If you’ve been following this site for any length of time, you know that there are a considerable number of calls and movements to boycott Israel, from various countries and sources. One of the things that all of these boycott movements have in common is that if you dig down deeply enough, you will always find a Palestinian group at their core. Sabeel is one of the biggest leaders in the anti-Israel boycott movement. But there has been a concerted move by the Arab and Muslim world, in concert with those who hate Israel, to delegitimize Israel on many fronts.

The news last week that Britain’s largest academic union decided not to boycott Israel on legal grounds (gee, and isn’t that a moral high road? “Let’s not do it, we might get sued.”) was great news. But this is even better:

A tour of Palestinian academic officials arranged by the British University and College Union was canceled following the union’s decision to call off its threat of an academic boycott of Israel.

During the tour, Palestinian academics were meant to visit British campuses and present their side of the conflict and the advantages of imposing an academic boycott on Israel.

Darn. There goes the propaganda mission, down the toilet! And the Palestinians are seething.

Following the cancellation, the British Committee for Universities of Palestine issued a statement condemning the move. The committee claimed the UCU’s decision was based on legal advice that had not been shared with all the union’s members.

Professor Jonathan Rosenhead, one of the committee’s heads, who has also signed a petition organized by Jews for Justice for Palestinians, said it was not rare for government or other bodies to turn to lawyers to receive the legal advice they want to hear.

See, here’s the thing about deciding a legal question. Once a lawyer determines something is going to open an organization up to liability, he and other lawyers get together to make sure that he’s right. Once they determine that could happen, that’s pretty much the end of it in the corporate world. The membership of the union doesn’t get to vote on whether or not the union should take a risk of being sued. If Professor Jonathan Rosenhead had done what his mother wanted him to do, he’d be a lawyer now, instead of an academic, and he’d be able to grasp that simple concept. He might even not have turned against Israel, but hey, he’s a British Jew, so he’s already halfway there.

Dr Amjad Barham, president of the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees, sent an open letter to Hunt expressing the federation’s shock and surprise at the cancellation of the tour.

In his letter, Barham wrote hat federation members felt their British colleagues were prevented the right to receive direct information, and expressed disappointment with the union’s leadership for failing to protect the members’ rights to hold an open discussion on the matter of the boycott.

So, here’s the gist of the letter, if I have this right: Even though the legal staff has determined that if the UCU holds the boycott, it will be sued, which could effectively end the UCU, and even though the reason they could be sued is because the boycott against Israel would violate discrimination laws in the U.K., the Palestinians should still be allowed to go on a tour of British university campuses to tell people why they should have a discriminatory, probably-illegal boycott of Israel.

Yep. Makes sense to me. Go on tour, boys, and remember to pack the good CDs for the trip to LaLa Land. “Prevented the right to receive direct information” my ass. All they have to do is head for the BBC website and they’ll have plenty of the same information that the tour was going to give them.

File this one under: Sore Losers.

israel academic boycott.

When you, my poor to moderately well-to-do reader, visit your travel agency to scrounge for a lowest price ticket to Spanish Riviera (if you are a Brit), to Cancun (if you are a US citizen) or to Cyprus (for Israelis), you are probably perusing wistfully the somewhat garishly colored booklets of more expensive resorts, like the ones on the Maldives. Tantalizing indeed.

However, the recent bombing changed the idyllic picture drastically. In many other places on our planet a humble bombing or two wouldn’t create too much noise. It is different in Maldives, this tourist paradise. From Al Jazeera:

The Maldives, with a population of about 350,000, is by far the wealthiest, and most orderly, country in south Asia. About 600,000 tourists visit the country each year, accounting for one-third of its economy.

So what is troubling this singularly blessed corner of the world, you might ask? Unbelievably, the answer comes from the same Al Jazeera article:

Half the population is under 18, reasonably well-educated and with few prospects for good jobs. Some young people have turned to drug use, while others have embraced a conservative strain of Islam that had been virtually unheard of on the islands just a few years ago.

