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The Washington Post Outright Lies About BDS and Anti-Israel Boycott Movements
Anti-Israel demonstration supporting the BDS movement, Paris, France, June 8, 2024. Photo: Claire Serie / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions effort — known as BDS — singles out Israel for opprobrium. BDS portrays the Jewish State as both uniquely evil and solely responsible for the lack of peace between Israelis and Palestinians. BDS has been endorsed by Hamas and other US-designated terrorist groups, and prominent BDS supporters have called for Israel’s destruction.
These are well-established facts. And they’re entirely missing in a recent Washington Post report.
Post correspondent John Hudson’s Aug. 12, 2024, dispatch is about Coca-Cola’s efforts to fend off a boycott based on the company’s links to Israel (“How Coca-Cola Tried and Failed to Suppress a Boycott Over Gaza”). Yet the article is littered with misleading omissions and, in some cases, outright falsehoods.
Hudson writes that “sales of Coca-Coa began to plummet in parts of the Middle East and Asia this summer in response to boycotts of corporations with alleged ties to Israel.” This led to the soda company’s franchise in Bangladesh launching an advertising campaign to blunt boycott efforts. The campaign starred actor Sharaf Ahmed Jibon, known for roles in South Asian soap operas, as a shopkeeper who assured viewers that Coca-Cola was not an Israeli product, and said that “even Palestine has a coke factor.”
But “there was a problem,” Hudson tells readers. “The so-called Palestinian factory is an Israeli-owned bottling company that operates on an Israeli settlement in East Jerusalem considered illegal under international law.”
Hudson adds that there’s “widespread anger over Washington’s military and political support for Israel’s offensive in Gaza,” resulting in backlash against American companies like Coca-Cola. Hudson argues that that anger has fueled the BDS movement, which he calls merely a “nonviolent activist movement opposed to Israel’s occupation.”
For good measure, the Post reporter even uncritically quotes Omar Barghouti, a self-described “co-founder” of BDS.
But the Post’s description of BDS is completely — and verifiably — false. BDS isn’t nonviolent. And it is not simply opposed to an “occupation.” Indeed, what exactly is being “occupied” is left unsaid by Hudson. Rather, BDS is opposed to Israel’s very existence — and its founders, including Barghouti, have admitted as much.
As CAMERA has noted, terrorist organizations like Hamas, whose charter calls for the genocide of Jews and the destruction of Israel, have stated, “We salute and support the influential BDS movement.” And according to sworn US Congressional testimony, some BDS groups have links to terror groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
Indeed, CAMERA’s Ricki Hollander painstakingly documented the true motivations, and disturbing terror ties, of the BDS movement in her 2022 backgrounder “The Intrinsic Bigotry of BDS.”
In 2022, BDS groups in Boston even launched the so-called “mapping project,” a target map of Jewish cultural, educational, and religious institutions and organizations that included high schools, teen and college groups, the Jewish Arts Collaborative, the Synagogue Council of Massachusetts, groups dedicated to helping disabled Jewish individuals, and others. All were singled out by the BDS group at a time of rising antisemitism and attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions.
The “mapping project” was so dangerous that it prompted condemnation from Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA), among others, who warned that such lists “can incite violence” and “inflame the deranged among us to take the next step from contemplating to acting upon violence.” But, for a movement that is wholesale endorsed by Hamas, that is perhaps the point.
In fact, BDS activists have, on numerous occasions, openly called for violence, from chanting “shoot the Jew” at Israeli jazz musician Daniel Zamir’s performance at Johannesburg’s Wit University to threatening Justin Bieber’s Jewish manager after the pop star played in Tel Aviv, warning that “the Jew manager will die.” There are dozens of other examples. But again: this isn’t surprising for a movement that, per sworn Congressional testimony, has links to terror groups that call for Israel’s destruction and the genocide of its citizens.
The Post’s decision to parrot Barghouti’s claims that BDS is peaceful fall further apart upon closer examination of Barghouti’s own statements. As CAMERA has documented, at a BDS conference in Chicago in 2011, Barghouti declared: “The media focuses only on one form of resistance, which we’re proud of.” He added: “We’re not ashamed to have armed resistance in addition to peaceful resistance throughout our existence.”
