BDS With a Twist: Campus Divestment Target More Than Israel
This piece, regarding recent divestment resolutions at Stanford University and the University of California system, quotes our Editor-in-Chief. It was originally published at JNS.com, and is excerpted below. For more, read the full piece, here.
While two recent student resolutions initiated by Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement advocates in California ultimately had different fates, the episodes share a common twist: lumping additional nations and political entities with Israel as divestment targets…Samantha Mandeles, editor-in-chief of CAMERAonCampus.org for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting media watchdog group, took issue with the UCSA grouping the U.S. and Israel “with some of the worst human rights abusers in the world,” calling the move “merely a smokescreen, meant to hide the true anti-Israel bigotries and aims of its proponents.”
“This amendment is an attempt to hide from legitimate critique of BDS as unfairly focused on the one Jewish state in the world—which, in large part, it is. The inclusion of several abusive governments as part of a system of worldwide human rights abuses does not excuse the counter-factual castigation of Israel,” Mandeles said.
