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Campuses Are Flooded with Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)

(Jerusalem Post) Natan Sharansky - Today, nearly every American campus is awash in double standards, efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state and rhetoric demonizing Israel. Campuses are flooded with Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) resolutions, which this year increased in both reach and intensity. Considering the absence of comparable calls to boycott the world's most egregious human rights violators, there is clearly a double standard at work in such campaigns. The danger of movements like BDS is not in the economic damage they could do to Israel; rather, it is in their ability to intimidate anyone who is ready to show sympathy to the Jewish state, an interest in traveling to it, or even a readiness to acknowledge his or her own Jewishness. Studies have shown that even Jews who are sympathetic toward Israel and feel positively about their own Jewishness choose to be silent in order not to defy mainstream opinion or damage their career. Israel's sympathizers have to shift gears, from playing defense to launching a confident offense. They have to take back the banner of human rights and liberalism, and not permit this rhetoric to be misused by those who are defending some of the world's most reactionary forces. The writer is a former prisoner of Zion in the USSR, a former Israeli cabinet minister, and currently Chairman of the Jewish Agency.
2015-05-22 00:00:00
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