Details of how pro-Israeli lobby groups have fabricated accusations of anti-Semitism on US college campuses in order to incite official crackdowns against Palestine solidarity activism were revealed earlier in the week during a political talk show hosted by prominent American journalist Chris Hedges.
The author and a visiting Princeton University lecturer discussed the Israeli lobby with co-founder of the Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah and journalist Max Blumenthal, on his talk show “On Contact”.
Discussing the Al Jazeera documentary on the workings of the Israeli lobby, the journalists described what they said was a “false crisis” created by a network of pro-Israeli lobby groups working with Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Israeli embassies,
“To lay a factual basis to make federal civil rights complaints or lawsuits that can then be used to force university administrations to muzzle students and teachers.”
A number of cases were cited to highlight the Israeli embassies’ efforts to aggressively target American pro-Palestinian student activists including the infamous case of Julia Reifkind.
The Israeli embassy officer spied on student supporters of Palestinian rights while engaging in deception by suggesting that pro-Palestinian student activists were behind an anti-Semitic incident on campus.
In January 2015, painted swastikas were found on a Jewish frat house. Reifkind attempted to falsely implicate Palestine solidarity activists with the anti-Sematic incident despite telling journalists at the time, in the leaked Al Jazeera footage, that the racist graffiti had almost certainly not been done by pro-BDS students, but was likely the work of white supremacists from off campus.
The pro-Israeli lobby is denounced as “completely morally bankrupt” and “desperate” for the appearance that it has grassroots support. Blumenthal cited cases from the documentary to expose the “astroturfed” protest as an indication of their desperation to appear legitimate.
Robert Fisk examines Bernie's Israel & Palestine policy. https://t.co/xJAxK7YbJJ
— João Miguel Aliano (@joaoaliano) February 9, 2019
The show also discusses how the base of the Democratic Party – particularly supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders – is continuing to embrace the struggle for Palestinian rights.
Israel is losing the support of progressives in the US, they said, explaining that the American political base still supporting Israel is almost exclusively right-wing, Republican, pro-Trump and fundamentalist evangelical Christians.
(MEMO, PC, Social Media)
