Kenneth L. Marcus

Kenneth L. Marcus

This evening in Tel Aviv, LDB President Kenneth L. Marcus will deliver an important keynote address at an important conference on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.    The IAM conference, entitled “BDS Campaign Against Israel: On Campusand Beyond,”  will take tonight at 6 p.m. in Tel Aviv University, Max Webb Hall 1.  LDB President Marcus, a former Staff Director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, will address “What is Anti-Semitic About the BDS Movement?”  In his keynote address, Mr. Marcus will explain why the BDS movement must be considered anti-Semitic even if some of its advocates deny harboring conscious anti-Semitic intent.  Marcus will also discuss legal tools that can be used to address some of the more extreme abuses of the movement.  Other conference speakers will include historian Richard Landes, political scientist Ofira Seliktar, and journalist Ben-Dror Yemini.  Details on the event are as follows:

The public is invited to the IAM event on “BDS Campaign Against Israel: On Campus and Beyond”  – Wednesday May 14, 2014 at 6pm in Tel Aviv University, Max Webb hall 1.

Tel Aviv University

Tel Aviv University

Entrance from gates 1 and 8, paid parking available.

Speakers bio and lectures

Lecture 1- Keynote speaker: Kenneth L. Marcus

What is Anti-Semitic About the Movement to Boycott, Divest from, and Sanction Israel?

“Supporters of the BDS movement argue that their campaign is a political response to human rights violations. Accusations of anti-Semitism, they often insist, are a bad-faith effort to limit debate on a legitimate topic of moral and political concern.  Kenneth L. Marcus, a human rights expert who formerly directed the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, explains why they are wrong.  In fact, anti-Jewish campaigns have frequently used the rhetoric of their times to justify anti-Jewish bigotry.  The BDS movement, Marcus shows, continues a long-standing effort to marginalize and delegitimize the Jewish people.  Some BDS supporters are consciously anti-Semitic, while others are not.  The essential feature of the movement however is its assault on the State of Israel as the collective Jew.”

Kenneth L. Marcus, President & General Counsel, The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. (more…)

Such eye-popping ADL findings as that 26 percent of the world’s population qualifies as “anti-Semitic” (i.e., harbors at least 6 of 11 core anti-Semitic attitudes) and that 35 percent has never heard of the Holocaust are receiving blanket media coverage. They are available in detailed strokes—but with a Methodology section that I suspect will leave statisticians wanting more—at: http://global100.adl.org/public/ADL-Global-100-Executive-Summary.pdf

I merely want to indicate a few findings that I find hard to believe:

1. Sweden’s comes in essentially at the bottom globally at 4 percent anti-Semitic. This runs counter to virtually every empirical account of what’s been happening at the grass-roots in Swedish society for over a decade. Bear in mind that Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city—which will soon have (if it doesn’t already) a Muslim plurality population—is rife with diverse forms hatred and intimidation of Jews of which anti-Israel animus is only the most vicious. If we accept the 4 percent figure, the only explanation would seem to be that virtually all Swedish anti-Semites are members of Sweden’s fast-growing Muslim minority, while pretty close to 100 percent of the rest of the Swedish population is immune to anti-Semitism. Thus Raoul Wallenberg wasn’t an exceptional figure in history’s honor roll. Because apparently Sweden is now, and may always have been, a nation of Wallenbergs!

2. Spain is 29 percent anti-Semitic, while France is 37 percent anti-Semitic. France is indeed becoming a European enfant terrible in terms of anti-Jewish prejudice, but this is the first and only poll I have ever seen indicating that the French are significantly more anti-Semitic than the Spaniards.

3. The U.S. comes in at 9 percent anti-Semitic. This is 3 percent lower than the ADL’s poll of a couple of years ago, and even less than ADL polls since 2000 that have come in stubbornly at 15 percent or higher. It’s hard to reconcile this new finding with the cautionary vibes we’ve been getting in recent years from the retiring Abe Foxman about the seriousness of America’s continuing anti-Semitism problem. Or is that, by the time Barack Obama completes his second term, American anti-Semitism will have gone the way of the dodo? If so, we may be able to sing along with Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”—except that Cohen’s lyrics about the coming millennium are not so sanguine as the new ADL poll.

4. Younger age cohorts are less anti-Semitic than older age cohorts, yet younger people are more ignorant that the Holocaust occurred and (among those who know it did occur) more inclined to believe that the number of Jews who died has been “greatly exaggerated.” Hard to make sense of these findings except on the twin assumptions that younger people are less bigoted than older people but at the same time are more incredulous about authoritative genocide statistics.

