Over the last month the UC Santa Barbara student government has been voting on a resolution to divest from companies doing business with Israel. As a UCSB graduate and former student leader, I spoke at two senate hearings and worked with current students to defeat the resolution. It should now be very clear that what we are fighting at UCSB is the local face of an organized, global propaganda campaign against Israel.

Divestment activists at UCSB attempted to portray their campaign as grassroots and local. But evidence to the contrary abounds. Indeed, divestment is part of an increasingly organized and global movement. The language of the resolution introduced at UCSB was strikingly similar to those recently presented at UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and elsewhere. The Facebook pages set up in support of divestment at the different campuses were also very similar. These campaigns were carefully synchronized. They hit Stanford first, then UC Riverside, then UC San Diego, then UC Santa Barbara, then UC Berkeley, and finally UC Davis. As the drama was ending at one university it would begin anew at the next one down the line.

Divestment did not happen overnight. It is the result of years of work by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and similar campus organizations. Their modus operandi is simple and extremely effective. They get involved in student politics, build relationships with student leaders, hone their talking points, and lobby. At some campuses, like UCSB, this issue has been elevated to the point where some candidates for student government run on a platform of divestment. The anti-Israel movement has evolved, drastically increasing its participation in the democratic process.

It is clear that there is a well-oiled machine organizing and orchestrating this campaign behind the scenes. The main visible forces behind it are SJP-West, SJP National, and above all, the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Leading BDS organizations such as the U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation, American Muslims for Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, and the American Friends Service Committee are making significant contributions as well. BDS heavyweights like Desmond Tutu and Alice Walker are supplying personalized statements to student government leaders and even speaking at student senate hearings in person.

BDS portrays itself as a progressive human rights movement, but nothing could be further from the truth. BDS uses anti-Israel propaganda to promote a fundamentally immoral and illiberal political agenda: the elimination of Israel as the democratic state of the Jewish people. Some BDS leaders and organizations hide this or avoid stating it explicitly. But the undeniable reality is that the third core demand of the BDS movement, the return of millions of Palestinian refugees to Israel, is a call to replace the Jewish state with a Palestinian state. The involvement of legendary anti-Apartheid and civil rights activists like Tutu and Walker has helped BDS gain credibility and influence in progressive circles. But it seems Tutu and Walker left their opposition to bigotry at the door when they joined BDS. Tutu continues to endorse the Free Gaza Movement, which has been widely criticized for racism, despite receiving personal appeals to remove his endorsement. Walker has discriminated against Israelis directly, refusing to allow her book, The Color Purple, to be translated into Hebrew.

Despite the pretense that UCSB Divest was a local initiative, its supporters did little to hide their ties to the BDS movement. They organized a lecture about BDS by the infamous Richard Falk the day before the senate vote. The PowerPoint presentation they used on the night of the debate included slides promoting BDS. Representatives of the US Campaign to End the Occupation and American Muslims for Palestine read statements to the senate in person or by video. And in the nastiest surprise of the evening, a small army of community activists from Jewish Voice for Peace attended and spoke in favor of divestment, while grossly overstating their minimal influence within the Jewish community. It was quite the production.

By the time students began to speak the point of divestment was clear: to put Israel on trial in front of a captive audience. Israeli policies and legitimate Palestinian grievances were distorted and taken out of context. The daily hardships caused by the Israeli checkpoints and security barrier were presented as entirely arbitrary, as if the brutal suicide bombings of the Second Intifada had never happened. International laws were misrepresented or cited inaccurately. Israel’s presence in East Jerusalem and parts of the West Bank, which is legal under the Oslo Accords, was twisted into the “illegal” occupation of Palestinian territory. Widely disputed claims were presented as indisputable facts. Israel was mislabeled an apartheid state in the very title of the resolution, trivializing the suffering of those who suffered, and continue to suffer, under real apartheid regimes. But facts matter little in a well-oiled propaganda campaign.

