When blood-libels about organ-harvesting don’t work, it’s time to dust off that other weapon that has served racists so well for centuries: the boycott.
Not just any boycott.
A boycott solely against people of one single faith.
People who refuse to betray their own country.
And not just any people either. Academics. The leading thinkers of any democratic society, the progressives who embrace free thought as part and parcel of their pursuit of expertise.
No, we’re not talking about Egypt, whose Muslim majority routinely violate the human rights of the country’s 3 million Coptic Christians.
Neither are we talking about the Shia Muslims of Iraq who slaughter the Sunni Muslims of Iraq in the name of Islam. And vice versa.
Nor are we talking about the Muslim Palestinian Authority in the West Bank (the Jewish provinces of Judea and Samaria where the Palestinian Arabs want to create a second Palestinian state alongside Jordan). In the West Bank, Christian Arabs living in the cradle of Christianity are so relentlessly pursued by their Muslim neighbours that their population in Bethlehem has dwindled to one-third its size in just one generation.
And of course we are not talking about the Gaza Strip, where ethnic cleansing got a head start with the removal of every single Jew, dead and alive, before the territory was handed over to the Gazans as a first step in the establishment of peace and a new nation. What the Muslim-majority Gazans did instead was to turn on the Christian minority, which has since been decimated.
When it comes to use of the boycott as a weapon against people of a single faith, we are, in fact, talking not about any of the above, but about Sweden.
KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, is organizing a “seminar to discuss the case for boycotting Israel”. Presenting the case for a boycott will be such leading lights of democracy and fidelity as Dror Feiler, a communist who renounced his Israeli citizenship and now campaigns in Sweden on behalf of terrorist organizations such as Hamas. He is regarded in many circles as a traitor. He is also President of European Jews for a Just Peace, an organization numbering almost a hundred people. He does not represent more than a handful of Jews in Sweden but is given widespread coverage by a media enchanted with the Palestinian narrative and deaf to any other.
At the KTH event, Associate Prof Jan-Erik Gustafsson will “report about the Birzeit group for international academic boycott”.
So it’s going to be a balanced, fair and above all representative exchange of views, then.
Interestingly, not a word is mentioned by these champions of human rights on the subject of China, which has occupied and annexed Tibet these past fifty years. Or Turkey, which committed unspeakable atrocities against the Armenians and still occupies Armenia. Neither is Russia mentioned, despite its continued occupation of Chechnya. The Kurds still do not have a country of their own and have been hounded over the centuries – yet another subject that KTH chooses not to highlight.
And that’s before we even mention that other paragon of democracy and enlightenment, Iran, which continues to trumpet its determination to erase Israel from the map and is pursuing the development of nuclear technology for that purpose.
The boycott supporters at KTH prefer not to delve into the legion human rights abuses occurring every day in the Palestinian territories – honour killings, systematized rapes of Christian women, the illegal incarceration of the one sole Jew still (hopefully) alive in Gaza – Gilad Schalit who was kidnapped from sovereign Israel three years ago and still held without access to the Red Cross, his family, legal representation (not that he is accused of anything apart from Judaism, a crime in Gaza), the summary executions of political opponents. None of this matters.
There is a considerable risk to constantly crying “anti-Semitism” every time something of a tacit anti-Semitic nature takes place. The term and its meaning risk being diluted.
There is however an even greater risk to ignoring anti-Semitic attacks when they occur in countries that are ostensibly democracies. Because it sets society on the slippery path to indifference. And we know where that leads. Ask the people of Cambodia, Darfur, Bosnia, Tibet, Armenia, Kurdistan. And the decimated Jews of Europe.
Interestingly enough, one of the participants at the KTH seminar is the Egyptian propaganda ministry. That may of course explain the utter silence on the plight of Egypt’s Coptic Christians.
It also raises interesting questions about how one of Sweden’s foremost educational establishments has been infiltrated by a foreign governmental agency with a murky agenda.
For an insight into how Egypt is perceived today, read this article by former Israeli ambassador to Egypt Mr Zvi Mazel.
And for an insight into how Sweden is perceived today, read this interview by Dr Manfred Gerstenfeld.
With Egyptian state infiltration into Swedish academia, Swedish state funding of various anti-Israel NGOs, and the total infiltration of UNRWA by various Palestinian Arab terrorist and criminal gangs, it is time to step back and ponder where we are headed in the Middle East.
Because constellations such as the Sweden/Egypt/Hamas/media/academia axis seem to be working cohesively outside the established policy structures.
The lack of transparency is worrying. Like now at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, which demands that Jewish Israeli academics betray their country if they wish to be treated as equals.
It’s an echo of what Ilmar Reepalu, the mayor of Malmö in southern Sweden said recently: that only Swedish Jews who renounced all affiliations with Israel could reasonably be expected to live in peace and security in Sweden.
He made no corresponding demand on Swedish Muslims.
Malmö mayor Ilmar Reepalu may well be an honorary member of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
They certainly speak and act in sync.
Interesting link:
CAMERA reports that government-funded anti-Israel NGOs have been operating for many years.