to Israel but to Jordan, the country she left from to go to the United States and where she lived after her parole. Odeh’s plight was a recurring cause celebre at this conference to try and get her deportation canceled.

RasmeaOdeh

Flashing forward to the more current events, Kurwa also bemoaned the recent sacking of Professor Stephen Salaita from the University of Illinois at Champlain because of his outspoken support for Palestine which Kurwa also deemed an abuse of academic freedom. Salaita was in fact sacked before he begin a term at that university after it was determined he had made multiple anti-Semitic public remarks against Jews and declared Israel an “apartheid state” when it is in fact the only state in the Middle East that does not practice apartheid. Given that the entire conference was based on half-truths and at times outright lies to forward its destroy- Israel- at- all -costs agenda, it’s not much of a surprise that support for Salaita would be such a strong issue also at this event. The attendees were encouraged by Kurwa, “to find Professor Salaitaa job someplace, somehow, so he could continue his work” andhe, too, was named a cause celebre for those in attendance.

Next up to speak was RababAbdulhadi of SFSU. Abdulahdi, as a Professor of Ethnic Studies has had a career as a pro-Palestinian activist against Israel and the US on the California taxpayer’s dime and recently came under criticism for spending $7,000 of California tax dollars on a trip to the Middle East to “show solidarity” and meet with PFLP terrorist Laila Khaled. Khaled was one of the first terrorists to start airplane hijacking and is under house arrest in Jordan.

Abdulhadi devoted part of her speech to attacking AMCHA and Stand With Us campus, two Pro-Israel advocacy groups that exposed Abdulhadi’s expenditures and statements in support of groups like Hamas. She thanked the conference organizers for “...the amazing support they have shown me after I have been attacked by the AMCHA Initiative campaign. It could not have happened without you.” Abdulhadi accused such groups of violating “academic freedom” and her right to free speech.

Abdulhadi complained of what she termed a “collection of attacks” that she alleged were from pro-Israel groups during the war on Gaza “and what this means to us in terms of repression.”

Citing attacks on “pro-Palestinian students and myself” she alleged took place not only at San Francisco State, she elaborated a list of other colleges to include “UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis, San Jose State, UC Berkeley, UCLA, University of Vermont, Northeastern, Northwestern, University of Michigan, NYU, Brooklyn College and elsewhere...” that she said were conducted by AMCHA, Stand With Us, Simon Wiesenthal and other pro-Jewish groups as being further examples of “a campaign of repression” and “denials of academic freedom.”

She and the other speakers on the panel scoffed at requests by such pro-Israel groups for “civility” from pro-Palestinian and BDS groups on campuses,such requests deemed as being “merely attempts to stifle debate.” This flew in the face of numerous physical attacks on pro-Israel students, even non-Jews, across the country by BDS groups.

She continued, “These attacks [by pro-Israel groups] are part of a very long history of repression and I’d like to send some as old as myself back to the Los Angeles 8 who were attacked by President Bush who then failed in trying to intimidate debate.” The LA 8 were prosecuted over twenty years ago for deportations after the FBI found fundraising and connections from them to the PFLP terrorist group, the same one Leila Khaled belongs to. Abdulhadi then said the government “...wanted to build internment camps for the citizens of 7 Arab countries and Iran and put people like the Japanese during World War II in them.”

Abdulhadi went on to praise the current SFSU President who she maintained in private had assured her he would never let groups like AMCHA or Stand with Us deny her “academic freedom” whereas“...the previous president had sought to control my behavior.” She continued adamantly, “I have a right to spend public tax dollars to teach social justice if I want to.”

She then went into a litany of revolutionary dialog, declaring Israel guilty of colonialism, an example of “white settlers taking advantage of an indigenous population.” She even included the situation in Ferguson as an example of where what the termed the indigenous black population was being abused by “the white settler community and the police department”—a rather silly statement. Incredibly, she also said the police officer who slew Michael Brown had been trained by Israel ( a complete lie) and complained about the “militarization” of the police “as a way of taking advantage of the haves and have-nots.”

