BDS Activists Lose in Ithaca, Anti-Israel Defamation Continues

Jim Murphy, a local radio host and supporter of the BDS campaign in Ithaca, which suffered a setback when a local food coop rejected an anti-Israel boycott proposal last night.

The governing board of the GreenStar Cooperative Market, a food coop located in Ithaca New York, handed the BDS movement a set back last night when it rejected a proposal to impose a boycott on Israeli-produced goods. Advocates of the proposal, who had falsely claimed that Sabra Hummus was named after the Sabra and Shatilla massacre, suffered the defeat after the coop’s council concluded that the boyct proposal violated New York state human rights law which prohibits companies participating in boycotts based on national origin.

William Jacobson, a blogger at Legal Insurrection, and a law professor at Cornell University (located in Ithaca) who has been documenting the controversy, states “This is a very important victory, and one in which the NY Human Rights Law played a central role. As such, it has serious implications for other boycott attempts singling out Israeli products based on national origin.”

Ithaca is a hotbed of anti-Zionist activism. Alison Weir, a well-known anti-Israel propagandist will be speaking at the Unitarian church in Ithaca this evening (May 13, 2015. The event has drawn criticism from the Ithaca Coalition for Unity and Cooperation in the Middle East (ICUC-ME), which has written a letter to the church council.

The letter highlights some of Weir’s uglier polemics. For example, she has compared Israel to Nazi Germany, stating that its founding was “the start of a holocaust.” She has also demonized American Jews. “In this country, you…you’ve killed careers. You’ve killed business. You’ve killed hope. You’ve weeded out sprigs of integrity from our Congress, journalists from our press,” she has written.

In its letter to the Unitarian Church, the ICUC-ME declared that such language fits the U.S. State Department’s Definition of antisemitism. The letter states in part:

Hosting someone like Weir confers legitimacy on those spreading hate speech and anti-Jewish libels and violates universal principles of equality and inclusiveness. This undermines the prestige and reputation of the Unitarian Church in our community.

The letter goes onto state that while ICUC-ME does not want the invitation to Weir to be rescinded, they do call on the church to “publicly repudiate this speaker and to reach out and repair the hurt and rebuild the trust that is breached by hosting Weir.”

This isn’t the first time a church in the UUA has promoted anti-Israel propaganda. Rev. Tim Kutzmark, a pastor at a UUA church in Reading, Mass., promoted anti-Israel propaganda from his pulpit a few years back.