To sum up my visceral reaction: the ADL pollsters may need to reconfigure their methodology to capture a new era when more weight must be given to how increasingly threatened Jews especially in Europe feel and when anti-Israelism is no longer the hellhound’s tail but is now the rabid bite of “the new anti-Semitism.”

Frank (Faryar) Nikbakht, founder of CRMRI , Committee for Religious Minority Rights in Iran (Equal Rights for All), has focused his criticisms of the ADL poll primarily at its treatment of the interaction of religion and nationality in shaping anti-Semitism in the Middle East.

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Washington DC, – This evening in Tel Aviv, Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights under Law (LDB) President Kenneth L. Marcus will deliver an important keynote address at an important conference on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The IAM conference, entitled “BDS Campaign Against Israel: On Campus and Beyond,” will take tonight at 6 p.m. in Tel Aviv University, Max Webb Hall 1. LDB President Marcus, a former Staff Director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, will address “What is Anti-Semitic About the BDS Movement?” In his keynote address, Mr. Marcus will explain why the BDS movement must be considered anti-Semitic even if some of its advocates deny harboring conscious anti-Semitic intent. Marcus will also discuss legal tools that can be used to address some of the more extreme abuses of the movement. Other conference speakers will include historian Richard Landes, political scientist Ofira Seliktar, and journalist Ben-Dror Yemini. Details on the event are as follows:

The public is invited to the IAM event on “BDS Campaign Against Israel: On Campus and Beyond” – Wednesday May 14, 2014 at 6pm in Tel Aviv University, Max Webb hall 1. Entrance from gates 1 and 8, paid parking available.

Speakers bio and lectures

Lecture 1- Keynote speaker: Kenneth L. Marcus

What is Anti-Semitic About the Movement to Boycott, Divest from, and Sanction Israel?

“Supporters of the BDS movement argue that their campaign is a political response to human rights violations. Accusations of anti-Semitism, they often insist, are a bad-faith effort to limit debate on a legitimate topic of moral and political concern. Kenneth L. Marcus, a human rights expert who formerly directed the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, explains why they are wrong. In fact, anti-Jewish campaigns have frequently used the rhetoric of their times to justify anti-Jewish bigotry. The BDS movement, Marcus shows, continues a long-standing effort to marginalize and delegitimize the Jewish people. Some BDS supporters are consciously anti-Semitic, while others are not. The essential feature of the movement however is its assault on the State of Israel as the collective Jew.”

Kenneth L. Marcus, President & General Counsel, The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.

Lecture 2: Ofira Seliktar

BDS as a Soft Asymmetrical Conflict: An Intelligence Perspective

“BDS is part of a larger phenomenon of Soft Asymmetrical Conflict (SAC) waged against Israel by numerous nongovernment elements embedded in civil society and aided by governmental bodies. SAC is a new form of 21st century warfare that, by and large, surpassed the more traditional Low Intensity Conflict (LIC) based on terrorism. Israeli authorities are not well equipped to deal with SAC, leading to spectacular failures like Mavi Marmara. With its strong roots on campus, the BDS campaign and other forms of SAC require a rethinking of the Israeli intelligence paradigm.”

Ofira Seliktar is Professor of Political Science at Gratz College and Chair of the Strategy and Intelligence Section at ASMEA. She has also worked as a consultant to agencies in the United States.

Lecture 3: Richard A. Landes

The Delegitimization of Israel: From the Fringes of the Internet to Mainstream Media

“One of the key functions of the mainstream news media is to serve as a dialysis machine, filtering out the poisons that can weaken the civil polities in which they operate. At least in the Arab-Israeli conflict, they have, alas, played the role of injecting the poisons of lethal narratives into the information stream of the West.”

Richard Allen Landes is an American historian and author, currently serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Boston University. He is most famous for coining the term “Pallywood” for what he considers the practice of “staged filming” of “evidence” against Israel for the benefit of the Palestinians.

Lecture 4: Ben-Dror Yemini

“Foundations on Which Boycott Campaign is Built On”

A boycott is a legitimate tool in the framework of international relations. Western countries boycotted Austria because the neo-Nazis joined a government coalition there, Iran was a subject of boycott and sanction, as well as Burma and recently Russia, following the crisis in the Ukraine.
The boycott of Israel is problematic because the claims used to justify the campaign label Israel as an apartheid state are false. In addition, the agenda of the hard-core boycott advocates has nothing to do with human rights, but rather the denial of Israel’s legitimate rights in the Middle East. Occasionally, senior officials such as Secretary of State, John Kerry, use the rhetoric of apartheid – attesting how successful and widespread the label has become.

Ben-Dror Yemini is an Israeli columnist and researcher, his book “The Industry of Lies” will be published in Hebrew in two months.