But as Hollander has observed, Barghouti’s pride in terrorism is not at all surprising, given that members of designated terrorist organizations are part of the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) leadership. Heading the list of the 29 Palestinian NGO members that comprise the leadership committee is the Council of National and Islamic Forces in Palestine, which includes Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), PFLP-General Command, Palestine Liberation Front (PLF), and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, among other designated foreign terror organizations. The US BDS wing, which calls itself the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, does not merely advocate “to stop US support for Israel” as it claims, but facilitates US donations to the terrorist-member BDS National Committee.
A Tablet investigation even documents how this branch, registered as a 501(c)3 charitable organization, enables tax-exempt fundraising in the US for the foreign terrorist-member entity.
An Israeli government report on the BDS movement’s terrorist links names some of the terror group leaders who have taken prominent roles in the the BDS movement abroad, while downplaying or concealing their affiliation with the illegal groups. Among them are senior Hamas operative Muhammad Sawalha, who heads Muslim Brotherhood front organizations and promotes BDS in the UK; PFLP terrorist Leila Khaled, notorious for her role in the hijackings of international airlines, who has worked on behalf of the South Africa BDS chapter to raise funds and advocate for BDS; and Khalida Jarrar, a senior PFLP member who has been indicted for inciting attacks on Israelis.
All of this is open-source information and is well documented, including in Congressional testimony; it is widely available for the Post’s perusal. But the newspaper is seemingly uninterested.
Indeed, singling out the Jewish State for opprobrium and economic punishment is, in and of itself, antisemitic.
Boycotts have been used against Jews for centuries. Indeed, as CAMERA has documented, boycotts were used to pressure Jews against living in their ancestral homeland as early as 1909 — nearly 40 years before Israel was recreated and more than half a century before Israel took control of the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War. This begs the question: what is the “occupation” that BDS activists oppose? The answer: Jewish political and social equality in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland.
These facts about BDS are well-established. BDS, like its terrorist supporters, wants the destruction of the Jewish State. They believe that all of Israel is an “occupation.” Barghouti, and his interlocutors at the Post, failed to mention all these relevant details. It is unsurprising then, that Hudson parrots terrorist talking points elsewhere in his report.
Hudson writes that “since Oct. 7, when Hamas-led militants killed more than 1200 people in Israel and took more than 240 hostage, the Israeli military has killed more than 39,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials, and the country’s restrictions on access to humanitarian aid have created a famine in parts of Gaza.”
There is an impressive number of falsehoods in this one sentence.
Hamas are not “militants.” Rather, they are terrorists. Precision matters, both in journalism and good writing. And Hamas did not “kill” more than “1200 people in Israel.” Rather, as part of a complicated operation, they invaded the Jewish State and murdered them — many in the most barbaric ways imaginable. Women were raped en masse, before having their genitals mutilated and then executed. The elderly were set on fire in their own homes. Parents were tortured in front of their children, and vice versa. Babies were murdered in their rooms. Per capita the death toll from Oct. 7 was multitudes larger than the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that led to the Global War on Terror and the invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan.
And, as barbaric as 9/11 was, it did not include Islamists proudly filming their atrocities, including dismembering parents in front of children, or using the phones of the slain to call their family members and brag that they had been murdered. Oct. 7 was the largest massacre of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust—yet Hudson seeks to equate it with Israel’s righteous response. Worse still, he misleads Post readers.
Those “local health officials” that Hudson cites are, in fact, Hamas. The Gaza Health Ministry that puts out casualty counts is controlled by Hamas, a US-designated terrorist group. And it has a clear incentive to exaggerate casualty counts, as well as a long and documented history of doing precisely that — including during this recent war. CAMERA has highlighted the Post’s penchant for regurgitating unverified claims made by a genocidal terror organization — a penchant that has led to the newspaper receiving both considerable criticism and a loss in subscribers. Hudson’s report is emblematic of that failure.
Further, the claim about an impending famine, as well as the assertion that the so-called “settlements” are illegal under international law are also incorrect. As CAMERA has documented, there is a strong basis in international law for Israel to lay claim to Judea and Samaria, or, as it has been popularly known in more recent decades, the West Bank. David Adesnik, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, thoroughly debunked the myth of a famine in Gaza in a July 7, 2024, Washington Examiner op-ed. Indeed, as Adesnik documents, Israel actually helped prevent a famine and has been providing key humanitarian assistance. Hamas, by contrast, has been hijacking and hoarding aid and food stuffs.
