WASHINGTON, Thursday, November 19, 2020 (WAFA) – The Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement today criticized US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's labeling of the movement as anti-Semitic.
“It’s quite ironic that the Trump Administration, prompted by Israel’s apartheid regime, continues to enable and normalize white supremacy and antisemitism in the US and worldwide while simultaneously smearing BDS, a leading Palestinian-led human rights movement and its millions of supporters worldwide as ‘anti-Semitic’.” BDS said in a statement, stressing that it “has consistently and categorically rejected all forms of racism, including anti-Jewish racism, as a matter of principle.”
The international rights movement said, “The fanatic Trump-Netanyahu alliance is intentionally conflating opposition to Israel’s regime of occupation, colonization and apartheid against Palestinians and calls for nonviolent pressure to end this regime on the one hand with anti-Jewish racism on the other, in order to suppress advocacy of Palestinian rights under international law. This fraudulent revision of the definition of antisemitism has been condemned by dozens of Jewish groups worldwide and by hundreds of leading Jewish and Israeli scholars, including world authorities on antisemitism and the Holocaust.”
It added: “By this revisionist and fraudulent definition, even human rights organizations that are not part of the BDS movement but endorse banning settlement goods, for instance, as well as some 22% of Jewish Americans under the age of 40, who support a full boycott of Israel according to a recent poll, would also be designated as ‘anti-Semitic.’
The BDS movement said it “stands with all those struggling for a more dignified, just and beautiful world. With our many partners, we shall resist these McCarthyite attempts to intimidate and bully Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights defenders into accepting Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism as fate.”
Pompeo today announced the decision to label BDS as anti-Semitic while on a visit to Israel that included a visit to an illegal settlement built on occupied Palestinian territory in clear violation of international law and relevant United Nations resolutions.
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