She extended this idea to the recent war in Gaza as an example of the “haves” (Israel) taking advantage of the “have-nots” (the Palestinians). But then she claimed the Palestinians would rather live under bombardment by the Israelis and “stand tall” than capitulate to the Israeli government and she predicted a Third Intifada in the near future. She alluded to Palestinian cooperation with the ANC in fighting South African apartheid from SFSU in the 80’s (Jewish students did this also back then) and complained pointedly about the arrest of Sami al-Arian who was the US head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad in 2001, as if this was some form of oppression (Al-Arian was responsible for the deaths of over 100 people including some Americans through terrorist attacks). She attributed these events to racism by the “Zionists.” She declared in spite of setbacks like the war in Gaza and against BDS that their movement “...is more legitimate today for Palestinians than it ever was.”Abdulhadi, who went to the Middle East to show “solidarity” with a PFLP terrorist and consistently spoke of Palestinians aligning themselves with the likes of Hamas, concluded her speech by saying the BDS movement that day would mean “ ‘Never Again’ for anyone,” referring to Jewish resolve against another Holocaust. Considering her support for groups and individuals whose charter and verbiage call for the annihilation of all world Jewry, her concluding remarks were surreal.

RababAbdulhadi PFLP Terrorist Leila Khaled

The evening concluded with Marjorie Cohn of the National Lawyers Guild, who, in addition to her shoddy math about rocket attacks on Israel, gave a long lecture on how BDS and anti-Israel advocates on campus could preserve their right to speak on campus, explaining what was legal and what was not legal. A pamphlet was also circulated to everyone in attendance. It was mentioned that some campuses had tried to “silence” pro-Palestinian speakers and she explained the law to everyone to see they would not be “silenced.” She mentioned earlier in the evening that she and the NLG were excoriated by Alan Dershowitz, an Israel supporter, for dishonesty and use of the law to promote BDS in America . She stated that she was very proud of Dershowitz’s vituperation against her. “I took it as a badge of honor,” she said.

Next up was Bill Mullen, a history professor and faculty advisor to SJP at Purdue. Mullen spoke about the Academic Studies Association’s (ASA’s) recent vote to boycott Israeli academics and programs. Mullen was highly critical and derisive of pro-Israel groups who opposed this, citing his own interpretation of academic freedom. According to Mullen, such opposition groups called for “civility” in academia when it came to discussing the Israel-Palestine conflict, Mullen declaring such requests an attempt to control unpopular ideas from the pro-Palestinian camp that would hinder critical thinking. Actually, such “civility” is supposed to mean not lying about Israeli history and actions (a frequent tactic at this conference also) or condoning terrorist groups andtheir tactics (such as defining terrorism as “legitimate resistance.”). Mullen further suggested it referred only to legitimate criticism of Israel and its policies and was just an effort to indoctrinate students from learning for themselves. He didn’t bother to mention that the vote and lobbying for this boycott activity in the ASA was carried out by Noura Erekat and some Palestinian plants along with some 80 Arab professors in the ASA who promote BDS and whose sole purpose of being there wasto be a stacked deck to push for a boycott of Israeli institutions and to do so by misrepresentation if need be. Noura Erekat is the niece Saeb Erekat, Arafat’s second-in-command of the PLO and no slouch when it comes to lying about Israel committing atrocities against Arabs (Saeb claimed, for example, that the entire city of Jenin and its Arab population were wiped out by Israel; as a result he was banned from several television stations for doing so). In keeping with the tactic of lying by omission, Mullen failed to point out that boycotting Israeli academics and professors, rather than being an exercise in academic freedom was in fact a way to deny academic freedom to the pro-Israel camp by silencing anything they had to say and preventing them from proving when the BDS advocates in the ASA were lying.Documentation from the US Campaign who staged this conference, documentation that is generally fraudulent or leaves out details, was used as a basis for a petition to boycott Israel from within the ASA.

Bill Mullen Noura Erekat