Since the drug addicts rarely, if at all, resort to bombing, being otherwise engaged, we should obviously take a look at the “others” - those who caught that elusive virus called in journalistic lingo “conservative strain of Islam”. It is hardly a coincidence that this malady precedes the first attempt at bombing, addressed at tourists, of all possible targets.

“The Maldives has never had something like this before. We are taking this very seriously because tourism is our life blood,” Shareef said.

Somebody obviously wants to hurt the Maldives’ economy. Destitute people are a much better fodder for extremists of all kinds than well-to-do ones. And the Maldives’ life blood is in danger of being drained, quite quickly if the bombings become a habit.

Just to satisfy my curiosity: does this virulent conservative strain of Islam come with genetically built in know-how on bomb building? It seems so, since according to this, the bomb was quite sophisticated, including a cell-phone operated primer.

This case could bear watching…

Cross-posted on SimplyJews.

h / t Elder of Ziyon

Lally Weymouth of the Washington Post - daughter of the late Katherine Graham - interviewed Mahmoud Abbas for the paper. The interview is here.

Elder of Ziyon is certainly correct that there’s nothing “moderate” in the positions he espouses.

A comment at the site cites IMRA catching Abbas in a lie. (Or if you prefer to be polite an embellishment.) Abbas boasted that his security forces had captured two rockets aimed at Israel. IMRA thought cited an e-mail from Khaled abu Toameh that those weren’t rockets but empty pipes.

So far the only other commenter on the article is Yaacov Lozowick who observes

So according to the Palestinian president, the 2nd Intifada was launched in response to an unprecedented offer by Israel’s prime minister. It would have been legitimate to continue negotiating so as to achieve more - but that was not what happened.

Reading the interview it is impossible to get the feeling that Abbas is capable of much independent thought. He comes across as spoiled. (The world must support our demands, Israel must agree to our terms, Hamas must make nice to us.) He also is living in unreality. These Q & A’s are precious:

Are there any concessions that you’re willing to make in order to reach a deal with the Israelis? Are there any concessions you demand?We will be flexible, but before 1947, we had 95 percent of Palestine. In 1937, the partition plan gave the Israelis only part of Palestine. And they were very happy at that time. [David] Ben-Gurion was very happy with it. It didn’t work. After that [came] the 1947 partition plan — we rejected this, so we lost.

You should have taken it?

Yes, at that time, of course. But it gave us 46 percent of Palestine. . . . Now, we accept [the pre-'67 borders].

So in other words, it is a concession that the PA is willing to forgo the 1947 partition plan. That ship sailed 60 years ago. There’s no sense of shame, that since the Arab world rejected compromise 60 years they missed their chance.

The other part of the problem is “we had 95 percent of Palestine.” Who is “we?” The areas now considered to be part of Palestine were sections of Jordan and Egypt at the time. Yes the untenable 1947 partition divided what was then Palestine into Jewish and Arab enclaves. But Gaza was part of Egypt and Judea and Samaria were parts of (Trans)Jordan - which itself was part of the British Mandate of Palestine. (And was Ben Gurion happy with the partition plan? Or was he willing to tolerate it in order to get a state?) “We” clearly does not refer to what Abbas (and the world) would now call “Palestinians.”

And then there is this:

The Israelis thought they were doing a good thing when they withdrew from Gaza [in July 2005], but now they have been forced to evacuate a town near Gaza [because it has been repeatedly shelled by rockets from Hamas].They did it unilaterally. They didn’t do it bilaterally with us. We asked them many times to make [the Gaza withdrawal] the result of an agreement between us. But [former Israeli prime minister Ariel] Sharon refused. He didn’t want to talk to us. . . .

OK, so what happened when Israel ceded territory under the terms of of a bilateral agreement? That happened in late 1995, when Israel ceded Tulkarem, Shechem (Nablus), Ramallah, Kalkilya, Bethlehem and Jenin to the Palestinian Authority. Starting in February 1996 Israel was struck with a series of suicide bombings that killed over 60 people and injured hundreds more. This violence didn’t occur because Israel killed Yihye Ayyash or because Hamas was trying to “kill the peace process.” It happened because Israel trusted its security to the PA. The PA, then under Arafat’s leadership, had no interest in preventing terror or Hamas from developing a terror infrastructure. So Hamas took advantage of the opportunity, built its infrastructure while being protected by Arafat and struck at Israel when it could. What happened in Gaza is a repeat of that and of Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, which afforded Hezbollah a better platform from which to attack Israel.

