Oppose BDS
I lived in Minnesota for five years. My wife is from there; her family still lives there.
When we return to visit, we have to reckon with a frightening reality: My in-laws’ newly elected congressional representative is deeply implicated in anti-Semitism.
Ronald Reagan infamously described the “nine most terrifying words in the English language” as “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
Right now, pro-Israel activists are recoiling from the unanticipated consequences of state laws that only sought to “help” them fight BDS, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel.
Lara Alqasem, the American student seeking to study at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, currently detained by Israeli authorities who refused to honor her visa, is the subject of a file on the highly controversial right-wing Canary Mission website.
For the past few years, a group of Jewish students have sought to sue administrators at San Francisco State University, alleging that their college has tolerated and buttressed a pervasively hostile anti-Semitic atmosphere. The students claim they have been subjected to anti-Semitic slurs and taunts, and had their campus events disrupted and sabotaged with little to no pushback from campus leadership. Among their more striking pieces of evidence was the deliberate exclusion—conceded by university officials to have been “improper”—of the campus Hillel chapter from a university civil rights information fair.
When the controversy over anti-Semitism and Women’s March co-leader Tamika Mallory first flared up, surrounding Mallory’s enthusiasm for Louis Farrakhan, it had one very interesting characteristic: it wasn’t about Israel.
When UC-Berkeley Lecturer Hatem Bazian was invited to speak at Arizona State University by a group of Muslim students, he found something unexpected in his contract: a clause requiring him to certify he wouldn’t boycott Israel.
When UC-Berkeley Lecturer Hatem Bazian was invited to speak at Arizona State University by a group of Muslim students, he found something unexpected in his contract: a clause requiring him to certify he wouldn’t boycott Israel.