Well things seem to be a bit quiet on Planet BDS land these days. The last big announcement I can see on the BDS Central web site has to do with the Quakers, and (as noted here), we have yet to hear from any of those crowing boycotters as to why – if their victory is so absolute […]
Tag Archives | hampshire divestment
Hampshire BDS Revisited
If there’s one article I’ve linked to internally more than any other since starting this blog, it would definitely be this piece on Hampshire College. Part of this is due to the fact that Divest This got started in reaction to the (false) story that Hampshire College had become “the first US college to divest […]
Post-Modern Politics
The BDS “movement” seems to be entering its post-modern phase. I suspect this has something to do with the fact that its participants have gotten quite good at Web 2.0 media communications, but struggle to find any news worth pushing through that pipeline. After all, the last real serious BDS victory I can think of […]
BDS to World: “We’re Not Losers” – Part 1
This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series BDSFail
I’ve recently discovered two examples of the “But we’re not losers!” BDS argument mentioned at the end of my last posting (one from Australia, one from Philadelphia).Both of these make the case that programs promoting boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel are doing marvelously well, with a recent string of victories providing “a strong wind […]
Lack of Concrete Victory is Incidental
Some stories that have appeared over the last couple of weeks highlight the fact that a lot more people seem to be chasing fewer and fewer BDS challenges this year. For example, just last week The Forward published a survey that found only 17 instances of any significant BDS activity since 2005 on college campuses, […]
Stream of Consciousness
Well even if actual BDS battles (or even minor skirmishes) have not been in the news recently, there does seem to be a fair amount of talk on the subject of late. The highest profile of these debates took place on the pages of The Huffington Post where French philosopher Bernard-Henry Levi (or “BHL” as […]
Harvard BDS Hoax Update
Well great, big, fat surprise: the latest divestment “victory” celebrated across the BDS ether, the Great Harvard Divestment “triumph,” turns out to be yet another hoax (the biggest one so far this year). I was beginning to think that the divestnistas had put hoaxes behind them after spending so much time last year shredding their […]
Strategy and Tactics: Tactic(s)
This entry is part 4 of 6 in the series Strategy
With the sides in the BDS conflict outlined in terms of numbers and organization, I’d like to turn the conversation over to the tactics used by those seeking Boycott, Divestment and Sanction against Israel. Even through “tactics” appears in the plural, in fact the entire BDS project seems to be built around a single tactic […]
Comments and Boycotts
A commenter at the end of this piece asked if I’d ever participated in a boycott. And someone responding to this one talked about an experience he had making a personal boycott choice in reaction to the BDS phenomenon. Regarding the first question, looking back I don’t think that I ever have practiced or participated […]
Friends and Allies
A couple of the more laughable moments during the recent divestment follies in California involved attempts to lump the Berkeley “victory” with a similar “win” at Hampshire College last year. The fact that both the Berkeley and Hampshire BDS attempts were epic failures (the latter having the after-effect of putting every college administrator on guard […]
California Scheming: BDS at Berkeley
March 19, 2010 in 6
At the start of the 21st century, the year of butterfly ballots and hurricanes, some people speculated whether Florida was the new California, i.e., the one US state whose daily news triggers smirks and eyebrow-raising in the other 49. Well all I can say is that in the last week California has come roaring back, […]
Results
Apologies to my reader for the quiet around here the last week. In addition to vacation, I’ve been working on a little project that should be of interest to the anti-BDS community which I’ll be writing about sometime next week. In the meantime, some quick thoughts about a topic I’ve mentioned here before: how to […]