Where did the BDS movement originate?

UNDERSTANDING BDS-DEFINITION AND BACKGROUND

The term BDS refers to Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions conducted against the state of Israel, and also a way to attack the Jewish people both in Israel and worldwide. Partially funded by the PLO, the BDS movement grew out of the Arab League boycott of Israel begun in 1950 after Israel’s War of Independence. The Muslim and Arab world and its Arab League, despite tentative agreements with Egypt and Jordan, began the boycott in 1950 and have never signed a peace treaty with Israel even after the cessation of hostilities in 1948. Five Arab armies back then sought to wipe the new Jewish state off the map but failed. The purpose of the Boycott was to starve the Jews out of their new homeland.  The Boycott movement was given new life and recreated as Arab irredentists expanded the movement later in the academic arena, notably in American colleges and later in churches and through labor movements. The International Solidarity Movement was set up by Yasser Arafat in 2001 with the help of two “camp counselors,” Huwaida Arraf and Adam Shapiro, who were employees of Seeds for Peace, a camp set up and funded by the U.S. State Department, to  operate in the U.S. and Europe to promote  BDS and other anti-Israel activities on campuses and elsewhere (see StopthISM.com). The BDS movement is a support mechanism for Palestinian terrorist groups in their efforts to de-legitimize and ultimately destroy Israel. Its leadership calls terrorism that kills Israelis “legitimate resistance.”

THE BEGINNING AND  SOME HISTORY

The Vietnam War produced in American colleges a revolutionary mindset among campus radicals to bring down the capitalist U.S. government as Marxist-inspired self-defined “revolutionaries” sought to promote communism and the downfall of America and American interests both at home and abroad. Israel during the Cold War was considered a staunch U.S. ally that one day might be called upon to protect U.S. interests in the Middle East in the event of war with the Soviet Union. Ho Chi Minh dispatched North Vietnamese intelligence officers to U.S.  campuses to stir up opposition to the War which resulted in campus riots and demonstrations. The PLO leadership, at one time a proxy of the KGB against U.S. interests, learned from North Vietnamese advisors how to expand their support base by linking PLO goals to other popular political movements to swell their numbers and support. The Vietnamese advised the PLO that in lieu of being too vociferous in announcing themselves as a revolutionary movement,  it would be more successful trying to pass itself off as a human rights movement to try and gain universal appeal. Terrorism was thus justified as a human rights necessity to fight against a Jewish state and the Boycott was just another weapon to provide support for terrorism while claiming to be “nonviolent.”  BDS leadership never condemns terrorism using the euphemism “legitimate resistance.” However, the Boycott, despite claims of being “nonviolent” (as if starving Jewish families to support terrorists’ goals could be disguised as such), through its leaders like Paul Larudee openly recognize a right to use violence against Israelis to achieve the Palestinians’ revolutionary goals. This deception, and the insistence that the movement is “Palestinian-led,” v voiced in the recordings are the two main mission obligations always mentioned.

Arab-American college radicals such as Jess Ghannam (a professor of psychiatry today at UC San Francisco), Zahi Damuni ( a biochemist, formerly of St. James University in Canada), and Mazen Qumsiyeh (a geneticist from Yale, fired for anti-Semitic emails), some of whom were born in the West Bank, went on to graduate university and with their professional incomes started the group Al Awda (Arabic for “the Return”), an organization set up to promote PLO and later Hamas goals against Israel’s existence. During this time, Al Qaeda was also founded by a Palestinian named Abdullah Azzam, the mentor for Osama Bin Laden. This was the Muslim jihadist link behind the BDS Movement to this day. Today, the leadership of Al Awda helps promote BDS along with myriad other groups and clubs that have sprung up to promote starving out the Jews in the Middle East and, by extension, linking to the worldwide jihad. Al Awda is still very active in the USA and in promoting BDS. BDS was launched in Israel in 2005 by Palestinian Jamal Juma and later Omar Barghouti, an Arab student from Kuwait attending Tel Aviv University helped to specifically launch the academic boycott in Israel and worldwide with the help of Jess Ghannam, Manzar Foroohar (an Iranian Muslim) and some other Arab professors in the USA in 2007 that comprised a steering committee. ...