Indeed, the misrepresentations of history and international law were nothing compared to some of the slander and vile innuendo we heard as the evening progressed. Divestment supporters used the infamous fake-Zionist-quote technique, reading a damning quote about Israel and falsely attributing it to Ariel Sharon. They repeated the long-debunked lie that Israel committed a massacre in Jenin in 2002. They took a sensationalized scandal about birth control and distorted the issue even more, charging “racist Israel” with “sterilizing” Ethiopian Jewish immigrants. How birth control turned into sterilization is anyone’s guess. In an especially bizarre and horrifying twist, one student associated Israel with Egyptian Bedouin who harvest the organs of African refugees in the Sinai Desert. And of course, they saved the worst for last. After the senate voted against the resolution, a leader in the divestment campaign went outside and screamed in anger, “Zionism is a form of white supremacy!”

Let that last one sink in. Zionism, the movement for Jewish liberation and self-determination, a movement shared by an international Jewish community of all colors, is now being labeled “white supremacy”. A diverse, historically oppressed minority with indigenous roots in the Middle East cannot advocate for its inalienable right to self-determination on a college campus without being accused of the lowest form of racism. And the worst of it is that some of the accusers have the audacity to call themselves “progressive.”

This scene repeats itself on every campus that divestment hits. The vicious accusations heard at the UC Berkeley, UC Riverside, and UCSB divestment debates echo one another. The new reality is that every student senate floor is a potential stage for the BDS movement’s anti-Israel theater.

But there is another, brighter side to this story. Divestment has mobilized Jewish and pro-Israel students like never before. Motivated, bright leaders have emerged, ready to do what it takes to push the anti-Israel movement back on its heels. Ideally this motivation is something that must spread among pro-Israel communities before they are hit with divestment campaigns.

The global movement to delegitimize Israel has become more organized, more cohesive, and more troublesome. It is time for the pro-Israel community to recognize the new facts on the ground, get better organized, and adapt. Indeed, we find ourselves in a familiar position: having no choice but to stand up and defend ourselves against hate.

We were able to get it passed by sneaking it in without the Zionists' knowledge, then that was exposed by articles such as this one A new vote was taken, and BDS lost 10-2



As some of you might know, the student senate at UC Riverside voted on March 6 to divest from companies doing business in Israel. You'd think that the UCR students had risen up in outrage at supposed Israeli "apartheid". That is, after all, what "Students for Justice in Palestine" (SJP) --sponsors of the divestment motion -- want you to think.

But don't be fooled. The UCR senate did not pass the divestment bill because UCR students agree with the SJP. The senate passed the divestment bill, quite simply, because it was swindled. Because the SJP orchestrated it so that opponents of the bill did not get their say.

I know because I was there.

While the SJP boasted that it started to lobby the UCR senators -- one of whom is also an SJP "board member" -- a "month and half" before the motion came to a vote, opponents of divestment were kept entirely in the dark until a mere 20 hours prior. The SJP were given a week to prepare a PowerPoint presentation. Students opposed to the motion were not.

On the night of the vote, SJP officer Shadi Matar opened with a 14-minute presentation. As if being kept in the dark for weeks were not enough, opponents of the motion were given no right of rebuttal whatsoever. In fact, opposition was rigidly confined to 50 percent of the time allotted for public interventions -- that is, to whoever in attendance wanted to get up and speak. The rest went, again, to the SJP and its allies.

In the words of dissenting Senator Megan Crail, "there was not enough time or opportunity among Senators to discuss the resolution due to public forum, and there was not a presentation of the issue from both perspectives."

What's worse, the SJP reportedly admitted that it deliberately kept opponents of the motion in the dark until the last minute in order to pass the motion without any real opposition:

Amal Ali, the president of Students for Justice in Palestine at UC Riverside, said keeping the resolution under wraps was the only way to "level the playing field," noting that similar resolutions on other campuses had been quashed by well-funded major Jewish or pro-Israel organizations. "We are aware that the Jewish lobby is very powerful and know BDS is something they fight against," said Ali.

I'll note that Ali's "powerful" Jewish lobby was able to muster only 4 or 5 surprised UCR students to speak disjointedly against the motion, while the SJP arrived with dozens of supporters delivering a well-oiled series of tested sound bytes. Meanwhile, the SJP -- a trans-national organization with branches on scores of campuses across the country -- is supported by powerful groups like American Muslims for Palestine (AMP). (In fact, AMP's chairman, Hatem Bazian, was a co-founder of SJP.)

