Israel passes new law to protect settlers from boycott

BBC report here.

How to kill peace

Earlier we linked to this Harry’s Place guest post by Shlomo Yosef –  ‘How to kill a movement over a weekend‘.

The piece is an example of boycotters working to entrench conflict and condemn peace-makers as collaborators. The boycott campaign depends on this, Harry’s Place has always been in the forefront of highlighting examples, and that is just one of the reasons we value Harry’s Place.

However, as our follower Ben White correctly pointed out on Twitter, the piece is also a good example of anti-boycott rhetoric going beyond what is acceptable. Ali Abunimah has never called himself “the mullah from Chicago”, nor has he issued anything he described as a “fatwa”. How does this language serve an anti-boycott cause? It does not. What it does is risk hostile, perhaps sub-conscious, connections being formed between Muslim and boycott. It was wrong to bring Islam into this, we don’t want to go there, neither should Shlomo Yosef, and neither should you. We hope that disrupts any such association.

Read the piece with that in mind, take from it an example of boycotters wrecking peace, and note that just as it is possible for criticism of Israel to be antisemitic and criticism of Margaret Thatcher to be misogynistic, it is also possible for criticism of people with Muslim names to contain anti-Muslim bigotry.

Entebbe- 35 years ago this week – Alan Johnson

Thirty-five years ago this week, German leftists Wilfried Böse and Brigitte Kuhlmann hijacked Air France Flight 139 along with their comrades Fayez Abdul-Rahim Jaber and Jayel Naji al-Arjam. They demanded the release of Palestinian and Baader-Meinhof terrorists, flew the plane to Entebbe in Uganda, separated the Jews from the non-Jews, and prepared to execute them.

How did a young, idealistic, anti-Nazi, a member of the far-left Revolutionary Cells (RZ) come to his end acting like a Nazi, selecting Jews for death?

Read Alan Johnson on where anti-Zionism on the left comes from.