In the spring of 2018, the city council of Cambridge, Massachusetts, was going to vote on whether to boycott the office technology company Hewlett-Packard (HP) because an anti-Israel organization called MassAgainstHP objected to the city using printers made by a company which does business with the Israeli government. MassAgainstHP, along with several other organizations, including the Boston branch of Jewish Voice for Peace, brought a petition to the city council, which was brought forward as a resolution. Thanks to counter-actions by local pro-Israel activists, the vote, scheduled for April 23, 2018, never occurred.
In the lead-up to the vote, Americans for Peace and Tolerance produced the following series of signs with which to educate the council members as to why boycotting Israel, in the face of all the human atrocities raging across the globe, is not only absurd, but blatantly anti-Semitic. The signs touch on the human rights abuses which anti-Israel groups will never protest, and the fact that boycotts specifically targeting Jews have a very dark past.
By popular demand, they are now available to the general public for download.
Arabs and Muslims Own Black Slaves
Across North Africa, Arabs and Muslims own hundreds of thousands of black men, women, and children as chattel slaves. Strangely, BDS agitators never get around to protesting this barbaric horror.
175,774 Child Brides in Iran
According to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s own government records, between 2013 and 2017 alone, a grand total of 175,774 girls below the age of 15 were sold as child “brides.” Strangely, state-sanctioned pedophilia is missing from anti-Israel activists’ agendas because combatting child rape, involving neither Jews nor the West, does not serve their purposes.
Anti-Christian Genocide in the Middle East
Since the rise of ISIS in 2014, tens if not hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern Christians have been persecuted into near-extinction in one of the most brutal episodes of religio-ethnic cleansing in recent years. Ancient Christian communities — some speaking the same Aramaic tongue Jesus spoke — have been nearly exterminated, with some of those captured by Islamic fighters crucified as an encouragement for others to accept Islam. Nevertheless, many decry Israel’s human rights record, even when Israel’s Christian population is thriving and on the rise.
Gays Hanged in Iran
Homosexuality is a capital offense in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and many men suspected of being gay are publicly hanged from construction cranes. In Israel, however, they march every year in the massive Tel Aviv Pride Parade; still, even some gay groups protest “pinkwashing” — the supposed use of Israel’s admirable gay rights record to cover up for its “oppression” of Palestinians.
The Nazis Boycotted Jews, Too
In fact, the very first major boycotts of Jewish businesses were organized by the Arabs of British Mandate Palestine in 1920. They were also the same Arabs who, more than a decade later, applauded the rise of the Nazis in Germany, and with whom they allied themselves during the Second World War. The most infamous anti-Jewish boycotts, however, were those of the Nazis themselves — this picture is from their iconic first large-scale boycott of April 1, 1933. Yet, today, anti-Israel organizations perpetuate their legacy by singling out only Israel for condemnation and economic warfare, in the face of everything else plaguing the world.
