By Stuart Littlewood
Congratulations, BDS campaigners.
Your global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions effort is hurting Israel so much that panic-stricken propaganda bosses are casting about in desperation for something to hit back with… for example, the libelous press release which portrays yours truly and other Palestine freedom campaigners as promoters of a new movement boycotting Arab goods.
This tissue of lies arrived the same day as news that Israel is spending $1.6 million to train "new media warriors" in the use of social media tools for disseminating the regime’s endless stream of disinformation. Of course, it’s nothing new. Israel’s Ministry of Dirty Tricks launched a revised training manual eighteen months ago to serve as a communications primer for the army of cyber-scribblers it was then recruiting to spread Zionism’s poison across the internet.
According to the lie machine I addressed hundreds of Muslim Britons in front of the Libyan embassy in central London and "excoriated the Arab and Iranian regimes for plundering their countries of their wealth and depriving their people of their basic human rights". And I upbraided them for "their entrenched system of apartheid".
The Zionist “media warrior” who thought up this garbage writes that my fictitious new organization — Britons for Boycotting Arab and Iranian Goods (BBAIG) — has demanded that all UK importers immediately terminate their contracts with Arab countries, and that I’m claiming "the UK public is supporting our initiative until the vicious dictatorships of the Arab Middle East and Iran are overthrown and their civilian populations are finally endowed with classical democracy".
Not that Zionists know anything about classical democracy. Rabid ethnocracy is more their thing.
Also targeted, and dubbed a co-founder of the imaginary BBAIG, is Dr Ghada Karmi of Exeter University, whom they describe as "a crusader for the seething Arab population of Gaza and the West Bank". The public are supposed to believe that she is threatening the illegitimate Muslim government leaders of the Middle East with arrest warrants should they set foot on British soil or seek asylum here. "Under Britain’s laws of universal jurisdiction, war criminals and their genocidal ilk are liable to arrest upon the deposition of a citizen’s complaint before a UK magistrate."
Well, not any more actually. Israel’s ‘heavies’ put pressure on British government wimps a year ago and our universal jurisdiction laws are being watered down on Tel Aviv’s instructions to provide a safe haven for the world’s war crimes riff-raff who qualify as friends of Whitehall and specifically Israel’s psychopaths.
Dr Karmi is reported to have "cast aside her life-time enmity towards Israel and pleaded with the Jewish state to invade Syria and Iran and wipe out their respective feudal ruling classes".
Lawyer Daniel Machover and Sarah Colborne of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which leads numerous BDS campaigns, are also named in this wild fiction.
Attempting to strike fear into our hearts the press release contains a footnote saying: "Guaranteed Distribution to 330,000 media, government and NGO activists around the world via Internet, Twitter, Facebook, My Space." The bogus story has managed to surface on a couple of sites, but all activists (and editors) need to be alert to the new tactic.
Just for the record I haven’t been in London for months, and I’ve never met Dr Karmi. However, she emailed to say: “Why not use it to let people know about this latest idiocy?” Agreed.
Truth is fatal to Israel’s vile ambition. Its propagandists can only peddle lies. For them the challenge is finding new avenues for their dishonesty and fevered imagination.
But at least they keep us amused.
– Stuart Littlewood is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Visit: www.radiofreepalestine.co.uk.