“Writing is easy,” Mark Twain allegedly said. “All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.” If so, the Post’s report on BDS would be a blank page –and readers would be better off for it.
The writer is a Senior Research Analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.
The post The Washington Post Outright Lies About BDS and Anti-Israel Boycott Movements first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Sen. Rick Scott Donates Salary to US Holocaust Memorial Museum
US Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) on Capitol Hill in Washington, US, Dec. 7, 2022. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
US Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) announced on Wednesday that he will donate a portion of his Senate salary to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, underscoring what he called the urgent need to combat antisemitism at home and abroad as threats to Jewish communities escalate.
Scott, who has given part of his congressional salary since joining the Senate in 2019, said his gift was motivated by the growing dangers facing Jewish people and the importance of ensuring younger generations understand the Holocaust.
“Ann and I are proud to support the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Years ago, Ann and I brought our daughters to the Auschwitz memorial and museum in Poland because it was so important to us that they learned about the Holocaust and understood the horrors that occurred,” he said in a statement.
“It’s so important that every generation understands the atrocities of the Holocaust, and the museum does an incredible job teaching those lessons to millions of people every year. By sharing the stories of those who survived and those who were murdered, providing critical resources to educators, and reminding each of us what it means when we say ‘Never Again,’ it is a vital institution,” he added.
Scott also recounted taking his daughters years ago to Auschwitz in Poland, describing the visit as an effort to show them the catastrophic consequences of unchecked hatred against Jews.
The senator tied his donation to the approaching second anniversary of the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of southern Israel, the deadliest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Palestinian terrorists killed 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 hostages during the onslaught.
“As we approach the second anniversary of Oct. 7, Ann and I are proud to support the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s meaningful work defending the truth of the Holocaust and their important efforts to teach its relevance for today,” Scott said.
Scott’s office did not disclose the specific amount of the donation.
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Texas State University Silent on Status of Professor Who Incited Violent Attack on Jews at Public Library
West Asheville Library in North Carolina. Photo: Screenshot/buncombecounty.org.
Texas State University is refusing to disclose whether it still currently employs a far-left professor who was filmed inciting a riotous assault on three pro-Israel individuals who peacefully spectated an anti-Israel presentation that was held in June 2024 at the West Asheville Library in North Carolina.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, two of the victims, David Moritz and Monica Buckley, are Jewish, and one is cancer patient Bob Campbell, an 80-year-old military veteran. Their assailants kicked, punched, and dragged them out of the event, titled “Strategic Lessons From the Palestinian Resistance,” after Texas State University assistant professor of philosophy Idris Atsu Robinson spotted them in the audience and invited the 60-80 anti-Israel partisans in attendance to decide their fates.
At one point during harrowing footage taken of the incident, Robinson suggested that the encounter could lead to “murder.” At no point did he deescalate the situation and even seemed to find humor in igniting the passions of a mob.
Responding to an Algemeiner inquiry on Thursday, a Texas State media relations official declined to comment on Robinson’s employment status, saying the university “does not discuss personnel matters.”
The university has been asked before to account for its handling of Robinson.
In June, the StandWithUs Saidoff Legal Department, a pro-Israel nonprofit that seeks to combat antisemitism, notified the school of Robinson’s conduct and rhetoric. According to StandWithUs, “university sources” confirmed that he will not be teaching during the fall semester of the 2025-2026 academic year. However, the university would not comment on the matter “due to the confidential nature of personnel matters,” making it unclear whether Robinson is still employed by Texas State and will teach there in the future.
StandWithUs says Texas State should state Robinson’s employment status, share findings amassed during an internal investigation of him, and produce any previous complaints which accused him of wrongdoing.
“It is critical that universities protect Jewish and Zionist students by refusing to provide a classroom platform to faculty members unlawfully promoting antisemitic hate and violence,” Michael Scheinman, Saidoff Legal Department assistant director of campus and community affairs, told The Algemeiner on Wednesday. “Schools that do not act and fail to implement strong safeguards risk exposing their students to the same hatred and violence suffered by the victims of this attack.”
He added, “StandWithUS Saidoff Legal continues to support the victims of this horrendous hate incident by coordinating with law enforcement, helping to identify masked perpetrators, and urging Texas State University to condemn the antisemitic conduct that contributed to this violence.”
