Divest This’ Panic-Driven Response to Omar Barghouti

The excellent Divest This! blog is back in business after an extended hiatus, and it wastes no time in cutting down Omar Barghouti’s grandiose visions of BDS success, most recently expressed in The New York Times.

Divest This! observes:

As the leader of a “movement” that has accomplished next to nothing in close to fifteen years, Omar Barghouti seems to have developed special vision powers (perhaps learned while studying at an Israeli school he insists everyone in the world but he should boycott). These powers allow him to see panic-stricken Israeli supporters on all sides that quiver in perpetual fear of BDS’s explosive growth that always seems to arrive in the form of a damp squib.

Barghouti’s latest New York Times piece (paired with a “rebuttal” by Hirsh Goodman which declares Israel to be guilty, but urges something other than boycotting as a punishment – great diversity of opinion Grey Lady!) demonstrates all the rhetoric ticks that give BDS staying power despite lack of concrete victory (incidental or otherwise).

Thus 16% of the American Studies Association’s membership voting for an academic boycott is a “landslide vote” while the stunning backlash against the boycott from across the academy goes unmentioned. Or perhaps that is just part of the panicked response of Israeli supporters? (Keep in mind that in the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose world of BDS, both the BDSers own activity and the overwhelmingly negative response it generates counts as a victories for them.)

Then you’ve got odd-hand quotes from people like Secretary of State John Kerry treated like official policy, without mentioning actual US policy which has been to reject and condemn boycott and divestment (as well as enforce anti-boycott legislation implemented by that Zionist stooge Jimmy Carter in the 1970s).

Mix in two parts Apartheid accusations, a sprinkling of “non-violence” and “we can’t be anti-Semitic because we’re anti-racists” and voila: the rhetorical magic that seems to have kept Mr. Barghouti on top of a movement willing to fly him around the planet, despite his inability to get anything bigger than a student council to do his bidding (and even then, only barely). . . .

In fact, it has been the failure of BDS to achieve its goals at the level of civil society that has helped de-legitimize the entire de-legitimization movement, which is why the boycotters have to resort to badgering a film star about which soft drink she endorses in order to get anyone’s attention (ignoring the fact that the planet has already decided to flip them the bird by stocking up on Zionist bubbles and flavor).