{"id":91106,"date":"2016-03-24T07:30:57","date_gmt":"2016-03-24T15:30:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=91106"},"modified":"2016-03-24T07:30:57","modified_gmt":"2016-03-24T15:30:57","slug":"watch-out-jewish-students-the-anti-israel-movement-will-boycott-you-next","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=91106","title":{"rendered":"Watch Out, Jewish Students: The anti-Israel Movement Will Boycott You Next"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Haaretz<\/a>: Recent events at Brown University reflect a frightening new stage to the BDS movement: targeting Jewish students and institutions that don’t explicitly distance themselves from Israel.<\/p>\n

Janet Mock was born in Honolulu in 1983 to an African-American father and native Hawaiian mother, and is a soaring star in LGBT circles\u2014almost a pop icon of the transgender community, if you will. As I discovered last week, she\u2019s in high-demand as a speaker on college campuses. \u201cMoral Voices,\u201d a social justice group that operates under the auspices of Brown University\u2019s Hillel, secured her as a speaker for a March 21 seminar entitled \u201cRedefining Realness.\u201d The event was well-publicized, and \u2014 as evidence of its expected popularity \u2014 was slated to take place in Brown\u2019s largest lecture hall.\u00a0
\nBut, unbeknownst to the program\u2019s organizers, Hillel\u2019s right to sponsor events had apparently been revoked by a handful of student activists. A group calling itself \u201cBrown Students\u201d published a petition on Change.org urging Mock to disavow Brown\/RISD Hillel\u2019s sponsorship, since its umbrella organization\u2014Hillel International\u2014is pro-Israel on most issues.\u00a0
\nI take pity on my readers, and will therefore reproduce only the most critical part of the tortured document:
\n\u201cHillel as a corporation has consistently defended and even advocated for the Israeli state\u2019s policies of occupation and racial apartheid. Israel\u2019s violent policies center on colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide of native Palestinians. Further, the Israeli government has been ignoring (and actively perpetuating) waves of anti-African violence in the past few years, recently including the mob shooting and lynching of an African asylum seeker and anti-African state-supported police violence.\u201d\u00a0
\nThe petition\u2019s authors also coughed up the highly-original pinkwashing charge \u2014 that Hillel is exploiting Israel\u2019s positive record on LGBT rights in order to distract people from how evil the Jewish state is.\u00a0
\nThe students were not protesting anything about Janet Mock; just that Hillel doesn’t have any right to host “one of their own” \u2013 a transgender woman of color \u2013 if it supports Israel. The petition attracted only 159 supporters \u2014 not all of them even Brown students \u2014 but as Mercutio said, \u201c\u2018tis not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church-door, but \u2019tis enough, \u2019twill serve.\u201d Janet Mock cancelled the event. In an email, her representatives explained that \u201cthe focus of Janet’s work was lost leading up to the proposed event, and her visit was received with controversy and resistance rather than open dialogue and discussion about the issues closest to Janet’s work.\u201d
\nThe fingerprints of Students for Justice in Palestine were all over this from the start, and SJP\u2019s proud confession in Monday’s issue of the Brown Daily Herald leaves no doubt that the petition was its handiwork.\u00a0
\nThe Janet Mock incident was just one episode of the anti-Israel scourge that has racked Brown this semester. Hillel hosted its highest profile event of the year on January 28, when former Soviet political prisoner Natan Sharanksy and Hollywood legend Michael Douglas came to speak about their \u201cJewish Journeys.\u201d Needless to say, that program didn\u2019t sit too well with the dark forces of anti-Israelism, whose faithful picketed the talk in an attempt to disrupt it. Then came the coup de gr\u00e2ce: Students at the Jewish and LGBT frats discovered anti-Semitic and homophobic vandalism graffitied on their walls last week. There\u2019s no evidence implicating SJP in this, but when punishing the world\u2019s only Jewish country becomes a permanent and obsessive feature of campus life, what happens next cannot be dismissed as an unhappy coincidence.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Haaretz: Recent events at Brown University reflect a frightening new stage to the BDS movement: targeting Jewish students and institutions that don’t explicitly distance themselves from Israel. Janet Mock was born in Honolulu in 1983 to an African-American father … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-israel","category-jews"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=91106"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91107,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91106\/revisions\/91107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=91106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=91106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=91106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}