Boycotting Jews yet again

The caravan will roll back into Sydney later this week.

The caravan of hate that is.

This Thursday at 6:00pm at Parramatta Town Hall in western Sydney, a crowd of protestors will assemble before marching towards a suburban shopping mall in order to taunt the management, staff and patrons of a Jewish owned franchised café called Max Brenner.

This protest comes just seven weeks after a similar one at the very same café, and four months after the protest organisers won a legal victory (on 23 July) when charges were dismissed against a violent protest against Max Brenner that was held in mid 2011in downtown Melbourne. Commenting on those protesters, Australian Workers Union boss Paul Howes said he found their behaviour "mimicked those of Nazi thugs".

This Thursday the activists will be reminding us – in case we ever needed reminding - of just whose side they are on in the war between liberal democracies and the tyrannical, misogynist and Jihadist forces which rail against us.

And just as they did in September, these protesters will repackage their anti-Semitism as the allegedly less pungent fume of "anti-Zionism". But just who are they kidding?

The earlier protests both in Sydney and Melbourne included Marxists, Greens, anti-capitalists, anti-Western, Muslims and Muslim sympathisers. These are people that hold a range of divergent views across many topics from one another, but are unified by one pernicious common denominator: their animus toward Jews and their attempts to revise history.

In Sydney's September protest, about 50 protestors nested outside the Parramatta outlet of Max Brenner and held banners accusing the Middle East's sole democracy of being a terror state engaged in genocide and representing all is that is wicked in the Middle East. Between shouting that Max Brenner's beverages are laced with Arab blood, there were shrills that the Jewish state was responsible for the killings of Muslims by Christians in Lebanese "refugee camps" some 30 years ago.

These are classic, tried and tested, Jew baiting activities.

One reminiscent of the reprehensible and oft repeated 'blood libel' accusation, while the other incites bigotry by claiming that Jews goad others to do their bidding. And that the bidding involves blood-curdling activities.

Both the Melbourne and Sydney protests were and continue to be supported by the global campaign of Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel. A movement whose purpose is to delegitimize and demonise Jews everywhere by first delegitimizing and demonising the Jewish state.

BDS' message is clear: all the problems of the Middle East would be solved if the Jewish state were no longer supported in any way. Not by diplomatic means, not by commercial means and not through cultural and sporting exchanges.

BDS members claim Max Brenner outlets are subsidiaries of the Israeli-owned Strauss Group, manufacturers of food and confectionery, who also happen to produce some food rations for the Israeli Defence Forces. And this in turn, BDS alleges, facilitates the "occupation" of the disputed territories (Gaza and the West Bank). Perhaps the brown shirts in the BDS missed the news way back in 2005 when ABC News (amongst others) reported that the last Jew was uprooted from Gaza and the "occupation" was over. Perhaps Arabs in Gaza could remind the BDS-ers about that. After all, how could the Arabs forget the bliss they celebrated the day Jews were marched out of Gaza: the joy of torching synagogues as the Jews were leaving.

Funny how the BDS mob and their fellow travellers never demonstrated against such Kristallnacht-like wickedness.

Strange how BDS never protested when (pre 1967) Gaza was occupied by Egypt. And on the matter of rallies, it's very curious there are no BDS rallies protesting the daily state sanctioned killings in Syria of Arabs by Arabs. Ditto for BDS rallies shaming Iran's rulers when Iranian women are being stoned to death?

Hmmm?

The nefarious BDS campaign is funded by a wide variety of sources, not least by run of the mill haters in the community. In fact donations are blatantly solicited by its affiliated "Palestine Solidarity Campaign", where it lists its banking particulars proudly on its website: BSB: 063-262 Account: 1052 9148.

Nice to know the Commonwealth Bank of Australia is enabling this kind of hate. I am sure I am not alone in wondering if the CBA will equally roll out the welcome mat for other despicable groups riding the hate caravan. What about allowing anti-Chinese or anti-Indian organisations to raise money through a CBA account Mr Narev? Huh? Or does the CBA already enable these groups?

Now, don't get me wrong.

