BDS Movement
News about economic and academic attacks against the Jewish state
“I see everything through the lens of my Jewish upbringing, my Jewish values,” says the Illinois congressman.
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz blasted the decision to release the blacklist, calling it a “shameful surrender to pressure by countries and organizations interested in harming Israel.”
“By cloaking his anti-Semitic beliefs in anti-Israel invective, Waters apparently believes he has carte blanche to spew anti-Jewish tropes,” said B’nai B’rith International.
It has managed to get a vague commitment from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to skip the conference, though it hasn’t seemed to affect other presidential candidates.
“The resolution proposed by Students for Justice in Palestine is a clear attempt to emotionally blackmail student senators and create a hostile environment for Jewish students on our campus,” said University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Hillel executive director Erez Cohen.
“Waters is an avowed anti-Semite whose views on Jews and Israel far exceed the boundaries of civil discourse,” wrote B’nai B’rith president Charles Kaufman and CEO Daniel Mariaschin.
Chancellor Carol Christ of the University of California, Berkeley, said the chaos in the meeting reflected the “tension between free speech and our commitment to creating a campus environment where everyone must feel safe, respected and welcome.”
“The goal of this conference was to bring international herbal research to Israel,” said Sara Chana Silverstein, an Orthodox Jewish master herbalist from New York. “For BDS to attack this conference limits knowledge for the world.”
“Jewish students were repeatedly harassed, heckled and threatened with physical threats of violence. … Jewish students should never feel threatened and should NEVER fear for their safety while on campus,” posted campus group Tikvah: Students for Israel, on Facebook.
The conference comes after the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights launched two investigations into UCLA for its repeated failure to “prevent a hostile campus environment for its Jewish campus community in direct violation of the school’s Title VI obligations.”
Solomon Rajput, 27, also supports a bill to mandate that U.S. military funding to Israel not be used for “detention, interrogation, abuse or ill-treatment of Palestinian children.”
Anti-Semitism is rearing its ugly head in other ways, he says—not just in temples, but in communities, and in local governments and schools, not to mention on campaign signs.
