The international Israel boycott campaign BDS is worried about its image because one of its sub-groups is too open about what to think of the movement’s propagated non-violence.
A splinter group of the BDS boycott campaign against Israel is causing headaches for the parent organization because it is too open in public with terrorist organizations. Like Mena-Watch in June reportedthere is what is called the Mapping Project in the orbit of BDS Boston.
At that time, BDS Boston published a visualized enemy list created by anonymous authors of the Mapping Project. It includes the names and addresses of companies, foundations, newspapers and even hospitals allegedly guilty of being supporters of Israel and “US imperialism,” which the Mapping Project calls for taking action against and “dismantling” these enemies. .
In addition to organizations, there are also a number of individuals on the list, such as Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, US Senator Elizabeth Warren and US Senator Ed Markey. The publication of the names and addresses of Jewish community members and Jewish institutions aims to intimidate and threaten Boston’s Jewish community. In addition mapping project literally:
“We published addresses, named officials and leaders, and mapped connections. These entities exist in the physical world and can be disrupted in the physical world. We hope people use our map to figure out how to effectively push them back.”
In addition to spokespeople for Jewish organizations, a number of congressmen have criticized BDS Boston. Seth Moulton (Democrats, Massachusetts) wrote on twitter:
»Targeting the Jewish community in this way is wrong and dangerous. It’s irresponsible. This project is an anti-Semitic enemy list with a map attached.«
Ritchie Torres (Democrats, New York) tweeted:
The BDS movement has put together a ‘mapping project’ that accuses Jewish and ‘Zionist’ institutions of various ills in American society. Making someone a scapegoat is a common symptom of anti-Semitism, which is essentially a conspiracy theory.”
Bad for PR
Even the BDS leadership distanced itself from the “mapping project.” Mahmoud Nawajaa, General Coordinator of the BDS National Committee, wrote a letter to BDS Boston afterwards. This letter was dated shortly thereafter by Aaron Bendler Jewish Journal leaked and from this on Twitter released. Nawajaa asked BDS Boston to remove the map from the Internet or “remove the abbreviation BDS from the name.” His reasoning:
»The Mapping Project uses non-strategic names and ‘physical addresses’ of institutions and individuals as targets and disseminates messages containing phrases such as ‘resistance in all its forms’. By having BDS on behalf of your group and yet spreading messages that indirectly advocate armed resistance and affiliate with groups that do, you have violated a key policy of our movement.”
Meanwhile, the members of the Mapping Project publicly hailed those from BDS Boston as “our friends.” designated become, blatantly terrorist actions. When the US section of the Jewish National Fund (KKL-JNF) held their national conference in Boston on November 5, demonstrated in front of the venue people who identified themselves as supporters of the mapping project.
They demanded the “dissolution” of the JNF and chanted the call for an “intifada,” a new wave of deadly violence against Israeli Jews. A few days earlier they had expressed their solidarity with the Palestinian terrorist group “Lion’s Den” on the Internet. explainedwhich since August in the area of the West Bank city of Nablus, numerous nocturnal raids and terrorist attacks had committed.
That’s not the image BDS wants to convey to a broad audience in the West. It’s not a moral issue, it’s a PR issue. In the West, one likes to be moderate to a naïve audience. BDS officials use terms like “civil society” and “nonviolent” to describe themselves.
Proximity to violence and terror
It is known that some members of organizations that support BDS are also members of terrorist organizations and even carry out assassination attempts – think, for example, of Samer Arbid, one of the two main perpetrators in the deadly bombing of Rina Shnerb. The 17-year-old Israeli was on August 23, 2019 near the Ein Bubin spring in a terrorist attack carried out with a remote-controlled bomb northwest of Jerusalem was killed. Her father, Rabbi Eitan Shnerb, and her brother, Dvir, survived the blast with injuries.
A few weeks later, Israeli security forces arrested 44-year-old Samer Mina Salim Arbid. Arbid not only belonged to the terrorist organization PFLP (a Video shows him at an official PFLP event) but was, as soon turned outactive in the organization Addameer, which is also funded by the German Heinrich Böll Foundation is funded.
Addameer’s mission is to support terrorists and other criminals imprisoned for acts of violence against Israelis. Addameer is also part of the BDS movement. BDS groups in Western Europe keep inviting terrorists to the PFLP events a. The Israeli government has numerous personnel overlaps documented between BDS groups like Addameer and terrorism.
Open homage to terrorism, however, is not what BDS leaders want to present to Western audiences. They prefer to avoid the topic. But when they speak up and believe they are addressing a sympathetic Arab audience, they sound no different than the Mapping Project folks. BDS spokesman Omar Barghouti, for example, responded in a 2010 interview with the Palestinian literary magazine Al-Adab when asked whether he was in favor of an end to the “armed resistance” – meaning the murder of Israeli Jews – enter:
“No, we certainly have a moral and legal right to armed resistance to the military occupation of our country, even under international law, as long as we are attacking legitimate targets, i.e. the occupation, settlers and people who are armed. … The resistance is not an ideology or a dogma. We cannot be neutral, we must think of forms of resistance that are appropriate to our situation and goals.«
According to Barghouti, civilians can also be murdered as long as they are claimed to be “settlers.” So the issue of violence is not something the BDS leadership and the Mapping Project would have to split. It is probably more about the question of where and to whom you are speaking. Barghouti does it like Yasser Arafat once did: He tells Westerners what they want to hear, so he is moderate.
The BDS leadership probably fears that the newcomers to the Mapping Project have not yet understood this. They may overtly flaunt hatred of Jews and affinity for terrorism — to potentially jeopardize the fruits of BDS’ years of efforts to hide both from Western audiences.