Trump admin. targets BDS and, by extension, intensifies attack on Black Lives Matter

By Robert Inlakesh

Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer and political analyst, who has lived in and reported from the occupied Palestinian West Bank. He has written for publications such as Mint Press, Mondoweiss, MEMO, and various other outlets. He specializes in analysis of the Middle East, in particular Palestine-Israel. He also works for Press TV as a European correspondent.

US President Donald Trump’s administration has declared the BDS movement to be anti-Semitic and support for it amounting to hatred of Jewish people, this is despite the fact that many progressive and anti-racist groups in the United States support the movement. This move would also interestingly brand ‘Black Lives Matter’ as a racist group, endorsing anti-Semitism.

The BDS Movement is a Palestinian Human Rights advocacy group, which calls for a peaceful form of resistance to Israeli human rights violations, through Boycotts, Divestments and Sanctions on Tel Aviv’s regime. Despite the constitution of the United States protecting the individual's right to boycott, the Trump administration, in an undemocratic manner, has teamed up with its Zionist allies in order to suppress the rights of Americans to decide they do not wish to purchase Israeli goods on political grounds.

The BDS movement has received endorsements from various leading anti-racist groups in the United States, perhaps the most prominent of which being the Black Lives Matter movement. Notably, several leading African American human rights activists have also endorsed the BDS movement, including the likes of Angela Davis

Donald Trump has previously retweeted a post on twitter, which labelled Black Lives Matter a “Marxist-terrorist” organization, sparking outrage at the time, but now with the official labelling of the BDS Movement as anti-Semitic, Trump’s administration is taking that belief to new heights. This labelling of the BDS Movement would essentially mean that BLM would become an anti-Semitic hate group in the eyes of the US government.

As part of the initiative to combat the BDS Movement, which was announced by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during his trip to illegal settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights, he stated that the US “...will immediately take steps to identify organizations that engage in hateful BDS conduct and withdraw our US government support."

The BDS movement has, however, fired back at the far-Right Netanyahu-Trump alliance’s claims, stating, “It’s quite ironic that the Trump administration, prompted by Israel’s apartheid regime, continues to enable and normalize white supremacy and antisemitism in the US and worldwide while simultaneously smearing BDS, a leading Palestinian-led human rights movement and its millions of supporters worldwide as ‘antisemitic.’ BDS has consistently and categorically rejected all forms of racism, including anti-Jewish racism, as a matter of principle.”

In over 20 states in the US, anti-BDS legislation has been passed, which has led to lawsuits being enacted against the state for its unconstitutional bills. In Germany, a similar trend of anti-Palestinian sentiment has been espoused on a government level, with the parliament declaring that the actions of the BDS Movement were reminiscent of Nazi actions under Adolf Hitler. France has even sued BDS activists for displaying boycott stickers on Israeli products and urging shoppers not to buy them, which the European Court of Human Rights ruled in June to have been illegal and demanded the French state pay compensation.

At this point, it seems that Israel is not only above the law when it comes to committing crimes against the Palestinian people, but also that when it comes to Israel. Several Western nations have taken the position that there is no freedom of speech or constitutional rights for its own people to take action against Israeli war crimes.

Ultimately, the position taken, against the freedom to boycott Israel, by the likes of Western leaders such as Boris Johnson, Justin Trudeau, Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron, and others, is akin to dictatorship. Next time these world leaders come together and criticize third-world dictators and advocate for wars to overthrow them, this is perhaps something that should be kept in mind.

(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV.)

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