[Peace-discuss] [OccupyCU] Academic Freedom Conference ... speakers flying/ driving / Skypeing in from around the country/world.

[David Gehrig]

Well, there it is -- the automatic robo-presumption of bad faith, exactly the kind of thing that shuts down even the possibility of rational dialogue. Ever wonder why, a dozen years after BDS started, it's still accomplished effectively nothing? Maybe that kind of exchange has something to do with why despite all their efforts the BDS gang is pretty much left in a corner talking amongst themselves. And their response, unfortunately, seems to be to double down on the very rhetoric that's isolating them.

I guess I'm thinking about a mass demonstration on the National Mall in 2007, on the fortieth anniversary of the occupation of the West Bank. It was meant to be a big deal -- full page ads in the front section of the New York Times and the Washington Post don't come at all cheap, and I think there were display ads in the DC Metro, another way to spend big money. But at the end of the day, it was a tiny little demonstration. Why? Not because Americans don't oppose the occupation of the West Bank -- they do, and I do. But the organizers were unable to convince the mainstream that they weren't going to do what David did here, an angry harangue against a reality-impaired cartoon caricature of Israel, based among other things on a false cartoonish historical analogy to South Africa.

That stuff might play on the pages of Counterpunch -- after all, the Holocaust deniers Israel Shamir and Gilad Atzmon still play on the pages of Counterpunch, whose cluelessness about antisemitism is the stuff of legend -- but it isolates you from the possibility of actually making any actual change.

@%<

> On Apr 26, 2014, at 7:59 AM, "David Johnson" <davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> But lets be honest Ya'aQov, you are not a regular listener of my radio and tV program so we both know you are attempting to distract from the issue