Posted on 02/04/2012 6:55:32 AM PST by IbJensen
An international campaign wants to stop a non-profit environmental organization that has been functioning for more than 100 years by purporting fallacies and anti-Israel propaganda.
The Jewish National Fund (JNF) was established with the hope to help the birth of the State of Israel. JNF plants trees for forest development in Israel, creates parks, battles forest fires, is responsible for soil conservation, pioneers innovative solutions to help Israel's water supply, among other notable work.
The "Stop the JNF Campaign" alleges that the Jewish National Fund "was instrumental in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in the 1948 Nakba, and continues to play a central role in maintaining Israel's regime of apartheid." It calls for the revocation of JNF's charity and to isolate the group by breaking all ties with it.
The campaign posted an action alert on its website last Friday asking its readers not to support JNF's "Green Sunday" on Feb. 5. "Don't be taken in," the alert reads. "The JNF's tree planting is a cover for ethnic cleansing."
Despite its shrill and nonsensical premise, the "Stop the JNF Campaign" has garnered support from organizations across the United States, the United Kingdom and other countries around the world. It also has spread to American and Canadian college campuses.
Vilifying labels such as "ethnic cleansing" and "regime of apartheid" are used by anti-Israel activists to demonize the State of Israel. Hebrew University Professor Emeritus Gideon Shimoni has explained that the false equation between Israel and apartheid in South Africa is a "deceptive device [which] functions much like use of the term 'holocaust' to describe any and all human disasters. It obscures apartheid's constitutive core, racism, as well as its actual historical context, South Africa."
The false notion that Israel engaged in "ethnic cleansing" of Palestinians cheapens actual cases of ethnic cleansing, including the Bosnian genocide committed by Bosnian Serbs, the ethnic cleansing of Armenians during World War I, Nazi Germany's persecutions and expulsions of Jews which culminated into the Holocaust, the Sudanese campaign against black ethnic groups in Darfur, among many other examples.
A look at the founders of the Stop the JNF Campaign helps explain its outrageous agenda. It was started by the Habitat International Coalition (HIC), the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN), the Scottish Solidarity Campaign (SPSC) and the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC).
IJAN is a radical organization that advocates the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. The organization was a sponsor of last year's "Never Again For Anyone" tour across the U.S. and in Toronto, Canada, which featured speakers who equated Israel's treatment of the Palestinians to that of the Nazis' treatment of Jews during the Holocaust.
The Scottish Solidarity Campaign (SPSC) is a fringe anti-Israel organization that repeatedly uses the Holocaust to demonize Israel and has served as a platform for Holocaust deniers and Hamas supporters. The chairman of SPSC, Mick Napier, tried to justify a horrific terrorist attack in Israel by spewing lies about the school that was targeted and writing, "Palestinians continue to resist and we should be inspired by their courage, fortitude and endurance against an enemy that threatens them openly with a 'Holocaust'." In March 2008, a terrorist entered the Mercaz Harav yeshiva in Jerusalem and opened fire, killing eight students and wounding nine more. The massacre was praised by Hamas and supported by 84% of Palestinians, according to a poll taken shortly after.
BNC is the Palestinian coordinating body for the worldwide Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign. BDS is a worldwide initiative to encourage companies, consumers, universities, cultural centers and more to boycott and divest from all Israeli interests and bodies. On college campuses, BDS often takes the form of student groups and professors pushing for universities to divest from companies that have holdings with Israel or do business with Israel.
The Stop the JNF Campaign is one initiative of the worldwide BDS campaign. Its launch last March was announced on the BDS website. BDS leaders, such as Omar Barghouti, single out Israel, apply double standards to the state, and often use the "apartheid" myth and false "ethnic cleansing" charge.
