Thursday, October 6, 2005
NGO Monitor is reporting on a meeting of European NGO's getting together to plot and coordinate their anti-Israel divestment activities.
European Coordinating Committee of NGOs (ECCP) Meeting to Promote Boycotts and Divestment
The European Coordinating Committee of NGOs on the Question of Palestine (ECCP), which claims over 300 member NGOs throughout Europe, is holding a meeting "on solidarity with Palestine in Brussels on the 8th of October, three months after the launching of the 'European campaign for sanctions against the Israeli occupation'." According to ECCP, "The objective of the meeting is to enlarge the European solidarity movement with the Palestinian people and to create the largest possible support to the campaign, by coordinating the efforts between trade unions, academics, churches and any NGO concerned by the respect of international law and human rights, and the situation in Palestine.” (As ECCP fails to practice transparency, information on funding for its activities is not available.)
The agenda includes sessions entitled “The situation in Palestine and the call for sanctions” and “Campaign for Sanctions against the Israeli occupation”. The speakers are drawn from other radical anti-Israel NGOs such as the EU-funded Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), which was among the major supporters of the recent effort in the UK to arrest Israeli officials for alleged "war crimes", and the Palestinian NGO Network (PNGO). PNGO is an umbrella body of highly politicized Palestinian NGOs that was instrumental in producing many of the preparatory documents for the 2001 Durban conference and the 2005 AUT academic boycott...
The chairman is Belgian Senator Pierre Galand who was previously head of Oxfam Belgium, the entity that brought us the lovely poster shown.
You know, when I first saw the link for this blog, Campaign to Divest from "Palestine", I thought it was a bit over the top and ill-advised. I've never been a big boycott supporter, especially from a Jewish perspective, it doesn't make a lot of sense for a minority group (particularly a small minority) to be bringing boycotts into the equation. They can quickly turn on you.
But more and more I wonder why Israel and her supporters don't start nipping this sort of thing in the bud by bringing the boycott straight back at the perpetrators. Do you think things would change if Palestinian Arabs started being boycotted, blocked, fired from their employment? I think so. I suppose these things tend to work out badly for the boycotters, really though. Look at all that the countries that boycott Israel miss out on, and how backward they are. No, for many different reasons, it wouldn't be the right thing to do. But the thought does occur from time to time when reading reports like this.
Not much point in boycotting the Palis, whose only export is terrorism.
This sort of thing makes me think the phrase "Nongovernmental organisation" is nothing but a euphemism for "apologists for terrorists and tyrants." Have these guys ever talked about boycotting a tyranny? Cuba perhaps, or Iraq under Saddam? How about the thugs running China who murder Falun Gong meditators? I've never heard of such. How about a boycott (however futile) against the Palestinian Authority, virtually all of whose actions really do contravene international law and the Geneva Conventions.
There's something about armed Jews defending themselves against genocide that seems to make a lot of people nervous, indeed hysterical. I can only wonder why.