Omar Barghouti, the Qatar-born Palestinian founding father of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, on April 27 addressed the anti-Israel Jerusalem Fund in Washington, DC. His remarks and their approving reception by about 80 sympathetic listeners filling the Jerusalem Fund’s lecture room should dispel any illusions about the BDS movement seeking Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Jerusalem Fund Executive Director Mohamed Mohamed introduced the “human rights defender” Barghouti, recently charged in Israel with tax evasion, to an audience containing BDS supporters well-known in Washington, DC, and beyond. The Christian Palestinian-American Philip Farah has previously addressed this author and others on BDS at a Jerusalem Fund presentation, just as the former Foreign Service Officer (FSO) Bud Hensgen once had an art exhibit there. His fellow former FSO Benjamin Tua revealed his solidarity with the event by stating in answer to an audience question that “Europe seems ahead of the United States on BDS” with growing sanctions against Israel.
Prominent radical anti-Israel organizations had representatives in the audience as well, such as Yousef Munayyer, the executive director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, a cosponsor of Barghouti’s talk. The respective Washington, DC, coordinators for Friends of Sabeel-North America (FOSNA) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), Paul Verduin and Shelley Cohen Fudge also attended. Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin and other Code Pink members arrived at the lecture’s end.
Barghouti’s background exposed Hensgen, now a member of Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East (UUJME), as outright naïve. His audience comments mentioned how he had been unable to persuade a liberal rabbi that “BDS is not anti-Israel or against the Jewish state or is ultimately calling for the end of the Jewish state.” Yet Barghouti has a long history of anti-Israel statements directly contradicting Hensgen and Barghouti’s lecture comments that BDS leaders “have never taken a position on one state versus two states.” In particular, Barghouti has stated that “we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. No Palestinian, rational Palestinian, not a sell-out Palestinian, will ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine.”
Barghouti starkly dismissed Hensgen’s foredoomed efforts of trying to persuade the wiser rabbi, stating that “I wouldn’t have spent a lot of my time trying to convince the KKK why blacks deserve equal rights.” Barghouti’s unequivocal condemnation of Israel excluded any dialogue; “we have to convince Israel to give up and give us our rights? It is not a matter of convincing; it is a matter of compelling.” “Masters never give up power, never. It is only the resistance of the slaves and the masters’ solidarity with their struggle that forces the masters to give up their colonial privilege,” he elaborated to vigorous audience applause.
Barghouti clearly denounced “Israel’s regime of occupation, settler colonialism, and apartheid” with slanderous analogies of Israel with past civil rights issues that have become all-too familiar. “Why are people wedded to the idea of maintaining this one case of a racial supremacist state on Earth?” he asked. He welcomed “major artists refusing to play Tel Aviv as the new Sun City,” a reference to the South African resort boycotted under apartheid.
Barghouti emphasized the Palestinian demand for a “right of return” for so-called Palestinian refugees. These now number about five million due to the United Nations’ bizarre practice of bestowing refugee status on the growing number of descendants of an estimated 750,000 Palestinians who fled the fledgling Israeli state in 1948. Thus for him:
Palestinian refugees and internally displaced Palestinians together constitute about 68 percent of our people, making the issue of refugee rights the most important, the most significant right for the Palestinian people in order to exercise our inalienable right to self-determination.
Barghouti in the past has conceded that a “return for refugees would end Israel’s existence as a Jewish state,” but his presentation dismissed any such concerns raised by Hensgen. Barghouti’s response that “ending a supremacist order—that is bad because?” provoked audience laughter. He deceptively argued that a “movement for Palestinian human rights…cannot be interpreted as the destruction of anything else except injustice.” Invoking canards of a Palestinian people existing since time immemorial, he stated that “we are the indigenous people of the land, we were ethnically cleansed. We have every right under international law to go home.”
Barghouti’s own comments indirectly indicated that Palestinian rejection of Jewish state is not a modern creation, but rather has origins in Arab opposition to Zionism beginning in the 1920s, including boycotts. Aside from the American civil rights and anti-apartheid movements, he noted that the “main inspiration for BDS came from a very long heritage of Palestinian nonviolent resistance.” Yet Arab opposition to Zionism, of course, also includes many violent forms, and he has previously supported Palestinian “resistance by any means, including armed resistance.”
As has become increasingly common, Barghouti cast destroying Israel as a “progressive” cause. “We have established amazing intersectional coalitions with various justice movements around the world,” including the “black justice movement” and “LGBTQI community.” He called upon this leftist community to oppose anti-BDS legislation emerging across the United States as a free speech cause, an outlook that might surprise Berkeley, California.
“Those who do not remember McCarthyism should better go back and read about McCarthyism,” Barghouti warned.
If they succeed in suppressing our freedom of speech on Palestine, they will go after every progressive movement in this country. You will gradually lose the very meaning of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the protection of free speech which is one of the gems that you still have in this country.
Observers of the BDS movement should take Barghouti and his bad company to heart. BDS leaders “wish we can genetically clone JVP in every European country and Australia and Canada,” he stated. Following the lecture, an audience member appeared to reject the very name of Israel by proclaiming that “we should always refer to it as occupied Palestine. I am sick and tired of calling it with the name they call it.”