The lesson isn’t that unilateral won’t work. The lesson is that giving territory to terrorists (or those committed to your destruction) strengthens them.

Finally there’s this:

Your popularity has increased since you declared yourself independent of Hamas and set up a government in the West Bank. Does this show that when you make a bold move, people like it?Yes, but if I make concessions which are unacceptable to the people, I think that I will not be popular anymore. But it is not a matter of popularity — it’s a matter of fairness.

“Bold?!” Read the whole interview. “Bold” doesn’t describe Abbas. He has chutzpah no doubt. But the best description of him is “passive aggressive.” This is not a man that any sane person would trust to ensure his interests.

And note, even here, he refuses to make “concessions which are unacceptable to the people.” Has he even thought of using his position as leader to persuade the people of the necessity of making concessions? Instead he just pretends that not demanding the 1947 partition plan is a concession.

Abbas is weak. And I’m not just talking about his political position.

Israel Matzav has more thoughts:

I want you to try to understand Abu Mazen’s basic argument, because it’s not something western minds are used to confronting. When we used to play football in the schoolyard and one team scored a touchdown, the ruled always was “suckers walk.” The team that gave up the touchdown had to retreat to the other end of the schoolyard to receive the ensuing kickoff. In Abu Mazen’s world, the winner has to give up all its gains in order to appease the loser.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

mahmoud abbas.

Here’s my Heroes tip of this season: Watch The Bionic Woman. It is superb.

The series is brought to us by the same folks that brought us the update/remake of Battlestar Galactica, which is also pretty damned good. The producers really have a great way of writing strong women characters, and oof—I really like the new Jamie Summers. Plus, she has a doppelganger, played by Katee Sackhoff, Starbuck from BG.

It’s a great match for Heroes fans. And like Battlestar Galactica, there’s obviously a past that we’re going to be filled in on as the season goes along.

And for those of you trying to figure out who the actor is who plays Will’s father, he played Badger in Firefly. (That was driving me nuts until I IMDB’d him.)

If you missed the pilot, it’s on Sci-Fi network sometime, and probably online as well. Really. Watch this one. It was great.

Having a bat mitzvah is a complicated thing.

And I don’t have my parents doing all the work of the party for me.

Well, the invitations are mostly done. Have to email a few people for their addresses. I decided I’m bringing the students’ invitations to school with me tomorrow.

Here’s a hint for anyone who thinks that Staples has a good print shop: Nope. Go to Kinko’s. Staples misled me as to how they could print on cards I bought from a paper store. They told me they really could only do it well on 8×11 card stock. Lucky for me, I remembered that literally around the corner is a Kinko’s, where I got the help I need and it cost less than half per copy, and $1.25 vs. $2 per cut. I used my typesetting/desktop publishing skills to fix the type to fit on the cards I had, and the staff helped me do the rest. Nice people. I have to remember to write a nice letter to their manager.

Mind you, I’m two weeks late with the invitations. But the most important people already said they’re coming—my close friends and family, and some blog buddies.

Now all I have to do is, well, almost everything else. But I have the caterer for Saturday night dinner. That’s the hard work, and I’m not doing it. I’m really tempted to cater kiddush lunch, too, but I’ll hold off and save the money. I have some friends at the synagogue who are going to help me prepare and set it up.

Of course, I’m utterly wondering why I chose to do this again… one of my fellow congregants had her adult bat mitzvah last year, and she invited half a dozen friends. That’s MUCH easier. I told her I should have done that. She thinks that I should keep on plugging away with what I’m doing, and that it will be great for my students. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She’s not the one who has to do the role of bat mitzvah girl and parent of bat mitzvah girl.

If I ever get married, I’m eloping. The heck with big parties.