Video: BDS leader Omar Barghouti making blatantly racist remark

(CIFWatch) Gilad Atzmon found this video of Omar Barghouti (who you probably know from his boycott work) putting his foot squarely in his mouth: The video is only a minute long but there is oh so much information packed into it. For example Barghouti declares that he won’t be lectured on violence by a “white person” why? Because “the white race is the most violent in history of mankind.” Isn’t that special.(MORE)...Ben White, another spokesman for the BDS movement, may have an answer to offer. In a recent New Statesman article he foolishly admitted that that BDS “is a strategy, not a principle.”

Omar Barghouti and OWS: They can colonize our lands, but they can never colonize our minds

The Oakland, Calif., chapter of the Occupy movement overwhelmingly endorsed a proposal in support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.

(mondoweiss.net) Last Saturday, Omar Barghouti stopped in Oakland, CA as part of his current West Coast tour. The lecture was billed as "Occupy Wall St., not Palestine," and Barghouti made the case that it makes "perfect sense to think of Israel as part of the global one-percent in War Inc." He touched on the relationship between U.S. and Israeli weapons manufactures, suggesting that Israel's behavior as a "garrison state" enables more customers for U.S. produced weapons.

...but the Barghoutis are the 1 percent ruling elite in the West Bank

(en.wikipedia.org)Omar Barghouti (born 1964) is a founding committee member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) who is currently studying for a masters degree in philosophy at Tel Aviv University. He was born in Qatar, grew up in Egypt and later moved to Ramallah (West Bank) as an adult.

(Front Page) Omar Barghouti is a distant cousin of Marwan Barghouti and Mustafa Barghouti. Marwan Barghouti is a major terrorist leader serving five life sentences for numerous murders. Mustafa Barghouti was a Soviet-educated Communist leader and a candidate for the presidency of the Palestinian Authority.... Bashir Barghouti, was a leading Jordanian Communist who served as the Minister of Industry in the Palestinian Authority. Another of the bunch, Mohammed Barghouti was the Minister of Labor.

(standwithus.com)Barghouti claimed that Israel constantly violates international law and committed “willful acts of genocide” during its war against Hamas from December 2008 to January 2009, and he cited the UN Goldstone report as proof. He didn’t mention the human rights of the Israelis, who were unrelentingly assaulted by over 7,000 rockets launched by Hamas, which necessitated the war, or that the Goldstone Report itself said it had “proved nothing” and was discredited by the world’s liberal democracies for being hopelessly biased and unreliable. He also neglected to tell audiences that Judge Goldstone himself retracted key accusations in the UN Report....He charged that Israel “steals” Palestinian water, when in fact, Israel is giving some of its own water to Palestinians—40 percent more water than it promised to give in the 1993 Oslo Accords ....Barghouti claimed that in 1948 and after, Israel destroyed tens of thousands of Palestinian books in order to commit a “cultural massacre” and “Judaize Palestine.” In fact, Barghouti’s source reveals that Israel collected books from abandoned Palestinian libraries to save them from destruction in the chaos during and after the 1948 War, and it painstakingly catalogued and stored them. They are available in Israeli libraries for all researchers to use.

The Reality of Campus Anti-Semitism

Jonathan S. Tobin

Should the federal government intervene when an American university permits its campus to become unsafe for Jews? When the prevailing atmosphere on campus is hatred against Israel and all things associated with the Jewish people?

