Divest This

Sorry about the graphic (I couldn’t resist).

Anyway, one of those friendly BDSers who regularly visits the comment section showed up last week to announce, yet again, a new stunning victory which I and everyone else is in complete denial over (since said victory means BDS is just inches from bringing the Zionist entity to its knees).

This time, the triumph in question has to do with the Quakers who allegedly sold off their shares in Hewlett Packard and Veolia, two divestment targets that the boycotters can’t seem to get anyone else to divest from.  Which left most of us panic-stricken Israel supporters asking some obvious questions, namely: “You mean to tell me there are still Quakers out there?” and “If they are out there, what are they doing in the financial services business?

Apparently, the Quakers also divested from every BDSer’s favorite boogeyman, Caterpillar Tractor (or Caterpillar Killdozer, if you prefer) at the beginning of the year (which makes you wonder why this precedent wasn’t even noticed, much less mentioned during the summer’s Methodist and Presbyterian divestment fights).

News of the Quakers, HP, Veolia (and Caterpillar) have been doing the usual circuit on the Israel-hating web sites (and will no doubt be showing up on their handwritten posters and mimeographed fliers soon – BDS being the only movement left that still uses mimeograph machines).  And it may very well be that the Quakers (who do indeed exist outside of oatmeal boxes and actually do maintain various investment funds for members) did everything the boycotters claim they did.

But if that’s the case, one wonders why the way these decisions were described in the boycotter’s own breathless press releases leaves so much room for alternative explanations.

Perhaps I’m just splitting linguistic hairs, but let’s tour the wording of the Quaker announcement as it appeared on the main BDS web site and see if we can determine what represents fact vs. self-serving interpretation. (Quotes from said press release appear in italics.)

Hewlett Packard was removed from Friends Fiduciary’s investments because they provide information technology consulting services to the Israeli Navy, said Jeffery W. Perkins, the Executive Director of Friends Fiduciary. 

Given that Jeffery W. Perkins was supposed to have said this, one wonders why this statement does not appear in quotations?  After all (and as I’ve said many times), the only way to know for certain that an institution has divested for specific political reasons (in this case, in protest of Israel vs. protest of military-related investment generally) would be for the organization to explicitly state that this is what they did.

So, in this case, the quote we are looking for from Perkins would not be one that says they have sold off their HP stock because HP is partially in the weapons business (since weapons manufacturing of any kind is anathema to the pacifist Quakers), but that they were specifically divesting from this company because of its relationship with Israel.

Veolia Environment, the world’s largest water privatization company, was removed because of “environmental and social concerns.” According to Global Exchange, Veolia provides segregated water services to Israeli settlers in the Palestinian Territories and runs a large landfill in the occupied Jordan River valley.

In the first sentence of this paragraph, we are told that the Quakers divested from Veolia for reasons that had nothing to do with Israel (i.e., they did so because of “environmental and social concerns” – with the statement in quotes this time).  But in the BDSers second sentence, they’re talking about an entirely different organization (Global Exchange) condemning Veolia over Israel and settlements and segregated water, and yadda, yadda,  yadda.

Now it may be the case that the Global Exchange organization feels that way (or at least some sub-group within it has made such a statement).  But even if they did, this does not make those accusations true.  More importantly, it provides no link whatsoever with financial decisions made by the Quakers.  So why quote one organization (Global Exchange) to explain a choice allegedly made by another organization (the Quakers), unless such a juxtaposition is the only way to present a decision that had nothing to do with the Middle East as being Israel/BDS related?

Friends’ Fiduciary’s decision to drop Hewlett Packard and Veolia follows on the heels of another important action, says Anne Remley of the Ann Arbor Friends Meeting, which initiated the divestment requests. In April, 2012, Friends Fiduciary’s removed Caterpillar Corporation from their list of socially responsible corporations based on the 360-year old Quaker Peace Testimony, which disavows support for war.

This paragraph strongly resembles the first one on HP in that (1) it provides no quotes from any actual decision makers within the Quaker’s financial organization (instead it gives us a statement by someone within a particular Quaker community who advocates for divestment); and (2) it gives us nothing to indicate that this decision was Israel related vs. general defense/military related (in fact, the statement seems to indicate the latter).

