Sorry, but I couldn't resist. From Divest This!

It almost escaped my notice that Feb 7 was the anniversary of the great Hampshire Divestment Hoax, that is until I discovered this stunningly self-aggrandizing announcement by the jesters who started it all: Hampshire's Students for Justice in Palestine (HSJP).

So I said to myself:"Self, how best to mark this important date?"

Should I Fisk the SJP's self-celebrating announcement, pointing out that their BDS "movement" actually began in 2001 and has not enjoyed a single success on any campus in the country despite nearly ten years of effort? (HSJP and the like-minded prefer to reset their project with the 2005 PACBI letter, thus flushing most of the last decade of BDS catastrophe down the memory hole.)

Or perhaps I should put their Frantz Fanon quote into context, which (in its original paragraph) reads:

"Anti-Semitism cuts me to the quick; I get upset; a frightful rage makes me anemic; they are denying me the right to be a man. I cannot associate myself from the fate reserved for my brother. Every one of my acts commits me as a man. Every instance of my reticence, every instance of my cowardice, manifests the man."

Now I could leverage this full Fanon quote to note that HSJP's friends the allies in the Middle East are the major manufacturers of the very anti-Semitic propaganda that cut Fanon "to the quick" (a Vesuvius of Jew hatred that even Israel's harshest critics don't deny emanates hourly from Tehran to Damascus to Gaza and beyond). But this presumes the members of HSJP actually know who Fanon is, beyond a source for quotes on Google.

But in the end, it seems best to mark the anniversary with some links to the various parodies I've done over the last year that seem to have gotten up the nose of those who still insist on pushing the Hampshire divestment fraud with all their might. And so...

Here's the parody that came to mind last February, once I discovered that the Hampshire divestment story running its course through the media was a hoax.

And here's a mock planning transcript for last November's BDS conference at Hampshire (some BDSers still get upset that half the Google links on a search for "Hampshire BDS" brings up this parody).

And finally, my epic time-waster: Hampshire and the Brain.

Paraphrasing William Shatner from Trouble with Tribbles: I take the issues of peace and justice in the Middle East extremely seriously. But Hampshire's SJP? Not so much.