After a long and involved debate, the Obama administration finally did the right thing last October and stated definitively that such conduct is impermissible at institutions that receive federal funding. While that ruling, which was prompted by an epidemic of anti-Semitic harassment of Jewish students at the University of California at Irvine, ought to have been welcomed by both academia and the organized Jewish world, it has now been challenged by the American Association of University Professors. In a newsletter on the AAUP website, Cary Nelson (the association’s president) and Kenneth Stern of the American Jewish Committee contend that recent events on American university campuses—at Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and Rutgers in addition to Irvine—do not rise to the level of a “working definition” of anti-Semitism. Calls for redress by Jewish students and professors are nothing more, they conclude, than an unscrupulous effort to “censor anti-Israel remarks.”
But Nelson and Stern are wrong both about the situation on campus. And they are wrong about the motivations of those whose activism led the U.S. Department of Education to issue its ruling.
Last September, one month before the ruling was issued, COMMENTARY published Kenneth L. Marcus’s essay “A Blind Eye to Anti-Semitism,” a thoughtful examination of the sordid goings on at the Cal-Irvine and the halting steps taken toward combating the epidemic of anti-Semitic acts that had taken place there. The former head of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, Marcus detailed not only the unhappy story of how the university had failed to protect Jewish students, but also set forth the legal rationale for the federal government ’s intervention. He pointed out that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in federally funded universities and public schools. Although it has been argued that laws banning racism do not apply to Jews (who are not a race but a people), Marcus rejoined persuasively that, in addition to being a religion, Judaism is a group identity that involves more than adherence to a faith.
Contrary to Nelson and Stern, what is happening on campus isn’t merely the free exchange of ideas about Israeli policies. As Marcus wrote:
There, on the campus of the University of California at Irvine, Jewish students were physically and verbally harassed, threatened, shoved, stalked, and targeted by rock-throwing groups and individuals. Jewish property was defaced with swastikas, and a Holocaust memorial was vandalized. Signs were posted on campus showing a Star of David dripping with blood. Jews were chastised for arrogance by public speakers whose appearance at the institution was subsidized by the university. They were called “dirty Jew” and “fucking Jew,” told to “go back to Russia” and “burn in hell,” and heard other students and visitors to the campus urge one another to “slaughter the Jews.” One Jewish student who wore a pin bearing the flags of the United States and Israel was told to “take off that pin or we’ll beat your ass.” Another was told, “Jewish students are the plague of mankind” and “Jews should be finished off in the ovens.”
The result of these incidents was that Jewish students rightly feared the consequences of speaking up in opposition to this spirit of intolerance. While it may be held that the university should have been able to handle this problem without federal intervention, the truth is that the school did nothing. Cal-Irvine officials reacted to complaints with indifference or without urgency. The Jewish community was left with little choice but to resort to legal complaints seeking to compel the government to enforce the law against discrimination. It is very much to the credit of the Zionist Organization of America that it championed this cause.
Although Nelson and Stern wrongly treat the students complaints as if they were trivial, they also claim that the resort to the law harms the cause of fighting anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Government intervention shifts the discussion, they believe, from opposing bigotry to protecting free speech.
Anti-Semites will howl that they are being repressed if they are prevented from spreading hatred for Jews on university campuses. No question about it. But those who preach hatred for African-Americans could make the same argument. Even to ask whether Nelson or Stern would be okay with the Ku Klux Klan’s holding officially sanctioned forums at federally-funded schools, however, is to answer the question.
Nelson and Stern go on to compare the warnings about campus anti-Semitism to the debate over immigration laws. But the comparison is just as specious. There is, after all, a clear distinction between advocating enforcement of existing laws against illegal immigration and broadcasting anti-Hispanic hate, even if the distinction is often erased in the heat of debate. No one is calling for Israel’s critics to be barred from campus. Harassing Jews in classrooms and public spaces as well as holding authorized campus events whose purpose is to promote the delegitimization of the Jewish people, however, crosses the line from unpleasant speech to an illegal promotion of violence.
The atmosphere of hatred created at Cal-Irvine in 2003 and 2004 and now being duplicated at other American universities stands as a watershed event in the history of the movement to defame Zionism and the Jews. At a time when this pernicious movement tries to flood into America through the classroom door, it is more important than ever that decent people speak out against the rising tide of international anti-Semitism. When universities fail to restrain the haters, it is up to the government to treat Jew-hatred no differently than it would bigotry against any other minority group. No matter what the AAUP says.

via docstalk.blogspot.com

nothing is ever new... do a Google search on the issue and tell me this is fair and unbiased?

Posted via email from noahdavidsimon's posterous

via rabbiyonah.wordpress.com

Last Friday, eleven Muslim 'students' were arraigned in a California court and plead not guilty to charges stemming from their disruption of a speech by Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren in February 2010. How could someone be criminally charged for exercising their right of free speech by heckling a speaker they didn't like - and in the United States no less? That's exactly the point, writes Yair Rosenberg in the Harvard Crimson. You have the right to speak but so do others who disagree with you. In this particular case, the 'students' were shown to have planned to prevent Oren from speaking at all. That steps over a line.

