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University of Pennsylvania to Host Upcoming BDS Conference
Posted: January 27, 2012
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The drumbeat of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) activity against Israel is set to continue with a major strategy conference scheduled to take place at the University of Pennsylvania from February 3-5, 2012.
Many of the significant players in the domestic anti-Israel movement are planning to speak at the conference, including Ali Abunimah, co-founder of the website "Electronic Intifada;" Philip Weiss of the anti-Zionist blog "Mondoweiss," Anna Baltzer, the National Organizer of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, and Rebecca Vilkomerson, the Executive Director of Jewish Voice for Peace.
The conference is being promoted as an opportunity to advance BDS initiatives, including a campaign against the retirement fund TIAA-CREF and a boycott of Israeli products on college campuses. Many of the invited speakers, however, are longtime activists who have pursued a wide range of delegitimization efforts against Israel, including lawfare initiatives (i.e. battling Israeli policy in the international courts), branding Israel's LGBT efforts as an attempt to "pink-wash" its alleged crimes against Palestinians, and academic anti-Israel arguments. This indicates that conference organizers likely hope the event will become a major strategy session for anti-Israel activists.
The conference is being organized by PennBDS, a new student group that appears to have formed for the purpose of organizing this conference. It has created a Web site and pages on popular social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to promote the conference, which at this point is sold out.
The upcoming conference claims to be a sequel of sorts to a BDS conference that took place at Hampshire College in November 2009. That conference, which attracted students from 40 different colleges across the U.S., was meant to jump-start a national BDS campaign against Israel on campus. Some of the speakers who presented at the Hampshire conference are scheduled speakers at Penn as well, including Ali Abunimah (who was the keynote speaker at the Hampshire conference), Hannah Schwarzchild and Abraham Greenhouse. As at the Hampshire conference, many of the speakers are Jewish anti-Zionists.
Some of the event's scheduled speakers have a long history of virulent anti-Israel rhetoric, including expressions of support for terrorist groups that violently attack Israeli civilians, comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany, and blanket statements about Israelis in general that appear to border on anti-Semitism.
Below is a sampling of comments made by the conference's scheduled speakers:
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Ali Abunimah, the co-founder and Executive Director of the anti-Israel Web site "Electronic Intifada," regularly compares Israel to Nazi Germany, arguing that "Zionism is not atonement for the Holocaust but its continuation in spirit" and describing Gaza as a "concentration camp."
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Helena Cobban, an anti-Israel blogger and former Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, has described Israelis as "stupid" and "incapable of empathy and compassion for other people."
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Bill Fletcher, a labor writer and activist, regularly accuses Israel of "ethnic cleansing" and "apartheid." He has also stated that the Holocaust "cannot and never will justify the destruction of the Palestinian people being carried out by the Israeli state."
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Reverend Grayland Hagler, a Protestant minister, has called for anti-Israel activists to "stand up together until we dismantle the State of Israel!" He was also part of a coalition that defended and supported the Holy Land Foundation, a Texas-based charity that was convicted in November 2008 of funneling money to Hamas.
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J. Kehaulani Kauanui, a professor at Wesleyan University, has claimed that Palestinians have the right to use violence against Israel: "Palestinians have the right to engage in armed resistance because they are illegally occupied."
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Ahmed Moor, a Beirut-based freelance journalist, has advocated support for BDS on the grounds that it will dismantle the Jewish state, saying: "Ending the occupation doesn't mean anything if it doesn't mean upending the Jewish state itself…BDS does mean the end of the Jewish state."
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Philip Weiss, a writer and founder of the anti-Israel blog "Mondoweiss," has alleged that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is a sort of vicarious revenge for the Holocaust, with Palestinians standing in for the Nazis and the "abused becoming the abuser."
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