Bongani Masuku, the International Secretary of COSATU (the South African TUC), is touring the UK in the next few days. He, together with Ronnie Kasrils and Omar Barghouti, is speaking at SOAS, Leeds and Manchester Universities, and the Scottish TUC in Glasgow. The tour, to promote a boycott of Israel, is organised by BRICUP.

Bongani Masuku has made inflammatory and threatening statements against the South African Jewish community because of their support for Israel. Alana Pugh-Jones of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies says:

Specifically, Masuku had openly and repeatedly stated that COSATU would target Jewish supporters of Israel and “make their lives hell” and urged that “every Zionist must be made to drink the bitter medicine they are feeding our brothers and sisters in Palestine”.

Ami on Harry’s Place highlighted more examples of Masuku’s threats, and ENGAGE reported that South African Human Rights Commission ruled that Masuku’s comments are Hate Speech. If Masuku does not apologise within 15 days, the Human Rights Commission will take him to court. The commission found:

The comments and statements made are of an extreme nature that advocate and imply that the Jewish and Israeli community are to be despised, scorned, ridiculed and thus subjecting them to ill-treatment on the basis of their religious affiliation.  A prima facie case of hate speech is clearly established as the statements and comments by Mr. Masuku are offensive and unpalatable to society.

Fair Play can now reveal that Bongani Masuku is actually coming to Britain as a guest of UCU.

UCU is hosting a conference on Saturday to strategise on how best to boycott Israel. The agenda of the conference is a secret. The venue is a secret, as are the speakers and attendees. UCU has not told its own membership about the conference and has refused requests for further information – perhaps the conference itself was supposed to be a secret too.

However, we have learnt that Bongani Masuku is one of the invited speakers, along with Kasrils and Barghouti. The BRICUP tour is only an “spin-off” event. UCU has indicated that is paying for international visitors to the conference; this would mean that it is paying for Masuku’s visit to Britain.

We are shocked that UCU would host someone like Masuku, who incites violence against Jews in his home country, as an honoured guest. However, we are not surprised. At its annual conference this year, UCU voted not to investigate why so many of its Jewish members had resigned. One of the arguments against this proposed investigation was that it would undermine the Union’s ability to campaign for the Palestinians.

So UCU members’ subscription money is being used, we believe, to pay for Bongani Masuku to spread his incitement in the UK. UCU is trying to keep this a secret from its own members. UCU is running closed-door strategy meetings on a boycott of Israel, despite its own repeated legal advice that “making a call to boycott Israeli institutions would run a serious risk of infringing discrimination legislation“ and therefore “an academic boycott of Israel would be unlawful and cannot be implemented“. And Bongani Masuku is a key guest at this conference.

UCU no longer has any credibility as an anti-racist organisation.

The British delegation walked out on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the UN General Assembly when he spoke early this morning.

Our Twitter campaign to David Miliband and Downing Street generated nearly 200 messages calling for the UK to walk out when Ahmadinejad spoke. These included many messages from Iranian democracy campaigners.

Yesterday afternoon, David Miliband responded directly to the Twitter campaign. In response to Khoshkeledoc, an Iranian tweeter who had joined the campaign, Mr. Miliband tweeted:

“You’re right the issue is very serious. Walkout depends on what he says. Massive billboard cruising ny in protest.”

Once Mahmoud Ahmadinejad began to speak, it didn’t take long for his inevitable criticism of Israel to veer into classic antisemitic themes. When he said

“It is no longer acceptable that a small minority would dominate the politics, economy and culture of major parts of the world by its complicated networks, and establish a new form of slavery, and harm the reputation of other nations, even European nations and the US, to attain its racist ambitions”

then the British delegation walked out of the General Assembly chamber. Sweden, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Canada, some South American countries and Israel also walked out or refused to go in at all.

A spokesman for the UK’s UN delegation explicitly said that their walkout was triggered by Ahmadinejad’s “antisemitic” rhetoric.

Well done to everyone who joined the Twitter campaign.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is due to speak at the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday 23rd September. He has said he wants to wipe Israel off the map, he regularly denies the Holocaust and he has brutally put down protests in Iran at his apparent theft of the Presidential election.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to stop Ahmadinejad speaking at the UN. But Governments don’t have to sit there and listen to him. They can walk out, as the UK Government and many others did when he spoke at Durban II.

So we’re arranging a quick Twitter campaign to call on the UK Government to walk out while Ahmadinejad speaks.

The message the Fair Play Campaign (@fairplaycg) tweeted is

“Ahmadinejad stole an election and denies the Holocaust. @DMiliband and @DowningStreet should walk out when he speaks at the UN. Please RT”

Obviously everyone should write their own message, but messages should include @DMiliband and @DowningStreet, so that they get seen by advisors to Gordon Brown and David Miliband. Also try to include some note in your tweet to encourage others to join the campaign.

