Saturday, November 28, 2009
It's not every day we get to highlight something good coming from the colleges out in Western Massachusetts, but there is a professor out there fighting the good fight, and he has a series of posts on the recent anti-Israel conference held at Hampshire College, as well as the "BDS" (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) "movement" generally.
Start here: Comparative Quackery: The Joke is on BDS:
Q: What's the difference between BDS and homeopathy?
A: Not much, actually. Both are frauds that are led by scoundrels, attract the naïve, and have yet to produce any verifiable result, much less, the promised benefit for suffering humanity...
And here: Whither BDS: A generation of giants--or delusions of grandeur?
...Much of the conference consisted (aside from a few pep-rally-type events) of, well, reports of various local efforts, without, well, any particular effects. It further consisted in promoting a mixture of Quixotic master goals (make universities and monster academic pension fund CREF divest; this, although the effort failed at Hampshire, which has practically no endowment at stake) and (more sub rosa) small-scale guerilla actions that fall somewhere between the juvenile and the illegal: e.g. "de-shelve" Israeli products ([1] [2]) in stores. Not exactly the stuff of which Che Guevara was made...
Then, BDS on Campus: A Generation of Giants Unleashes its Frightful Onslaught:
Evidently I spoke too soon when I gently suggested that the recent BDS conference at Hampshire this past weekend had been a tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
When I unsuspectingly arrived on campus on Monday, I was taken aback to see that these signs had sprouted, like dragon's teeth, overnight...
Click through to see the signs, for sure. Talk about a hostile work environment.
Finally, Professor Wald does a little deeper analysis on the BDS "Holocaust Industry" itself and its intersection with "traditional" antisemitism: You've Got (Hate) Mail! (and why this drivel isn't as far from mainstream discourse as you might hope). Too much there for a meaningful pull-quote.
