Are the Democrats Becoming the D in BDS?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

I have joked for some time now that the letter D in BDS stands for the Democratic Party. It’s becoming less of a gag by the day.

In the Nov. 6, 2018 American midterm elections, three Democrats who have nothing positive to say about Israel gained seats in the House of Representatives. As time goes on, they will be joined by many more.

Rashida Tlaib, elected in a Detroit-area Congressional district, is a supporter of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement that targets Israel, as is Ilhan Omar, who won a Minneapolis seat. She has called Israel an “evil” country and an “apartheid regime.”

“I personally support the BDS movement” because of “issues like the racism and the international human rights violations by Israel right now,” said Tlaib, the first Palestinian-American woman to be elected to Congress.

BDS seeks the end of Israeli occupation of “all Arab lands,” the full equality of Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel and “the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN General Assembly Resolution 194,” passed on Dec. 11, 1948. If implemented, it would allow millions of Palestinians to “return” to what is now Israel, and would effectively destroy the Jewish state.

Associate Dean Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center responded that if she chooses to promote such campaigns, “she puts herself in the camp of those that seek the Jewish state’s demise.”

Tlaib has even deemed U.S. Senator Kamala Harris of California, a rising Democratic star, guilty of racism for meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Tlaib announced in December that she plans to lead a trip of incoming lawmakers to the West Bank.

It will focus on issues like Israel’s detention of Palestinian children, education, access to clean water and poverty -- and perhaps a visit to the northern West Bank village of Beit Ur al-Foqa, where her grandmother lives.

It is not surprising, either, that Omar supports the movement. In a statement to the website Muslim Girl, someone on Omar’s staff explained that “Ilhan believes in and supports the BDS movement and has fought to make sure people’s right to support it isn’t criminalized. She does however, have reservations on the effectiveness of the movement in accomplishing a lasting solution.”

In fact Omar misled Jewish voters in her district during the campaign, obfuscating about her position.

Before her victory she had called BDS “counteractive” and maintained that it prevents dialogue. Like many other Democrats, she noted her opposition to anti-BDS legislation but framed it as a free-speech issue.

Somali-born Omar has faced controversy and accusations of anti-Semitism for spreading conspiracy theories about the State of Israel and Zionists. In 2012 she tweeted: “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a socialist who now represents a New York district, has said she wants to end the “occupation of Palestine.” When pressed on what exactly she meant by that, she admitted that she was “not the expert on geopolitics on this issue.”

She described Israel’s recent killing of Hamas rioters and saboteurs storming the Gaza border “a massacre” and called it “a crisis of humanitarian conditions.”

Yet Democrats, who claim to hear anti-Semitism dog whistles from every porch in red America, rarely see a problem with this kind of rhetoric.

Maybe it’s because the leftists aren’t on the Democrats’ fringe any longer. And so the campaign to boycott Israel has been gaining prominence.

Sooner, rather than later, these people will replace aging party leaders like Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer or Benjamin Cardin.

Many people on the left twist themselves into pretzels when they insist that their “anti-Zionism” is not anti-Semitism. See, for instance, the article by Michelle Goldberg in the Dec. 8 New York Times.

Yet they will at the same time accuse those on the right of being anti-Semitic when left-wing political activist George Soros is described – correctly -- as a “globalist,” even when he is not identified as being Jewish. Double standards, anyone?