By his own words, Robinson took immense pride in what transpired in Asheville, North Carolina last year. Commenting on the matter the next day while being interviewed on a podcast produced by the organizers of the event, he argued for “popular riots” and “divine violence,” saying explicitly that “terrorists” reserve the right to “take the life of the oppressor.”
“My arms are chewed up,” Campbell, a Navy veteran, told The Algemeiner during an interview which followed the assault. He added that medical staff at a local US Veterans Affairs facility identified “severe contusions” on his body.
“What really upset me — I was [lying] on the floor, and this big guy was on top of me,” Campbell recalled. “The librarian came to the door, looked me right in the eye, turned around and walked back and didn’t do a damn thing. Didn’t call the police.”
The activists proved equally merciless to the other victims, putting Moritz in a headlock and heaving Buckley outside and ordering her not to free herself from their grip.
Expressions of anti-Zionism are escalating to violence more frequently, as previously reported by The Algemeiner.
Earlier this month, Eden Deckerhoff — a female student at Florida State University (FSU) — allegedly assaulted a Jewish male classmate at the Leach Student Recreation Center after noticing his wearing apparel issued by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
“F—k Israel, Free Palestine. Put it [the video] on Barstool FSU. I really don’t give a f—k,” the woman said before shoving the man, according to video taken by the victim. “You’re an ignorant son of a b—h.” Deckerhoff has since been charged with misdemeanor battery.
According to the Tallahassee Democrat, Deckerhoff has denied assaulting the student when questioned by investigators, telling them, “No I did not shove him at all; I never put my hands on him.” However, law enforcement charged her with misdemeanor battery and described the incident in court documents as seen in viral footage of the incident, acknowledging that Deckerhoff “appears to touch [the man’s] left shoulder.” Despite her denial, the Democrat noted, she has offered to apologize.
In June, a gunman murdered two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC, while they exited an event at the Capital Jewish Museum hosted by a major Jewish organization. The suspect charged for the double murder, 31-year-old Elias Rodriguez from Chicago, yelled “Free Palestine” while being arrested by police after the shooting, according to video of the incident. The FBI affidavit supporting the criminal charges against Rodriguez stated that he told law enforcement he “did it for Gaza.”
Less than two weeks later, a man firebombed a crowd of people who were participating in a demonstration to raise awareness of the Israeli hostages who remain imprisoned by Hamas in Gaza. A victim of the attack, Karen Diamond, 82, later died, having sustained severe, fatal injuries.
Another antisemitic incident motivated by anti-Zionism occurred in San Francisco, where an assailant identified by law enforcement as Juan Diaz-Rivas and others allegedly beat up a Jewish victim in the middle of the night. Diaz-Rivas and his friends approached the victim while shouting “F—k the Jews, Free Palestine,” according to local prosecutors.
“[O]ne of them punched the victim, who fell to the ground, hit his head and lost consciousness,” the San Francisco district attorney’s office said in a statement. “Allegedly, Mr. Diaz-Rivas and others in the group continued to punch and kick the victim while he was down. A worker at a nearby business heard the altercation and antisemitic language and attempted to intervene. While trying to help the victim, he was kicked and punched.”
According to the latest data released by the FBI, antisemitic hate crimes in the US have been tallying to break all previous statistical records. In 2024, even as hate crimes decreased overall, those perpetrated against Jews increased by 5.8 percent in 2024 to 1,938, the largest total recorded in over 30 years of the FBI’s counting them. Jewish American groups have noted that this surge, which included 178 assaults, is being experienced by a demographic group which constitutes just 2 percent of the US population.
A striking 69 percent of all religion-based hate crimes that were reported to the FBI in 2024 targeted Jews, with 2,041 out of 2,942 total such incidents being antisemitic in nature. Muslims were targeted the next highest amount as the victims of 256 offenses, or about 9 percent of the total.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Europeans Launch UN Sanctions Process Against Iran, Drawing Tehran’s Ire
Satellite image shows buildings at Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center, before Israel launched an attack on Iran targeting nuclear facilities, in Isfahan, Iran, May 17, 2025. Photo: Planet Labs PBC via REUTERS
Britain, France, and Germany on Thursday launched a 30-day process to reimpose UN sanctions on Iran over its disputed nuclear program, a step likely to stoke tensions two months after Israel and the United States bombed Iran.
