Saturday, February 6, 2010
Well Israel Apartheid Week is just around the corner (be still my heart), and the theme of this year's festivity of hostility is (you guessed it): the ever-popular Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (or BDS)!
Anyone who's been following the BDS follies over the last year will recall how much of 2009 was made up of one BDS hoax after another: from Hampshire College's non-divestment in February, through failed attempts to portray normal business decisions by companies like TIAA-CREF and Motorola as political divestment decisions targeted at Israel.
Other than that, we were provided a cavalcade of boycott flops from Trader Joe's to the Toronto Film Festival that simply led to sellouts of Israeli products or massive lines to see Israeli films.
Well the folks who brought us the attempted Toronto film boycott have managed to merge both fraud and failure in what is looking like the most hilarious BDS hoax yet.
Earlier this month, a letter began circulating around North American film schools asking them to not partake in an Tel Aviv Student Film Fest that takes place this coming June. And, to demonstrate their depth of support, the letter writers included the names of supporters, including none other than James Cameron, the King of the World director of such spectacles as Titanic and Avatar.
The trouble was, Cameron never heard of this petition, has no idea of how his name became associated with this squalid little boycott project, and (at least according to one source) is pissed and demanding answers.
A preliminary report appears over at Divest This. Stay tuned as more details emerge.
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, p.39
Nappy loves the pithy reframing of "BDS" in Zvi's comment at Robin Shepard's blog entry that Sol quick-linked today: Blatant Double Standards.