MidEast

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Anti-Israel Event Held by Democratic Socialists at Wake Forest Pushed Anti-Semitic Messages

A group of students at Wake Forrest University in North Carolina is behind a week-long anti-Israel campus event, titled “How Palestine Became Israel,” that disseminated anti-Semitic messages, Shiri Moshe reported for The Algemeiner.

The “Solidarity with Palestine” initiative was launched by the Palestine Solidarity Coalition, comprised in part of members of the campus’s Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) chapter. In 2017, the parent group, Democratic Socialists of America, organized a convention in Chicago, where participants were heard chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – a call to eliminate the state of Israel from within the 1967 lines and establishing a state of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

As part of the anti-Israel campus campaign, Wake Forrest University students erected posters and a mock wall that resorted to anti-Semitic rhetoric. One of the posters accused Israel of engaging in “ethnic cleansing,” “apartheid,” and “settler-colonialism” since 1948, the year of Israel’s creation. Another poster targeted Israeli “policies,” including “the murder of children” and denying Palestinians “the right to life and liberty.”

The mock wall included the slogan “resistance is not terrorism,” a morally deprived attempt to legitimize Palestinian terrorism and to justify the murder of innocent Israelis by U.S.-designated terrorist organizations like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

One panel of the wall shows a map on which all of Israel is marked as Palestine, with the words “Free Palestine” above and “End the Occupation” below, while another specifically rejects a correlation between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

By their own admission, the students support the goals of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign that opposes the existence of the nation-state of the Jewish people, meaning that Jews are undeserving of statehood. The boycott’s campaign embodies anti-Zionism — which is anti-Semitism.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism, recognized by its 31 member states – explicitly codifies that “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, and denying Israel the right to exist” are anti-Semitic.

Peter Reitzes, a pro-Israel activist based in North Carolina who has covered the City of Durham’s ban of police training exchange programs with Israel for The Tower, observed: “Anti-Zionists love to hide behind the statement, ‘Criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic.’ However, calling for the boycott of only one country on the planet – Israel – is anti-Semitic.”

Reitzes also remarked that calling for only one country – Israel – to cease to exist is anti-Semitic. When speaking to BDS activists, the first question we should ask them is, ‘What other countries are you boycotting? Please provide me a full list.’”

YDSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Algemeiner. They commented, however, on their Facebook page, saying that, “The exhibit ends this week but the struggle on our campus for Palestinian liberation is just getting started.”

[Photo: JHMM14 / WikiCommons ]