To understand why this prosecution is justified, and indeed similar future prosecutions of campus disruptors are warranted, one must first understand what this prosecution is not.
It is decidedly not an “absolute affront to the Constitution” that will “inhibit the free exchange of ideas,” as Dan Stormer and Jacqueline Goodman, two of the Irvine defense attorneys, have claimed. It is their clients who sought to inhibit the free exchange of ideas by shouting down Oren’s speech, preventing him and the estimated crowd of 500-700 individuals from exercising their rights to free speech and assembly.
In fact, when viewed through the lens of pragmatism rather than partisanship, the prosecution of these disruptors clearly protects our civil discourse. Imagine, for contrast, a campus climate in which it is possible for any sufficiently motivated group to shut down an event to which it is ideologically opposed. Not only would Ambassador Oren and General Petraeus be shouted off the stage, but Nancy Pelosi would be accosted with cries of “baby killer,” while Omar Barghouti, who spoke recently at Harvard to advocate boycott of Israel, could be met with jeers of “terrorist” and “anti-semite.” It is essential for the preservation of considered campus conversation that such suppressive “speech” never be tolerated, no matter the opinion being espoused. Simply put, no partisan should have a vocal veto over the marketplace of ideas.
Beyond the practical necessity of such prosecution, there is also strong legal justification for it. As Professor Eugene Volokh of UCLA, a renowned free speech expert explains, “California law rightly makes it a crime to interfere with people’s rights to speak, and listeners’ rights to listen.” Volokh is a long-time equal opportunity advocate for First Amendment rights, having defended flag-burning, anti-Israel bus advertisements and even the permissibility of voluntarily-assumed Sharia arbitration on U.S. soil. To him, the Irvine case is not an example of individuals exercising free speech but rather attempting to stifle it. “Of course, the defendants have their own free speech rights,” he says. “They could have freely exercised them outside the meeting. They could have exercised them during Q&A … They could have exercised them by staging their own event. But First Amendment law has long recognized that there’s no right to speak so loudly that it interferes with other people’s activity.”
Countering a misconception, Volokh adds that “while a jail term is theoretically available” if the defendants are found guilty, “it will be highly unlikely for first offenders.” Rather, “in a case such as this, the defendants … will be fined, put on probation, and possibly sentenced to some community service.” And that, he concludes, “sounds like about the right punishment.”

It might be enough to inhibit these people in the future and maybe others as well. But unfortunately, the facts in this case seem uniquely suited for prosecution - a mistake that the BDS'ers are not likely to make again.
Read the whole thing. And if you speak to groups in public, know your rights. No one has the right to shut you down. At least in theory.

via israelmatzav.blogspot.com

UK University Heads Say They 'Can Do Little' About Islamic Extremism

Yes - this really is a British University: Muslims pray in the street at City University in London

..Oh yes they can. And the time has come for them to be forced to:
Islamic fundamentalism is being allowed to flourish at universities, endangering national security, MPs and peers said yesterday.

via undhimmi.com

Helen Thomas leader of the BDS

A series of protests against Israeli policy and its support by AIPAC are planned in May to coincide with the AIPAC conference in the U.S. capital and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech there. The protests, under the heading "Move over AIPAC," will include demonstrations opposite the building where Netanyahu will speak and Congress, and a series of lectures and meetings with critics of Israel, including veteran journalist Helen Thomas who lost her place in the White House press room after saying Jews should leave Palestine and go back to Poland, Germany and the United States. Thomas will give the keynote address at the Move Over AIPAC conference, and will receive an award from the women's pacifist organization Code Pink, one of the hundred left-wing American organizations behind the conference.

On Friday night, a favorite cafe among progressives, Busboys and Poets, gathered letters to Gazans; the next aid flotilla in May will deliver the messages to the Gaza residents. A separate room in the cafe hosted a meeting of around 250 activists with Omar Barghouti, founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign. Barghouti, who recently released a book on BDS, was winding up a book tour that included Columbia, Harvard, Brandeis and other universities.

via haaretz.com

Helen Thomas: I thought Obama was Liberal Because He Is Black....Israelis are Ruthless, Running an Open Prison & Brutal Oppression

international law on blockades...

Once again, I have obtained the audio from another anti-Israel event in the Chicago area thanks to my source there. This time the speaker was Helen Thomas. The event was sponsored by MESA (Middle Eastern Students Association) and was part of the Palestine Awareness Week, also known as Israel Apartheid Week. 


Here are some selections from her talk.


Here is transcript of the audio above.

As for the Middle East, Obama has passed the only veto recent time at the UN, 14 to 1, when there was a resolution backed by 100 countries against the Israelis building more and more settlements on Palestinian land.

I went to Susan Rice, who is our representative at the UN. And I said, “how could you, how could you raise your hand in a veto?” She said, “I would have lost my job.” You are not allowed to annex occupied land under the UN and under international law. The blockade of Gaza is an open prison. The Israelis are ruthless and not only have they been, they have been allowed to be the cause of support of America. American Presidents are afraid to say no to Israelis. It is political suicide. Especially if you are running again, which of course Obama is.

Only President Carter had been brave enough, courageous enough, to take them on; against their brutal oppression of the Palestinians. The bottom line is you can’t take what doesn’t belong to you.