Canadian Foreign Minister John Bard criticized "the constant barrage of rhetorical demonization, double standards and delegitimization" of Israel as the "new anti-Semitism" on Monday during a conference in Israel. "Harnessing disparate anti- Semitic, anti-American and anti-Western ideologies, it targets the Jewish people by targeting the Jewish homeland, Israel, as the source of injustice and conflict in the world, and uses, perversely, the language of human rights to do so," he added. "We must be relentless in exposing this new anti-Semitism for what it is."
Last July, Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd visited an Israeli-owned business in Melbourne after it was attacked by demonstrators. "I don't think in 21st-century Australia there is a place for the attempted boycott of a Jewish business," Rudd said. "I thought we had learned that from history," he added.
Unfortunately, the BDS campaign is gaining ground among youth in the United States. This weekend, the 2012 National BDS Conference is being held at the University of Pennsylvania. The conference is organized by PennBDS, a recognized student group at the University. The university is not sanctioning nor sponsoring the conference.
BDS tactics have not achieved many practical results, and seem more symbolic in nature. This holds true for the Stop the JNF Campaign. Just last week Israel's Ministry of Environmental Protection in cooperation with the Jewish National Fund held aninternational conference on Climate Change & Forest Fires in the Mediterranean Basin: Management & Risk Reduction. The conference drew approximately 150 participants including lecturers and guests from Jordan, Kosovo, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Canada and the U.S. Additionally, JNF maintains partnerships with government and professional organizations in the United States, Egypt and Jordan.
If planting trees has become an act of evil, it may be time to re-evaluate your thinking
I guess, under that same logic, producing ham and bacon is racist too. So Armour meat packing co., et al, is racist too? Which reminds me, I need to fix some bacon and eggs.
I’m really, really bad and, after my recent nursery order, I’m about to become even worse.
...alleges that the Jewish National Fund "was instrumental in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in the 1948 Nakba, and continues to play a central role in maintaining Israel's regime of apartheid."
***..JNF plants trees for forest development in Israel,***
From what I have read, the area became desert because under the rule of the Turks, they put a tax on trees.
So everyone went out and cut down their trees. Deforestation.
If Allah wanted a tree in that place there would be a tree in that place.
It’s unreasonable to expect muslims to do anything to improve things when the foolish Americans and other westerners are eager to send money and food for free.
BDS?
Bush Derangement Syndrome?
HA! I Knew it!
As a boy in about 1950, every week in Baptist Sunday school, I donated pennies and nickels to plant trees in the “new” nation of Israel.
I wonder how many of those same people support Al Gore and the theories of global warming/climate change. Yet they don’t support a program meant to encourage environmental progress. Green my rear-end. Oh, and when I was in Israel I planted a tree there.
Those insane hypocrites(also hypocritical in which they may be all for African nationalism and Muslim nationalism but Jewish nationalism is awful) would be better off asking about business, college and governmental ties to certain other countries rather than Israel.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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Especially the Gharkad tree, aka boxthorn, the tree of the Jews
When my husband died last year, I asked that trees be planted in Israel in lieu of flowers.
Many FReepers responded, as well as friends and family. JNF sent me a Certificate for each and every planting.
Some people even planted “Circles of Trees”, involving 3,5, or 7 fast growing and hardy species.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that during the Ottoman Empire, Trees were TAXED, and deliberately chopped down to provide fuel for the Turkish Railroads. This denuded the hills of Israel, causing desertification and erosion. The JNF has been instrumental in transforming the area into productive land once more.
The Horrible Forest Fires that devastated Carmel a while ago were found out to be the work of an Arab arsonist.
The lovely forests in the hills near Kiryat Sh’mona have suffered the ravages of Forest Fires kindled by Hezbollah rockets.
I loath the lying left. I really do.
I just sent my usual donation to JNF.
Guess I best double it.
That is how I started!
Remember the thrill of your First Tree? Our Sunday school had a tally - so much per tree and you would eventually reach the goal.
Israel should plant boxthorn along its Lebanese and Syrian borders, just to mess with the Jihadis’ minds.
The Sinai too, don’t forget the Sinai. And remove the rocks.
Good points!
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