A senior Iranian official quickly accused the three European powers of harming diplomacy and vowed that Tehran would not bow to pressure over the move by the E3 to launch the so-called “snapback mechanism.”
The three powers feared they would otherwise lose the prerogative in mid-October to restore sanctions on Tehran that were lifted under a 2015 nuclear accord with world powers.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said the decision did not signal the end of diplomacy. His German counterpart Johann Wadephul urged Iran to now fully cooperate with the UN nuclear watchdog agency and commit to direct talks with the United States over the next month.
A senior Iranian official told Reuters the decision was “illegal and regrettable” but left the door open for engagement.
“The move is an action against diplomacy, not a chance for it. Diplomacy with Europe will continue,” the official said, adding: “Iran will not concede under pressure.”
The UN Security Council is due to meet behind closed doors on Friday at the request of the E3 to discuss the snapback move against the Islamic Republic, diplomats said.
Iran and the E3 have held several rounds of talks since Israel and the US bombed its nuclear installations in mid-June, aiming to agree to defer the snapback mechanism. But the E3 deemed that talks in Geneva on Tuesday did not yield sufficient signals of readiness for a new deal from Iran.
The E3 acted on Thursday over accusations that Iran has violated the 2015 deal that aimed to prevent it developing a nuclear weapons capability in return for a lifting of international sanctions. The E3, along with Russia, China, and the United States, were party to that accord.
US President Donald Trump pulled Washington out of that accord in 2018 during his first term, calling the deal one-sided in Iran‘s favor, and it unraveled in ensuing years as Iran abandoned limits set on its enrichment of uranium.
Trump’s second administration held fruitless indirect negotiations earlier this year with Tehran.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio welcomed the E3 move and said Washington remained available for direct engagement with Iran “in furtherance of a peaceful, enduring resolution to the Iran nuclear issue.”
An Iranian source said Tehran would do so only “if Washington guarantees there will be no [military] strikes during the talks.”
The E3 said they hoped Iran would engage by the end of September to allay concerns about its nuclear agenda sufficiently for them to defer concrete action.
“The E3 are committed to using every diplomatic tool available to ensure Iran never develops a nuclear weapon,” including the snapback mechanism, they said in a letter sent to the UN Security Council and seen by Reuters.
“The E3’s commitment to a diplomatic solution nonetheless remains steadfast.”
Iran has previously warned of a “harsh response” if sanctions are reinstated, and the Iranian official said it was reviewing its options, including withdrawing from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The E3 had offered to extend the snapback for as much as six months to enable serious negotiations if Iran restored access for UN nuclear inspectors – who would also seek to account for Iran‘s large stock of enriched uranium whose status has been unknown since the June war – and engages in talks with the U.S.
Calling the E3 decision inevitable, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said it was an “important step in the diplomatic campaign to counter the Iranian regime’s nuclear ambitions.”
GROWING FRUSTRATION IN IRAN
The UN process takes 30 days before sanctions that would hit Iran‘s financial, banking, hydrocarbons, and defense sectors are restored.
Russia and China, strategic partners of Iran, finalized a draft Security Council resolution on Thursday that would extend the 2015 nuclear deal for six months and urge all parties to immediately resume negotiations.
But they have not yet asked for a vote.
“The world is at crossroads,” Russia’s deputy UN Ambassador Dmitry Polyanskiy told reporters. “One option is peace, diplomacy, goodwill … Another option is a kind of diplomacy at the barrel of the gun.”
The specter of renewed sanctions is stirring frustration in Iran, where economic anxiety is rising and political divisions are deepening, three insiders close to the government said.
Iranian leaders are split over how to respond — with anti-Western hardliners urging defiance and confrontation, while moderates advocate diplomacy.
Iran has been enriching uranium to up to 60 percent fissile purity, a short step from the roughly 90 percent of bomb-grade, and had enough material enriched to that level, if refined further, for six nuclear weapons, before the airstrikes by Israel started on June 13, according to the IAEA, the UN nuclear watchdog.
Actually manufacturing a weapon would take more time, however, and the IAEA has said that while it cannot guarantee Tehran‘s nuclear program is entirely peaceful, it has no credible indication of a coordinated weapons project.
The West says the advancement of Iran‘s nuclear program goes beyond civilian needs, while Tehran says it wants nuclear energy only for peaceful purposes.