For all the military might and all the nuclear arsenal, the Israelis live in fear, there is no question about that, and even more so now because of the Arab uprising all over. They hate that, I’m sure, because they have always false thought that they would be the only Democracy in the Middle East. What kind of democracy makes most of the citizens oppressed and not citizens, lower class, taking their land, taking their homes, killing their children? Now, I think I should lighten up, don’t you?

I’ve always assumed that President Obama would be liberal because he’s black. What a false assumption that was.

Question: Why do you think Obama hasn’t said anything to help the Palestinians get any of their land back? Why do you think Obama has done nothing to help the Palestinians get their land back?

Thomas: Politics - once you get elected, he has to have billions, not millions of dollars, and you can’t antagonize your big bankers. I don’t think he has ever been a real liberal, not like I am a liberal, the good old days. I don’t think he really cares that much, I am sorry to say that.

Question: Can you please explain your comments from last year that caused you to retire from the White House press?

INTERNATIONAL LAW REGARDING THE
LAND OF ISRAEL AND JERUSALEM

Thomas: I said the Israelis should go home, wherever it is. If it was Palestine, ok. But for everywhere else, to push people out of their homes, it is a horrible thing. Where is their conscience? I want to know. What right do they have to do that? To kill and to take someone else’s home and that is what they have done of the years. Even today they are bulldozing homes, killing children, killing the women, who are these people? How dare they? When is America going to stand up for the real international law? I mean absolutely, when we won WWII, we left, we didn’t occupy the other lands, we didn’t, but when the Israelis due with their military might, the US supports them, when they take what doesn’t belong them. And that is absolutely wrong. We provide them with the military money, we provide them with the money, they couldn’t exist one day without us. We are equally guilty.

Question: Do you think Jerusalem has become another settlement?

Thomas: I hope not. Jerusalem should be an international city. That was what was ordered for many years ago at the UN, except we abstained, I think. Of course Jerusalem is an international city. It should be owned by all religions and all the people.

Question: What solution do you offer for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? Do you take a two-state solution or one-state?

Thomas: Well, I think we have to bow to the inevitable that they are there. But, I think we have to stop them from taking more and more land. And we also have to get them out of their illegitimate places: the West  Bank, Gaza, and so forth. They have blockaded Gaza, they treat them like… There will be more and more flotillas and they deserve it.

Question: What steps do you think need to be taken to get the Palestinians out of occupation?

Thomas: Passive resistance, I think because there is no way to fight the Israeli military might. But I do think a real stand down on the part of the whole Arab world will put them in their place. I believe that we can do it. It worked with Gandhi, it worked with Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King during the height of the civil rights movement went to a restaurant that he knew was making a sit down strike and he made everyone of his supporters put their guns in the bag. Passive resistance works and it saves life.

Question: Why do you think there is such a huge disconnect with US media and with what’s going on over there (Middle East)?

Thomas: I think the Israeli propaganda is so effective and you won’t have a job in this country if you go against them. You can’t say one thing about Israel. I can call the President anything in the book; I’ve said that many times. Nobody says anything.  I can call him anything. But, I cannot say one thing about Israel or you don’t have a job or you’re anti-Semitic even if you are Semite.

Question: Can you explain what the word anti-Semitism is and how it’s been missued in the media?

Are these Jews in Jerusalem in 1948 the occupier?

Thomas: That’s not what it is, but I sure know how it’s been missued. I think it dates back to Hitler and that’s the way they try to defame you, by saying you are anti-Semitic. I don’t hate anyone. But, I sure have had trouble not to in a lot cases. We are supposed to love each other, but how can you love people who hate?

Ben-Gurion, who was the first President Prime Minister of Israel said “show them no mercy.” Everything they did, village after village. The Israeli army was created by terrorist groups: Irgun,???, Haganah, who formed the Israeli army. They initiated terrorism, Begin bragged about it in his first book.

Question: How do you respond to a person’s claim that Palestine is their land since King David?

Thomas: Well Rabin said, “where’s the deed, where’s the deed?” G-d apparently doesn’t give deeds.

Question: What do you think of the rumors of the 3^rd intifada? Do you think it will be successful?

Thomas: I’d like to see a stand down, throughout the whole Arab world. Passive resistance, resisting, blockading, stopping the whole ???. I think that’s the only solution. It’s the one that saves lives.

Question: Do you think it will happen?

Thomas: We need another Gandhi, or Tutu, or whatever.

Question: How do you feel about the popular demonization of pro-Palestinian events and supporters?

Thomas: That’s wonderful.

Question: The demonization of pro-Palestinian supporters.

Thomas: Dehumanization? How do I feel? Well, you’ve got a victim here.

via challahhuakbar.blogspot.com