Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, which operates 15 centers in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, announced that it adopted a “weapons exclusion” in its investments, in part to boycott the Jewish state.
“We are proud to announce a new ‘weapons exclusion’ in our investment portfolio, so there is no longer the potential to earn interest from companies that profit from violence and war, such as the devastating loss of life and sexual and gender-based violence happening in Gaza,” it stated. “We encourage our supporters to join us.”
It added that “this weapons exclusion allows us to reject companies who profit from the manufacturing of weapons and is a meaningful step in addressing both the violence we are seeing and the feeling of powerlessness that so many of us have been experiencing.”
Journalist and scholar Ira Stoll wrote that “the activist demands to divest from Israel or to boycott or sanction it have frequently transformed nowadays to demands to divest from arms manufacturers that are making the weapons Israel is using to fight Hamas in Gaza.
“I find such demands naive and morally mistaken,” he continued.
“For one thing, the weapons manufacturers aren’t going to go out of business because Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, or other ideologically aligned nonprofits and individual investors, decide to divest. The profits will still exist, they’ll just go to other causes,” he added.
“For another thing, without weapons to defend itself from the terrorists, Israel would be overrun by enemies that would kill and rape lots of Jews and install a cruel, unfree regime like the Hamas one that ruled Gaza from 2007 to 2023, or like the one that has ruled Iran since 1979,” Stoll wrote.
