THE BOYS' BRIGADE

From Barbara Kay, at Toronto's National Post:

At McGill University, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) zombie has returned.

For the third time in less than two years (and the fifth time in seven years), anti-Zionist crusaders are on the warpath. A motion calls on the Students Society of McGill University at their winter general assembly on Feb. 22 “to support any (BDS) campaigns on campus and to pressure the McGill board of governors to divest from corporations ‘complicit in the occupation of the Palestinian territories’.”

Similar motions in the Fall of 2014 and March of 2015 were, respectively, shelved indefinitely and failed on a secret ballot. Yet here the anti-Zionists are again. Clearly they hope to wear down the student body to the point of indifference or numbed acceptance.

The vehicle for this latest anti-Israel motion is the McGill BDS Action Network, which consists mainly of members of a group advocating Palestinian human rights and is endorsed by the McGill Black Students’ Network, McGill Students for Feminism, the McGill Syrian Students’ Association, the environmental activist group Divest McGill and the Union for Gender Empowerment.

No thinking person can avoid noting the irony in these names. Environment? Israel leads the world in agricultural sustainability, water conservation and arid-land research, while its neighbours pump non-renewable oil in increasing quantities. Gender rights? Israel is the only country in the entire Middle East that accords equal rights to women and gays.

And the Syrian Students Association? More people have died in the past year in Syria than have died in the entire Arab-Israeli conflict in the last 65 years, and for reasons that have nothing to do with Israel. Why does the Syrian Students Association not direct its activist energies in support of their ethnic brethren, or the Christians and Yazidis who will never be able to return to their ancestral homes? Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of Western progressivism, where hatred of Israel is so fierce it can derail activists from attending to the causes they allegedly represent...

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