I posted a piece earlier today on Divest This discussing the latest BDS trend: boycotting Israel peace activists. This original story highlights the strange mutations that a stalled boycott movement has birthed; in this case a set of NGOs allegedly committed to inter-community dialogs forcing local Palestinians to refuse Israelis entry to their cultural event lest they lose (mostly European) funding.

But the real story behind this perverse behavior is hardly Byzantine. As the divestment "project" enters its eighth year with nary a success to show for itself, there is still one group they can punish to demonstrate movement for their movement: friends and supporters.

This tendency to lash out at those with whom you mostly agree certainly has relevance with regard to Hampshire College. For this is Hampshire, after all, where political beliefs on the Middle East span a relatively constrained range. It's certainly not a campus where support for Israel would manifest itself in a large and budding membership of the Zionist Organization of America, much less Kahane Chai! Rather, it's a community where Israeli guilt and Palestinian pristine victimhood is taken for granted, as is the benefit for world peace that would flow from the creation of a Palestinian state.

And it is within this community that SJP has chosen to silence all dissent of those who waver from these tenets even a millimeter, especially if they do not full-throatedly endorse boycott, divestment and sanction as the wave of the future.

Crapping on the heads of friends and allies represents a time-worn behavior of political organizations of the L-O-S-E-R variety. After all, if you can't get your own college to divest (or can't convince people of your Hampshire divestment hoax), if you can't name any other college even thinking about divestment, if you can't point to any other institution (be it churches or cities) where divestment has less to show for itself than it did four years ago, well you can always kick your roommate around to make yourself feel better.

It's taken as given that any truly pro-Israel speaker who dares show up on campus would face the same kind of bullying shout downs that's been seen on other North American campuses. But the fact that Jewish students on campus, or anyone for that matter who does not subscribe to SJP orthodoxy, is under a cloud simply demonstrates how much easier it is to pummel those who actually possess the concern for human rights and free speech that SJP and its allies only feign.