As readers know, Legal Insurrection has devoted much of the past several months to fighting the academic boycott of Israel and Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement on campus.

We have relatively few resources, and time. We do what we can do.

We helped expose the American Studies Association for the hateful group it has become, an academic pariah which has circled its wagons of BDS friends, but has not seen its boycott call spread.

We’ve covered and brought public attention to floundering campus divestment resolutions, including the collapse at Cornell, thereby puncturing the supposed inevitability of BDS. Our coverage of anti-Israel fury directed at professors and Jewish students at Vassar has served as a wake-up call as to what BDS on campus can become.

What has been most satisfying is to see the pro-Israel students organize and mobilize in the face of these threats. It’s not easy for them. They didn’t ask for it. They would rather be studying.

But they have no choice. The issue has been forced onto them by anti-Israel students, faculty and outside non-student agitators who seek to monopolize campus life and turn it into a Middle East battleground. Like these students and activists who disrupted a speech by TIAA-CREF CEO Roger Ferguson at Cornell Business School last fall:

Ronald Lauder made a comment recently that rings true:

Fighting BDS “is not a burden or even a challenge. [It] is an honor….”

Lauder made that comment at a three-day anti-BDS powwow in London held in late March:

Nearly 150 pro-Israel politicians, diplomats and activists, including Intelligence and Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz, gathered in London this week for three days of discussions on how to fight the BDS movement, the Jewish Chronicle reports. “We will draft and lobby for legislation that will withhold government funding from academic institutions that boycott Israel,” World Jewish Congress president Ronald Lauder said at the group’s Tuesday night gala dinner. “We will draft and lobby for federal anti-discrimination statutes in the United States against banks, businesses and governments that target only Israel,” Lauder continued. “We will follow the money to find out just who is funding these attacks on Israel and if there is any connection to terrorism.”

Of course I wasn’t at the conference. I never get invited to anything.

That’s okay.

Opposing BDS is an honor, a satisfaction in itself.