Again, our friends on Planet BDS may show up tomorrow providing direct quotes from the Quaker financial establishment (I never thought I’d be typing that phrase) which explains in uncontestable language that these divestment decisions (1) occurred; and (2) were specifically taken in protest of Israel (not just as part of a general policy to avoid any investments in companies doing business with any military whatsoever).

As we wait for more detail, I think I’m going to find out if the Shakers also run their own retirement and investment funds.   If so, I’m joining.

I was planning to do a final follow up on the goings on at the PCUSA General Assembly last week, which would tie in a couple of more recent events (including the Episcopalians’ recent decision to join the Presbyterians and Methodists in rejecting divestment).

But as luck would have it, a request came in to do a PCUSA follow up piece for Peter Beinart’s Open Zion blog.  This was followed by a response of the “By Losing We Actually Won” variety, written by someone I strongly suspect to be a frequent anonymous commenter who’s been spending time with us lately.  And in response to his response, I just published the piece I would have written here which pretty much surveys the BDS state of the union after their zero-for-three showing with the Mainline Protestant Churches this year.

So those of you who still need their fix of post-GA commentary, I suggest you check out these articles (as well as any comments they generate).

As one last thought, some of you may wonder why I decided to publish something on Peter Beinart’s site, give that I have been quite critical of him in the past.  The short answer is that I’m happy to get the “BDS Loses Again” word out wherever I can.

But in the back of my mind I am hoping that the man behind Open Zion might come to understand that BDS – whether the full-blown variety he’s letting me criticize on his site, or the narrower “just-boycott-the-settlements” type he advocated for on the pages of the New York Times – always requires a community/institution/organization to do the boycotting, divesting or sanctioning.

And whether those boycotts are defined narrowly or broadly, the message the “I-Hate-Israel” crowd will always be crowing is that “The well-respected [fill-in-the-blank] organization agrees with us that Israel is an Apartheid state, alone in the world at deserving economic punishment!” (with that blank filled in by the Presbyterians, Methodists, Hampshire College, City of Somerville and other parties who never asked to become a battlefield in the Middle East conflict).

In a world where some people are more than ready to exploit the best nature of others for political gain, we all need to be extremely careful before providing an opening to people ready to turn places like the Presbyterian Church into a club with which to beat their political adversaries.  And it is this lesson that I hope reaches the right ears as much as my general message about the true nature of BDS.

I understand that we can’t count on anything until the final gavel sounds at the Presbyterian 2012 GA on Saturday, but assuming last night’s victory holds, there are a few important lessons to be drawn from this most-recent continuation of the BDS movement’s decade-plus-long losing streak.

First off, we need to keep in mind that this is not the first, the second nor third but actually the fourth time the Presbyterians have rejected joining the BDS “movement” and instead opting for engagement as a means to play a peace-making role in the region.

Once BDS Twitterers had finished howling derision at church members they had previously showered with praise (once their unexpected loss became apparent), they quickly reverted to “by losing we actually won” mode, citing a closing gap in the margin they have lost by over the last eight years.

But this calendar fails to take into account that BDS actually won in 2004, meaning the BDSers only hope right now is that in 2014 (i.e., ten years after they last managed to win a major battle) they might be able to get back to where they were a decade previously.

The extremely tight vote that killed off divestment last night (333-331 with two abstentions) is definitely the best lubricant for a BDS spinning-wheel trying to turn manure into gold.  But we need to keep in mind that this close vote was over the question of whether or not to do something extraordinary by PCUSA organizational standards: reject a committee report supported by a large percentage of that committee (one that embraced BDS) and replace it with a minority report that rejected divestment.

Given that committee reports tend to get rubber stamped in the General Assembly, it’s telling that the dynamic around PCUSA divestment votes tends to be built around church leaders stacking the committee that gets to bring forth BDS proposals, only to have those proposals shot down by the membership.

