WASHINGTON, Saturday, October 24, 2020 (WAFA) – The Palestinian-led Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement has warned that the US administration is escalating its relentless war on human rights, justice and the truth by planning to label leading international human rights and development organizations anti-Semitic for their criticism of the Israeli occupation.

According to a statement by BDS, plans to label major international human rights organizations “anti-Semitic,” cynically conflating criticism of Israeli violations of Palestinian rights with antisemitism and undermining the vital fight against real antisemitism.

The US-based Politico said that the administration of US President Donald Trump, and particularly Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, is considering declaring that several prominent international organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam, as anti-Semitic and that governments should not support them.

“By smearing leading human rights organizations as ‘anti-Semitic,’ the corrupt and increasingly authoritarian Trump Administration is escalating its relentless war on human rights, justice, and the truth. It is also entrenching its criminal partnership with Israel's far-right regime, including in its desperate attempts to conflate opposition to its occupation and apartheid against Palestinians with anti-Jewish racism,” said BDS in its statement.

“The anti-racist BDS movement for Palestinian freedom, justice and equality, stands with all those struggling for a more dignified, just and beautiful world – including the named human rights and development organizations – against Trump's McCarthyite attempts to intimidate and bully them into complacency and complicity in human rights abuses,” it said, explaining that the BDS movement has a longstanding policy of opposing all forms of racism and discrimination, including antisemitism.

M.K.