But the worst, sadly, was what the SJP and its supporters said. It was their lies. After discussing the wholly unrelated histories of Apartheid South Africa and Jim Crow for the bulk of his 14-minute presentation, SJP officer Shadi Matar (ASUCR Director of Academic Affairs, no less) drew a flimsy and untenable parallel between those injustices and Israel by showing Palestinians lining up to come to Israel for work, using Israeli IDs (which every single Israeli citizen including the prime minister must also have) and boarding bus lines (falsely claimed to be segregated). Any real evidence of the supposed racial segregation alleged repeatedly by Shadi was left entirely to the audience's imagination -- an imagination that had just been molested by Shadi's images of past, unrelated racism. It was as fair as showing reels of Nazi cattle cars to a jury for 8 minutes then immediately showing them a picture of a toy train in order to convict Mattel of racism.

Other SJP speakers and allies then piled on more juvenile accusations -- colonialism, genocide, theft, racism, eugenics (!) and, of course, "Apartheid" -- as the meeting devolved into a veritable Alice in Wonderland of outrageous libel.

Let's now consider actual facts, which the UCR senators were deprived of.

Israel -- declared, by Freedom House, the only free state in the Middle East -- is the only country in the Middle East to give full democratic rights to Arabs. Arabic is one of Israel's official languages. Arabs serve Israel proudly as ambassadors, Supreme Court judges, ministers, and even military officers. Three Israeli Arab women have just been elected to the Israeli parliament, joining many other sitting Arab Israeli deputies. The "genocide" that the SJP speakers irresponsibly accused Israel of has resulted in a higher growth rate and a population explosion for Israeli Arabs. Even Palestinian homosexuals find real refuge from persecution in Israel. And Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza elect their own leaders, as per their express wishes. Israel is by no means perfect, but it is the opposite of apartheid.

Just ask the resident German who lives here. Once a Brown Shirt, always a Brown Shirt.

If one actually looks at history, one will find that the zionists created the 'work' camps of Auschwitz. To service the wealthy zionists I. G. Farbien facility.

Yep, right on time.

Can't refute history, huh?

I know you zionists created the nazis but did you also create the very Brown Shirts you now castigate?

Hmmmm......

I

must

hate

da

Jooooooooooooooooooos!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Zionism is the Jews worst enemy.

Zionist didn't mind feeding the Jews into the 'work' camps, that's for dang sure.

Just ask the Warbergs. You know, the owners of I. G. Farben.

The ones who made Zyclon B.

Let's pretend you're right?

There are plenty of mentally defective Jews who to this day fellate terrorists, same as you do. They're just as breathtakingly stupid as any dime store libtard.

Any thinking person knows that they should mistrust anyone, and be the single biggest gun loving group ever. But for some reason, so many aren't, and like you, they'll sell out anyone, anywhere, at any time, for a nickel or less.

So what's your point? Are you trying to put a knife in the back of your kind? The collaborators and the self loathers get no respect from a Brown Shirt?

You poor widdle thing....your poor widdle thing...

Haw Haw

How you like those Goebbels coins, huh? Made you go into a spasm of death threats, cause the little item of history they represent actually shows a bright light to the cult of zionism.

Like I said, you psychopaths are the worst enemy the Jews of thew entire world represent.

http://randompottins.blogspot.com/2007/05/coin-with-two-sides.html

Yeah, just keep bringing these 'pieces' up with your usual input.

We can have a huge amount of psychopathic fun here, right, Tweet?

"Made you go into a spasm of death threats"

Bizarre.

Is this all the indymedia has?

It sure was pretty funny watching the repeated attempts to call them "photoshop" ha ha.

A Swastika on one side and the zionist six pointed star on the other side.

zionists, is that all they have? Psychopathic freaks like you?

Divestment didn't get past committee at UCLA. But we'll always have UC Irvine

It explains why the Jew hater went apeshit when someone posted his name and address. He disappeared soon afterward. Cowardly collaborator..

you notice that it wasn't the student body but the administration that defeated the BDS.

The student Senate, not the administration voted it down. They shoved Bds at us four times this semester, and we said no each time. What a waste of time and energy