It’s also worth noting that once the minority report was accepted by this tight margin, the vote to embrace its call for positive investment (vs. negative divestment) passed by a much more traditional anti-BDS margin of 63%-37%, indicating that no more than a third of members fall into the “divestment or nothing” camp.

The gap between the tight first vote and more traditional second one also highlights the fact that we might be comparing apples to kumquats if we just look at the numbers associated with each year’s key vote that killed off divestment for that year.  For whenever the Presbyterians (or any church or civic organization for that matter) have been given a clear and unambiguous choice to embrace or reject a divestment proposal, rejection of BDS always wins big.

Which is why the BDS brigade within the church and their enablers amongst the Presbyterian leadership put so much effort into eliminating all possible options, other than a request for members to support or reject a report that had passed committee by a wide margin.  In 2006, for example, there was no ambiguity that members were being asked to rescind the divestment policy they had enacted in 2004 which may be why that vote was so lopsided (95%-5% to rescind).  This explains why the BDSers put so much effort into obscuring what they were actually trying to achieve this time around, and worked so hard to funnel voters in just one direction.  And still they lost.

They lost despite making PCUSA divestment their top priority, especially after behind handed an even more embarrassing defeat by the Methodists a few months ago.  They lost despite the tremendous resources they put into trying to convince both churches to climb onboard the BDS bandwagon, which included cold calling delegates and flying supporters into the meeting to lobby hard to get their motions passed.  And they lost despite the fact that the organized Jewish community decided to not put similar effort into filling the GA with their own back-slapping and arm-twisting lobbyists, preferring instead to simply alert church leaders and members that our patience with getting slapped in the face every two years was at an end.

I suppose that this is the point where I should take back some of the negative comments I’ve been making about the church over the last week or so (or keep them in reserve in case last night’s victory is somehow reversed before the end of the GA).  But I’d like to think that some of that commentary, written far more in sorrow than in anger, might still resonate with the majority of Presbyterians who still don’t seem to want their church associated with a sociopathic movement like BDS.

After all, church behavior (or, more specifically, the behavior or church leaders) was indeed appalling before, during and after last night’s vote.  They continued and continue to push ahead with BDS, with Kairos and with all of the other paraphernalia of ugly anti-Israel polemics, despite being told four times by the membership’s voting representatives that the people in the pews prefer engagement to punishment of just one side in the Middle East conflict.

This GA, like the last GA (and the one before that) was accompanied by acts of bad faith between PCUSA leaders and their supposed friends in the Jewish community to whom they kept making promises of moderation they never intended to keep.  And the behavior of those leaders continues to degrade the institution, making it that much harder for PCUSA to be taken seriously about any matter whatsoever.

Now it may be that in two years time the divestment brigade will find the right combination of words and political maneuvers to get the Presbyterian Church back on the BDS bandwagon, regardless of the views of the majority of church members.  But by then, it’s not entirely clear what we’ll be talking about when we talk about “The Presbyterian Church.”

There are hard days ahead for an institution in decline and bitterly divided about so many issues.  And I wish I could say that last night removed the BDS albatross from around the church’s neck.  But that day, sadly, still seems far, far off.

I’m kind of stunned to be typing these words, but with regard to this year’s Presbyterian General Assembly (drum roll please): BDS Loses Again!

As many of you know, I’ve been fairly resigned to the likelihood that the Presbyterians would do to themselves what they did in 2004 and drag the denomination into another two years of internal and external strife, all so a few BDSers could brag to their friends that they finally got the church to vote the “right way,” after having had divestment rejected in 2006, 2008 and 2010.

But once again, sense that was nowhere to been seen in the leadership of the Church, or the partisan-packed committees they enabled, seems to still exist within the membership of the organization.  While church members can’t quite bring themselves to fully understand that, far from being a “peace movement,” BDS is the propaganda arm of a war movement that will quote scripture and subvert the vocabulary of human rights to get its way, the saner wing of the Presbyterian Church seems to know enough to avoid handing their name and reputation over to a third party that shares none of their interests.

I’m a bit blurry eyed from starting at Twitter feeds all night, but expect more commentary in the AM.

And in case you’re wondering what hashtag you want to use tonight, I believe that #BDSFail is starting to trend.