Showing posts with label boycotts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label boycotts. Show all posts

Monday, April 18, 2016

Now BDS Battle Is Moving to State Capitols - EITAN AROM/JNS.ORG CHARISMA NEWS

Israel Construction
The BDS Movement continues to build steam on college campuses, prompting pro-Israel groups to turn to statehouses to slow its advance. (Reuters photo)


Now BDS Battle Is Moving to State Capitols

Close observers of the anti-Israel Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement have long kept a weather eye on California. But that attention has mostly focused on university campuses, including the prominent 10-school University of California system.
Now, the Golden State is the latest battleground in a nationwide effort to draft and pass anti-BDS laws in U.S. state capitols, and pro-Israel advocates hope that success on the state-government level will curb the boycott movement's momentum on campus. At a Los Angeles conference on fighting BDS that was hosted earlier this month by the pro-Israel education group StandWithUs, California Assemblyman Travis Allen had a message for the movement's proponents: "Boycotting a trade partner of ours doesn't make sense."
A Republican from Huntington Beach, Allen has styled himself as an early adopter of a trend now sweeping state legislatures to bar companies that boycott Israel from contracting with state governments. That trend inspired not one, but two bills that have been introduced in the California Assembly since January, the first by Allen and another by Assemblyman Richard Bloom, a Santa Monica Democrat. 
Allen has since become a co-author of Bloom's bill—which, unlike Allen's similar measure, enjoys the support of the California Jewish Legislative Caucus. Bloom's measure, Assembly Bill (AB) 2844, won approval on April 12 from the Accountability and Administrative Review Committee, the first of two legislative committees set to review it.
"I am very pleased that others have now joined in support of the effort, and it looks like we will now get a substantive law that will affirmatively state that California won't support the boycott of Israel," Allen said in an interview.
The bill was not without its opponents. Cristina Garcia, a Democrat from southeastern Los Angeles County who chairs the accountability committee, recommended rejecting the measure. But the support of the committee's three Republicans put the bill over the top, and it passed in a 5-1vote, with three Democrats abstaining.
"With unanimous Republican support, I am extremely confident that the current efforts to pass AB 2844 will be successful," Allen said.
Allen has touted the wide and diverse support for legislative efforts to combat BDS, including from members of Congress and Israeli Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein. As calls to alienate Israel or its government have grown louder, anti-boycott activists have looked to state capitols to provide businesses with the political cover to reject those calls.
In addition to the state contractor bill, Allen authored another piece of legislation that would prevent state pension funds—worth hundreds of billions of dollars—from investing in companies that boycott Israel. 
If California passes any of the bills, it would become the eighth U.S. state to formally legislate against BDS, according to Peggy Shapiro, the Midwest director for StandWithUs. So far, Illinois, South Carolina, Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Arizona, and Florida have passed such laws, she said. Florida and Arizona have passed laws applying both to contractors and state pension funds, while the other states have done one or the other.
State legislation has become an increasingly important part of the anti-BDS arsenal, Shapiro said. StandWithUs has found "smart, willing, cooperative partners" in state capitols, working "hand in glove, reaching out to legislators, educating them about the destructive goals of BDS," she said.
Pro-Israel groups started advocating for such legislation after the European Union (EU) began discussing labeling laws for products from Judea and Samaria. Last November, the EU decided to make such labels mandatory for some goods, removing their "Made in Israel" labels.
The increasing popularity of legislative tactics to fight BDS has corresponded with a somewhat disappointing year for campus advocates of Israeli government policy, as student resolutions seen as unfavorable have passed at an increasing number of schools.
In the past, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law (LDB), a group dedicated to protecting Jewish civil and human rights, was able to keep a list of campuses where pro-BDS resolutions were likely to crop up.
"We're now at the point where, sad to say, the BDS movement has saturated the country to the extent that it is no longer so predictable—you can no longer focus on a discrete number of campuses," LDB President Kenneth L. Marcus said at the StandWithUs conference.
Part of the idea behind moving the battleground to state legislatures is to find more favorable turf for the anti-BDS message, said pro-Israel activist Noah Pollak, executive director of the Emergency Committee for Israel, who has supported the nationwide legislative effort.
"You don't want to fight on your enemy's terrain," Pollak said, speaking alongside Assemblyman Allen at the conference. The "enemy," he said, "picked out campuses for a reason."
Victories in state legislatures could subsequently spread to college campuses, said Pollak.
According to Pollak, legislating against BDS tells its proponents, "While you were doing your campus antics, the grown-ups were in the state legislatures passing laws that make your cause improbable." The laws are meant to dent the morale of BDS advocates, who enjoy a number of advantages on campus, he said.
Among those advantages, the Palestinian narrative of Israeli "oppression" and "racism" holds a certain intrinsic pull for some minority communities, allowing groups like Students for Justice in Palestine to build diverse coalitions around their cause.
Roz Rothstein, the CEO of StandWithUs, admitted that when it comes to building diverse coalitions, "we're very bad at that."
"The other side is doing it to a fault—that's all they do," she said.
According to Estee Chandler, the founder of the Los Angeles chapter of the pro-BDS organization Jewish Voice for Peace, the anti-BDS bills are unconstitutional and part of a sustained effort to shield Israel from being held accountable for decades of "occupation" and "human rights abuses." She calls the bills a "misleading attempt to squelch the BDS movement, which has only grown exponentially in spite of years of efforts to oppose it both on and off of college and university campuses."
Chagrined by the state of play among student governments, some in the anti-BDS camp are hoping one group of allies—state legislators—will make the diverse coalition on the other side obsolete.
Besides, the bills have the advantage of putting Jewish organizations in a position where they don't normally find themselves: on the offensive.
"We're always on the defensive; we're always responding to pro-BDS activists," said Jacob Millner, a senior analyst at The Israel Project, a non-partisan policy and education group. "This is something we can do where we can be proactive."
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Sunday, January 17, 2016

