The Juggernaut that is BDS.
Last night at about 6:00pm, 9th September 2011, about 80 – 100 activists in the city of Adelaide, South Australia, took part in yet another protest in support of the BDS campaign against the racist and oppressive policies of the Zionist state of Israel. While 100 activists may not seem a huge amount, when taken in context of the Australian governments almost sycophantic support of Israel and the relentless portrayal of all BDS protesters as anti-Semites by the Murdoch dominated Australian media, (and the atrocious weather!) this number is significant. And the numbers are growing.
The protest took place in Adelaide’s main shopping precinct, Rundle Mall. For the last 11 months groups of about 15 to 30 activists, from all walks of life, have once a week been picketing the Israeli based cosmetics company, Seacret, in Adelaide’s Rundle Mall. These protests have been very well recieved by the majority of the South Australian public and thousands of people have stopped to encourage the activists, eager to hear the reason why Israeli companies have been targeted by such a campaign. Virtually all those in support of the Zionist regime come from the ranks of Christian Zionists. These Zionists come from one or two extreme Pentecostal churches in Adelaide and most of the mainstream Pentecostal movement have distanced themselves from these extremists. It has been my experience that Christians who stand on street corners waving Israeli flags, telling sinners that they are all doomed to hell if they do not convert to their version of the Christian faith, do very little to warm the average Australian to the cause of Zionism.
Ignoring the clear teaching of scripture that the Gospel is a message of reconciliation of all sinners to God, justice and renewal, the Christian Zionists who weekly come out to counter the BDS protests are a part of the wider group of Christians in Adelaide that feel the need to fill Adelaide’s main shopping precinct with a message of God’s threat/promise that if we don’t love Him, He will personally see to it that we are tormented forever in unbearable and eternal agony. Good news…hey?
In the last few weeks, hundreds of teenagers have countered the message of these supporters of Israel, and general preachers of God’s wrath for sinners, with hours of long protests crying out for such messages of hatred, Islamaphobia and homophobia to be banned from our streets, and some have even cried out for a message of God’s merciful acceptance of sinners as a real means for bringing change in our world. When confronted with the reality of the hatred and anger they have generated in the public, the Christians usually reply that it is all just an attack of the devil and they will only intensify their message of God’s wrath for sinners. They no doubt consider themselves to be a far braver breed of Christian than those “touchy feelly” liberal Christians who support Palestinian rights and think the Gospel is an excuse to “coddle” sinners. They thrive on a type of Christian “macho”; proving their devotion to God by alienating themselves from the Godless.
The irony of all this is that while the media portrays the BDS campaign as a haven of anti-Semites and racists bent on dividing the people, taking our orders from…Tehran I guess, the fact is that it is clearly the supporters of Israel that are filled with people who are from overtly fascist organisations and others who believe that reconciliation between Arab and Jew is impossible, contrary to 13 centuries of history in the Middle East before the arrival of Zionist colonialism. The tag of anti-Semitism as the true motivation for the BDS campaign is so easily refuted by the existence of tens of thousands of Jewish people who support the movement, that I believe the public is becoming deaf to these lame arguments. Certainly the BDS campaign is not remotely concerned with them.
I truly believe that the days of Israeli apartheid are numbered; God’s will for justice and the desire for equality in the hearts of the vast majority of people will simply not allow it to go on for ever. Governments and media can do what they will to support racism and inequality in the Middle East, be it in Israel or the Arab nations, but it will not last. Justice will prevail and the tide is turning. That really is good news!
Craig Nielsen
ACTION FOR PALESTINE
Israel-Palestine 
3 comments
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September 11, 2011 at 10:03 pm
flozoe
Anti Semetism is a scam for 80 to 90% of Jews in the world today. Their origins are in Asia, not the ME.
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September 16, 2011 at 7:36 am
Ohara
July 2010 & Sep. 2011 – Two dates in official ‘Arab apartheid Palestine’ – ethno-religious cleansing – Nazi judenrein policy
* July 2010, “Palestinian” PM Mahmlud Abbas declars the region should be ‘Jew free’ [http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3929819,00.html]
* Sep. 2011, ‘Palestinian’ [PLO] ambassador to the US Maen Areikat declares that a Palestine “State,” should be ‘Jew free.’
[http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/judenrein-palestine_593537.html]
[http://www.israeltoday.co.il/News/tabid/178/nid/22948/language/en-US/Default.aspx]
[http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/147927]
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Why, they are all about “fighting the occupation” of-course.
And these are the same hypocritical-propagandists who would brand self-defensive anti-terror operations with a falsified “apartheid slur”, mind you. All the while multi-racial democratic Israel treats its 20% Arab citizens [eventhough, most Arabs in the area, the so-called “Palestinians” are not really natives… their parents or grandparents immigrated from: Egypt, Syria, etc.] with preferential treatment / affirmative action.
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September 16, 2011 at 8:17 am
craignielsen
If we go back in time before the Zionist colonialist project in Palestine we will find no statements from Arabs declaring that any part of the Holy Land should be “Jew Free”. Albert Einstein wrote about Jew-Arab relations in the pre-Zionist era when he said:
“There could be no greater calamity than a permanent discord between us and the Arab people. Despite the great wrong that has been done to us, we must strive for a just and lasting compromise with the Arab people. Let us recall that in former times no people lived in greater friendship with us than the ancestors of these Arabs” (cited in Jerome, 2009, p.70). If we want to have even the slightest chance of understanding the Israel-Palestine conflict we must first understand its roots.
The roots of the conflict are not to be found in the racist or apartheid attitudes of some Arabs, but are to be found in the Zionist colonialist ideology that saw Arabs as obstacles to Jewish entitlement to a land the Jewish people never owned, even from a biblical perspective. Today, as then, Jewish entitlement to the land of Palestine is based in a type of European supremacist ideology that is far more like Nazism than pro-Zionists care to admit. Arab hatred of Zionism has been provoked by Zionist brutality that pre-dates any type of Arab terrorism in the land of Palestine.
In an editorial in The Guardian in January 2006, Khaled Meshaal, the chief of Hamas’s political bureau, stated:
“Our message to the Israelis is this: We do not fight you because you belong to a certain faith or culture. Jews have lived in the Muslim world for 13 centuries in peace and harmony; they are in our religion “the people of the book” who have a covenant from God and his messenger, Muhammad (peace be upon him), to be respected and protected. Our conflict with you is not religious but political. We have no problem with Jews who have not attacked us — our problem is with those who came to our land, imposed themselves on us by force, destroyed our society and banished our people.”
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/jan/31/comment.israelandthepalestinians. Retrieved December 29, 2009.
The state of Israel was built on the principle of “hafrada”. This was their goal long before the misery and despair of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza created Hamas.
The BDS campaign is, and has always been, against all forms of racism, whether it be in the form of Zionism or anti-Semitism. Only full equality with regard to human rights, not the pretend version of the state of Israel and the “apartheid on steroids” of the West Bank”, will bring true peace and justice to the Holy Land.
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