If you’re already a twitter user, this will be the easiest campaign you ever joined. So what are you waiting for, write your tweet now!

Benjamin Pogrund was a South African journalist and anti-Apartheid campaigner, and is now an Israeli peace campaigner. His piece on the Guardian’s Comment is Free,  “Boycotts only harden Israeli opinion“, rebuts Neve Gordan’s pro-boycott piece from last week.

The piece opens with a criticism of the ‘apartheid’ analogy as applied to Israel:

For some, the apartheid accusation is the way to destroy Israel. If Israel can be linked with apartheid then it can be denounced as illegitimate as was white-ruled South Africa and hence be wide open to international sanctions.

Those who pursue this couldn’t care less about facts. They have an agenda and are unscrupulous about distortion, lying and exaggeration. Their ultimate purpose is exposed by how they answer a basic question: whether or not they accept the fact of Israel’s existence.

Continue reading ‘“Boycotts, sanctions and divestment are not the way to persuade individual Israelis”’ »

The Jewish Chronicle revealed that Jews for Justice for Palestinians are considering supporting boycotts of Israel. Fair Play Board member Jeremy Newmark analyses this news:

The revelation that Jews for Justice for Palestinians (JFJFP) is reviewing its policy on boycotts of Israel is no surprise. Until now, JFJFP has flaunted its non-policy on boycotts; it supported occasional campaigns against Israeli-linked companies, while indulgently appearing on the “anti” side of public debates on an academic boycott. As with almost every issue of substance, such as a commitment to a two-state solution, JFJFP preferred to fudge on a boycott.

But this year, after their annual conference voted to actively support boycotting Israel, JFJFP’s leadership decided to survey their members, to discover their views on the subject.

(Oddly, JFJFP’s so-called members include anyone who has ever signed any version of their declaration. Less than a third of these responded to the survey, a self-selecting group rather than a proper sample.)

The results are clear. Fifty-nine per cent of JFJFP members support a total boycott of Israeli goods, 61 per cent support divestment from any company that invests in Israel, and half want a boycott on tourism to Israel.

So why has JFJFP not come out in support of these policies? The answer is revealed by the next survey question — 60 per cent of JFJFP members acknowledge that adopting a public boycott position would discourage other Jews who are critical of Israel’s policies from joining their organisation. They know it would frighten the horses, so have generally kept their extreme views hidden to encourage more recruits.

Why the change of policy now? At their annual conference, JFJFP ran a workshop on boycotts where they discussed a number of real-world examples. Reading through these examples is instructive. All of them involved another organisation — such as the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) — asking JFJFP to join an existing boycott move.

It seems like this is a regular occurrence; when anti-Israel activists start a campaign, they call up the useful idiots at JFJFP or Neturei Karta for political cover. Perhaps JFJFP had begun to feel bad at saying “no” too often, or perhaps they were worried that they were out of step with the rest of the anti-Israel world, concerned that their loyalty to the cause is being questioned.

Anti-Zionist Jews are accepted by the anti-Israel movement so long as they are more zealous and extreme than anyone else; a Jewish pro-Palestinian group that won’t lead the boycott campaign will be treated by groups like the PSC with the lurking suspicion that they aren’t really “one of us”.

This costs JFJFP credibility in the internecine internal politics of the Jewish anti-Zionist world, credibility that it had to work hard to attain in the first place. In March 2007, another such group — Jews Against Zionism — put a motion to PSC’s conference to stop the PSC working with a group run by Holocaust deniers. JFJFP leaders reportedly worked with the PSC leadership to cripple the motion.

There is now little doubt that JFJFP stands poised to join the movement to boycott Israeli goods, sports teams, theatre groups and even holidays. JFJFP itself is a fringe group with no real traction in the Jewish community or the wider world, but its change in stance is important; it is another sign that the debate around Israel is shifting, that it’s becoming impossible for a group to be seen as pro-Palestinian unless it’s pro-boycott. This shift doesn’t help Palestinians at all, it impacts upon the Jewish community, and it contributes to the creeping delegitimisation of Israel.

In recent years, as the agenda of their leadership has been exposed, respected Jewish campaigners for Palestinian rights such as Norman Geras, David Hirsh, John Strawson and Linda Grant have distanced themselves from JFJFP. So the real question for the remaining signatories to JFJFP’s declaration must be: was this what you signed up for? If not, what are you going to do about it?

Jeremy Newmark is the chief executive of the Jewish Leadership Council, and on the board of the Fair Play Campaign Group, which opposes boycotts that target the people and supporters of Israel.