Dave says
It should be called BDSG, because after boycott divest and sanctions the next part in the plan is clearly a genocide.
mortimer says
BDS is ISLAMIC SUPREMACISM cloaked in Marxist terminology.
Many American Jews are still so hoodwinked by Marxism that they cannot see their support of BDS is actually support for the proposed Islamic jihad-genocide against Israel.
There is a shocking lack of support for the Jewish homeland among American Jewry by self-loathing Jews who identify with the Marxist pursuit of unicorns.
Shmooviyet says
The sickening gall of this nasty Barghouti to speak the phrase freedom of speech, calling it a “gem” of this country. He and his hypocrite ilk would kill that particular freedom today if it were possible.
See how BDS has settled a cozy spot on the victimhood sofa, amongst the other unhinged groups that encourage bloody silencing of others–the bloodier the better.
Dare you, Mr B, to express what your “faith” deep down believes about human slavery, and black civil/human rights. BDS is just a newer name for an ancient Klan org.
Oliver says
For ALL OF THE ATTENDEES AND BDS SUPPORTERS.
1. GIVE UP YOUR CELL PHONES.
2. GIVE UP YOUR COMPUTERS THAT USE THE PENTIUM AND ITS OFFSPRING
3. DO NOT SUE ANY OF THE MODERN MEDICINES FOR M.S.; M.D.; PARKINSON’S; AND MANY FORMS OF CANCER
ALL WERE DEVELOPED -IN ENTIRETY OR IN PART- BY ISRAELIS.
———————————————————————————————————————-
THAT IS TO START.
LITERALLY HUNDREDS OF GENETIC DRUGS ARE MADE IN ISRAEL. BE SURE THAT YOU DON’T USE ANY.
AND BE CAREFUL OF WHICH MEDICINES AND MEDICAL PROCEDURES YOU USE- MANY WERE DEVELOPED BY JEWS.
————————————————————————————————————————–
ibrahim itace Muhammed says
Any Muslim who partners with any business entity connected to evil israel is an accomplice in sheding the blood of fellow muslim paletinians and he be among those who will dwell in hellfire.o muslims,boycot àll produced by evils or have any investment in Israel to save your faith
FYI says
“Dwell in hellfire”.
Ironically enough it is most likely you muslims that will suffer that fate.
You do not obey God’s commandments.
But that’s not surprising since your allah doesn’t follow them either.
You murder,rape,steal on behalf of your false god and your false prophet.
You do not love God.
It’s funny how you muslims are so sure that a paradise awaits you..your counterfeit commandment-breaking allah may reward evil doers but the actual God most certainly would condemn the savagery of your murder cult.
Given that allah curses the Jews and the Christians it is most unlikely that TRUE prophets like Moses or Jesus would accept the perverse commandment-violating teachings of your koran.
Say your fatiha,pray all you like to mecca,follow your “prophet” and the false teachings of the koran all you like:just as long as you don’t expect salvation.
How terrible it is for you muslims!
It is not your allah that will save you!
Since you do not love the truth enough to be saved you are the very wins who will perish…
“O muslims! Ye who do not believe!How shall ye be saved?With your counterfeit allah??”
Good luck with that.
Oliver says
I guess, than, anal, the following:
THE GOVERNMENT OF JORDAN (OIL AND GAS, AS WELL AS JORDANIAN SOVERGIN FUND BUYING ISRAELI GOVERNMENT BONDS, AND ISRAELI SECURITIES).
THE GOVERNMENT OF SAUDI ARABIA- HAVE UNOFFICIAL DEALINGS.
THE P.A. BUYS ELECTRICITY FROM ISRAEL, AS DOES HAMAS-WITH THE P.A. (UNTIL RECENTLY) FOOTING THE BILL. (THIS, I ALSO OBJECT TO; LET THE MUSLIMS LIVE IN THE DARKNESS THAT THEY CRAVE, IN THEIR PRIMITIVE FASHON, AS THEY FOLLOW A PRIMATIVE RELIGION.
THAT IS A FEW OF THE GOVERNMENTS AND QUSI GOVERNMENTS, OFF OF THE TOP OF MY HEAD.
But, what about the Druze who serve in the IDF? And there are even Muslim volunteers in the IDF.
And Muslims who go to schools where Jews-Israeli and others, are teachers?
IIM- why don’t you go and be a good Muslim, kill some less pious Muslims, preferably Iranian Shiites and Hezbollah members, and get killed doing so. Do the world a favor.
Harry ko says
How brainless can these unbelievably stupid Muslims be ? It’s bloody amazing !!!
Oliver says
Not more stupid then the western nations that take them in. And even stupider are the leftists who support them. And the most stupid. The people who keep reelecting and reelecting the pieces of shit politicans and leftists.
ibrahim itace Muhammed says
it is rather christians ,evil jews and idol worshipers like hindus who worship because jesus as human god was clone Roman pagan god of mithra who is a satan incarnation and which hinduism also evolved.yahwe or jehova the god of evil jews was also an idol worshiped by pagans and cloned into judaism.Allah remains the only true GOD WOrshiped by all prophets like Noah,Abraham,Moses and true jesus(IssA)not mithraist jesus invented in 325 Ad.