Friday 9 March 2012

BDS Still Desperate

While not as bad as highlighting a "victory" from 2003, the London BDS group is still desperate to find events to crow about. Their latest is the story that Veolia was fined £130,000 for breaches of security law that led to the death of a worker near Aylesbury.

I'm not going to comment on the logic or morality of using the death of a company employee in Britain as a political weapon against Israel, I'll just point out that the death was in 2004 and the fine handed down in 2010.

Wednesday 7 March 2012

BDS Antisemitism in Birmingham

Mark Gardner at The CST highlights a youtube video of BDS activity in Birmingham. The campaigners in it visit a number of Tesco shops placing stickers on Israeli products before piling them into trolleys and leaving them in the aisles or bagging areas with anti-Israel posters. Amongst the Israeli goods targeted were, in the words of one activist, "loads of kosher stuff."

I don't think BDS is inherently antisemitic. I think it is wrong and counter-productive and some of its proponents may be motivated by an antipathy towards the Jewish people. However, trying to get people not to buy Israeli oranges and encouraging Tesco not to stock Israeli peppers is not an inherently antisemitic campaign.

Nevertheless, targeting the Kosher section is antisemitic in effect. Because its effect is to encourage Tesco not to have a Kosher section which harms British Jews as Jews. Below are some pictures from the video showing the campaigners focussing on Kosher products.
Happy Passover? Not if these BDS Campaigners can help it.
Scouring the Kosher section for Israeli products

BDS campaigners don't want Tesco selling Kiddush wine to Jews
Or Sabbath Candles

Or Kosher soup

Tuesday 6 March 2012

BDS Getting Desperate

You know things are bad for a campaign when it has to go back to past events. But how bad must it be when their latest victory is 9 years old?

London BDS posted the following tweet last night:


Follow the link and you'll see that the event referred to happened in 2003!

Sunday 4 March 2012

Yet Another Council Declares BDS Illegal

First there was Leeds City Council, then the North London Waste Authority now its the turn of Canterbury City Council. All three have explicitly and publicly told BDS campaigners that their attempt to have Veolia excluded from public contracts is illegal. In the most recent example, Larissa Laing, head of Canterbury's neighbourhood services said:
Canterbury must choose its waste collection contractor under procedures laid down by Europe and adopted by this country under the Public Contract Regulations 2006. We do not think that activities in the Middle East relate to what we are considering in this contract.
Will the BDS campaigners listen? No. As I've explained before, the BDS campaign chooses to focus on Veolia because it guarantees them things they can call victories. Whenever Veolia doesn't win a tender the campaign leaders can declare it a victory and everyone agrees and congratulates themselves. This is one of the reasons why Normal Finkelstein calls the campaign a cult.

So you can be sure that this latest inconvenience of a council pointing out that BDS is illegal - and thereby also showing that not a single "victory" is actually real - will be ignored.