God Honors Churches Which Support Israel While Methodist Churches Sit Empty by Abra Forman - BREAKING ISRAEL NEWS

Illustrative: United Methodist Church of Saugus, Massachusetts (Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Daderot)

Illustrative: United Methodist Church of Saugus, Massachusetts (Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Daderot)

IFCJ Leader Yechiel Eckstein: God Honors Churches Which Support Israel While Methodist Churches Sit Empty

“I called thee to curse mine enemies, and, behold, thou hast altogether blessed them these three times.” (Numbers 24:10)
The International Fellowship of Jews and Christians (IFCJ) has harshly condemned the United Methodist Church’s recent decision to divest from five Israeli banks, warning that churches which do not support Israel will ultimately suffer from decreased membership and affiliation.
IFCJ founder Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein said in a statement responding to the decision, “God is clearly honoring the churches that stand with Israel and the Jewish people by bringing about huge growth with them, and at the same time Methodist churches are sitting empty and their affiliation is way down.”
He said that the United Method Church (UMC) pension board’s blacklisting of five Israeli banks on the grounds that they enable abuse of human rights would only garner more conflict and strife in the region.
“Boycotting divides people and stirs deeper hatred for Israel and the Jewish people, rather than encouraging peace between Israelis and Palestinians,” he stated.
He emphasized the Fellowship’s appreciation for the millions of Christians who have “faithfully stood shoulder to shoulder with Israel and the Jewish people, despite cynical and hate-filled attempts to demonize Israel” in recent years.
NGO Monitor also made a statement blasting the decision and pointing a finger at the non-governmental organizations which attempt to delegitimize Israel under the guise of human rights. This group of “radical and anti-peace NGOs” runs campaigns calling for boycotts and divestments from Israel, said the statement.
The organization called the United Methodist Church’s decision immoral and damaging to the possibility of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. “Isolating Israel and damaging the prospect of peace are entirely inconsistent with universal values and morality,” said Professor Gerald Steinberg of NGO Monitor.
NO to BDS and YES to Israel!
He argued that the decision was based in a desire to hurt Israel rather than help Palestinians. “By adopting this resolution, the UMC handed a victory to anti-Israel extremists who are more interested in causing harm to the Jewish state than to improve the lives of Palestinians and Israelis,” he charged.
These extremists are represented by a group of NGOs which work against Israel, NGO Monitor said. At the forefront of this campaign is an NGO called “Who Profits”, which is funded by a number of European donors, including several church groups and the government of Spain.
Another pro-BDS and anti-peace NGO which promotes “economic warfare” against Israel is Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which praised the United Methodist Church decision and boasts a partnership with the United Methodist Kairos Response, a major BDS proponent within the Methodist church, said the NGO Monitor statement.
These organizations are part of a larger network of about 1,500 NGOs which, at a 2001 UN conference, formed a strategy aimed at delegitimizing Israel as an “apartheid regime” by calling for the imposition of sanctions and embargoes and the “full cessation of all links (diplomatic, economic, social, aid, military cooperation and training) between all states and Israel.
Steinberg called the strategy of using churches to advance the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) agenda “cynical”, adding that it “takes advantage of the perception of the church as a source of good and morality.”
“Tuesday’s decision by the UMC reflects the destructive power of the NGO network that exploits human rights for hate, and undermining the chances for peace and reconciliation,” he said.