Demonstrating is fine and dandy. If the point is legitimate. Otherwise it's very often an exercise in groupthink and at times, an exercise in group hate.

Take the BDS/Palestine Solidarity mob's patently untrue claims that the Jewish state is an apartheid state, mistreating its Islamic minority. And that Middle East peace is impossible so long as Israel does not fulfil several of the BDS' demands including allowing Arab refugees (from the Wars of 1948 and 1967) to return "to their homes". As is well known, the "right of return" is a metaphor for the dismembering the Jewish state as a Jewish state.

In fact the BDS canards are so evil, so absurd and so "out there" that even journalists for well-known and respected Arab media find them laughable.

Case in point: the Arab News, 6 October 2012.

In "The Arab Spring and the Israeli enemy', Abdulateef Al-Mulhim boldly claims that Arabs in Israel are far more better off that Arabs anywhere in the Islamic world. Anywhere.
He points out that it was Arab resistance to the establishment of a Jewish homeland started a war; lost a war and gained nothing but thousands of refugees.

Then came the 1967 War. Soon after, in 1973, the third major war between the Arabs and Israel broke out. Thirty-nine years on, many Arabs are finally beginning to ask many questions about the past, present and the future with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The questions are threefold: What was the real cost of these wars to the Arab world and its people? A harder question that no Arab national wants to ask is: What was the real cost for not recognizing Israel in 1948 – and still refusing to recognise it - and why didn't the Arab states spend their billions on education, health care and the infrastructures instead of wars? And the hardest question that no Arab national wants to utter is whether Israel is the real enemy of the Arab world and the Arab people?

All good questions.

Al-Mulhim penned his views after witnessing devastating photos and reports about a starving child in Yemen, a burned souk in Aleppo, Syria, the woefully under developed Sinai in Egypt, car bombs in Iraq and the decimated infrastructure in Libya. He saw the photos and the reports on the Al-Arabiya network, the most watched and respected news outlet in the Arab Middle East.

He asserts that an outside enemy was not responsible for the destruction and the atrocities he observed. The same people that were supposed to protect Arabs annihilated Arabs. The starvation, the killings and the destruction in these Arab countries were all committed by the same hands.

Arab hands. Muslim hands.

He laments over the atrocities in Syria, describing them as "beyond anybody's imagination". Saddened too by Iraqis hell bent on destroying their own country: "a country that makes $110 billion dollars from oil exports", but its best and brightest cannot leave quickly enough for commercial opportunities abroad. He notes that Tunisia's dictator stole $13 billion dollars from the poor Tunisians and Yemeni Arabs starve their own citizens.

The message is crystal clear, if perhaps unpalatable to Arabs and their Western collaborators: these are all crimes against the Arab people. Unspeakable crimes that must be addressed. And the common denominator in these crimes is that all were committed by Arabs on Arabs.

Israel is not involved in any of these Arab engineered tragedies and no improvement in the lot of any Arab will come out of accusing anyone other than the true perpetrators of these crimes against the Arab people. And then hauling those responsible to account.

The real enemies of the Arab people are the Arab states' corruption, absence of political freedom, lack of good education, lack of good health care, lack of respect for life and finally, Arab dictators who used (and continue to use) the Arab-Israeli conflict to suppress their own people.

To that list Al-Mulhim could have added the useful Western idiots (and their non Western puppeteers) marching this Thursday in Parramatta. A menagerie feigning sincere interest in the welfare of Arabs will instead once again be absorbed with the oldest hatred the world has ever seen: inciting animus towards Jews, for no reason other than they are Jews.

And what better day to bait Jews and ignore the real problems of the Muslim world than this Thursday? As luck would have it, it's the 24^th anniversary of Yasser Arafat's Palestinian National Council's statement of 15 November 1988 that proclaimed the independence of the Arab State of Palestine.

The 23^rd Arab and the 58^th Islamic state to join the community of nations.

Imagine that: 58 states and not a single fully fledged liberal, pluralistic democracy amongst them. Not a single one.

Now that's an issue worth protesting about.