Sunday, April 8, 2012

BDS and Political Correctness

Is the BDS (Boycott Dirty Semites) campaign just another vehicle for people to express their resentments without having to own that that is what they are doing? Does it offer people a way to express and nurture and feed their resentment of Jews while supposedly doing it for the sake of Palestinians? Does it allow its groupies to express profoundly visceral and irrational and ugly predjudices in a cloak of pseudo rectitude as if they were serving some noble cause? Possible payoffs are:the togetherness of communities built around shared resentment, the avoidance of one's own real issues, the false self esteem that comes with sanctimoniousness, the chanelling of agression and violence towards a relatively safe target (if a few suicide bombers attacked protesters outside a Max Brener shop you'd see a marked fall in attendance by the recreational protestors who are the mainstay of these events) but as it is at the moment there is no overt personal cost for anti-Israeli protestors. (Other than that blindness of lemmings who sacrifice clarity and personal power for the safety and abdication of reponsibility offered by the mob.)

For those who say that the central organising principle of the BDS phenomenon ( I wouldn't dignify it with the name "movement" - is pornography and the millions of people engaged by it a movement??) is a concern for human and Palestinain rights, and not simply a conscious or unconscious visceral resentment of Jews, then why are these same fervent 'campaigners' not organising similar boycotts against Turkey for its ruthless supression of the Kurds and its denial of an autonomous Kurdish homeland, Russia and its brutal suppression of Chechnya, China and its repopulation of Tibet and supression of The Uyghurs (a mainly Sunni Muslim group found throughout Xinjiang Province), Morocco for its occupation of Western Sahara etc.

And how would robbing Israeli Jews of their statehood serve Palestinian interests? Obviously it would only create an enduring passion for Israelis, robbed of their autonomy and rights, to subvert any Palestinian state errected on the ruins of the Jewish one. Are there calls for the dissolution of Turkey so that the Kurds may be free? Or of Russia so that Chechnya can gain its indepenence? Clearly the triumphalist paradigm of BDS does not emerge from real compassion for anyone, but from the desire of people to handle their own psychic garbage via projection, disassociation and splitting.

No comments: