Human Rights, You Say?

"The BDS campaign is completely contradictory to the Palestinian cause. We will never build peace this way. It has been catastrophic. The Palestinian people want prosperity, and BDS is about a totally different agenda. It is the agenda of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Iran. The agenda of the BDS campaign is to try to destroy Israel. What I try to explain to people is that if you support BDS, you are not supporting the Palestinian cause. You are not even aware of the Palestinian cause."
"Of course it's anti-Semitic [BDS campaign]. There is no doubt about it. It is because it's anti-Semitic that the campaign has such energy around it. These activists believe that Israel should not exist, that there should not be a Jewish state, that the Jewish people should not exist."
"And by the way, this goal will never benefit the Palestinian people, not in the short term, and not in the long term."
Bassem Eid, Palestinian human rights activist, Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group

An Egyptian man shouts anti-Israeli slogans in front of banners with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (GDS) logo. Amr Nabil/The Associated Press Files

This man dedicated to the furtherance of Palestinian interests travels the Globe as a speaker on the human rights situation of the Palestinians. He began his career as an investigator for B'Tselem, the Israeli NGO focusing on what it believes is Israel's illegal interference with West Bank Palestinians, a socialist-oriented, leftist, civil rights group critical of its own government. Mr. Eid has since branched out, co-founding the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group.


BDS goes hand-in-glove with the "right of return", the insistence that the offspring of the original 700,000 or so Palestinians who fled with the creation of the State of Israel, now numbering in the millions, have the right to 'return' to towns and villages they imagine themselves to be the rightful inheritors of. That 'return' and the 'dismantling' of the wall that separates Israel from the Palestinian terrorists who excel at suicide missions and the slaughter of civilians will satisfy the concerns of those empathizing with the plight of Palestinians.

The Palestinian group has a focus on acting as an investigative agency highlighting and emphasizing the abuses carried out by the Palestinian Authority against its own people in the West Bank, and the even worse human rights abusive situation practised by Hamas in Gaza. These are the issues, however, that the international community is far less interested in hearing about than accusations leveled against Israel for its purported inhumane treatment of Palestinians.

Those who claim not to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction campaign led by Palestinians and their legions of sympathizers who therein find an outlet for their latent anti-Semitism to find satisfactory expression under guise of human rights support, but who insist that the right to freely express their opinions is paramount in a free society, also are at ease ignoring the fact that the BDS supporters often violently repress the expression of opinions other than their own.

Events organized to denounce the BDS campaign on university campuses risk threats leading to violence. Mr. Eid in speaking at the University of Chicago had pro-BDS activists disrupt his speech, with one protester threatening to kill  him. Also in Chicago at DePaul University and at Northwestern University, Mr. Eid's speech venues were forced to safer places, excluding non-students. BDS supporters insist on their right to free speech, but refuse similar rights to those opposing their BDS campaign.

"The United Church of Canada does not describe itself as being part of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement" wrote the United Church national moderator, the Right Rev. Jordan Cantwell, thus removing the United Church from direct communion with the raving anti-Semitism of the BDS movement, while hypocritically supporting the achievement of their goals. Taking the higher road while practising the lower purpose.

The wildly anti-Semitic 2001 Durban conference that embraced the "apartheid" smear of Israel, upheld BDS as a moral duty obliging all human rights groups to embrace the concept in the name of humanity. Israel has the distinction of being singled out as a transgressor of human rights while the most egregious of state abusers go deliberately unnoticed. And mostly because they themselves are elected to sit on the UN's human rights commission.

The United Nations, needless to say, remains a bastion of human-rights-supporting clarity, as can be witnessed in the appointments carried out there in the name of furthering humanity's goals to foster equality and the advancement of liberty globally.

Which goes a long way to explaining their latest triumph of accommodation over reason by electing Syria and Venezuela to top posts on its committee against "Subjugation of Peoples", for those two countries are aptly capable of applying their experience to the topic in a first-hand view to elucidate the issue for the edification of all concerned human rights activists eager to hear the florid details from the horses' mouths, as it were.