By Steve Sailer
04/04/2015
The anti-Israeli Jewish-American site Mondoweiss notes the logic implicitly linking the success of Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction tactics in pummelling Indiana over a small town pizza baker telling a reporter she wouldn’t bake gay wedding pizza to accustoming the SJW mob to use BDS to pummel Israel down the road. Weiss thinks the BDS movement humiliating Israel would be a good thing, but you don’t have to agree with him on that to notice that he does have a tactical point: the triumph of the Eye of Sauron over Indiana means it will more likely be turned upon Israel in the future.
Double standard in US political culture: BDS is fine for Indiana, not Israel Philip Weiss on April 2, 2015The news is filled with outrage over the Indiana legislature’s enactment of a bill that would protect “religious freedom” by allowing businesses to discriminate against LGBT people to whom a business-owner objects. There have been wide calls to isolate and boycott Indiana over the discriminatory law. The AP reports:
Businesses and organizations are canceling events and barring travel to Indiana over a religious objections law that critics say would allow discrimination against gays and lesbians.
…. Governors in Connecticut, New York, Washington state and Vermont have barred travel over the law, along with mayors in New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Denver and Washington, D.C …
Bear in mind that the law was passed last week, and the governor of Indiana signed it a week ago. The alacrity of the boycott movement, and its enthusiastic coverage in the media, stand in stark contrast to the widespread efforts in our mainstream political culture to stifle actions to boycott Israel over its openly-discriminatory practices. … Israel has at least 30 laws that discriminate between Jews and Arabs inside Israel, including the ability to buy land and to marry; and the 4-5 million Palestinians inside territories occupied by Israel have no rights to speak of. Their situation is widely described as apartheid or even slavery.
There is a global movement to boycott Israel — the BDS movement, or boycott, divestment and sanctions movement — that is racking up victories around the world. But American leaders are deadset against it, including liberal Democrats who are spearheading the boycott Indiana movement. Lawrence Summers and other Democratic figures have described the movement as “anti-Semitic.”
Last week the leading Israel lobby group AIPAC crowed about a bill in Congress to stop BDS:
Bipartisan Bill to Combat BDS Movement Introduced in Congress
The legislation, which AIPAC designed and worked on drafting for months, would impose penalties on countries that support boycott measures against Israel….
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo opposes BDS. He went to Israel and Palestine last summer to congratulate Israel on its onslaught on Gaza. But he’s on the Indiana case like a duck on a junebug. Yesterday he issued an executive order barring state travel to Indiana unless it was necessary as a matter of public safety or health.
To American Jews out there who have a healthier regard for their co-ethnics in Israel than Philip Weiss does, let me point out that he does have a logical point: if the American establishment applauds SJWs using BDS against Indiana, why won’t some of the emboldened SJW mob eventually enlist in turning BDS upon the big one, Israel?
A lot of Jewish American liberals aren’t concerned yet about this logic: they assume, with decades of experience to justify their judgment, that we have too much influence over the media to allow audiences to reason by analogy all the way to an anti-Israel conclusion.
But social media is a new technology and it’s not clear just how out of control the SJW mob can get. Jews have lots of historical experience with mobs getting worked up over this or that and then winding up conducting anti-Semitic pogroms out of aroused animal spirits.
So a more prudent course for liberal ethnocentric Jews might be to
A. Ease up on promoting various SJW causes in the mainstream media: gay marriage has obviously won and right now the conquering army is merely hunting down defeated survivors in the sticks and bayoneting them in detail. But they’re developing a taste for humiliating those at their mercy that may not slake itself just with small town pizza makers.
B. Satirize the SJWs more, implying to the smarter young people that the mob is uncool.
C. Defend victims of the mob as the first line of defense for Israel and Jews.
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