No surprise here:
A speech at a protest calling on Oriel College, Oxford to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes which blamed Israel for the behaviour of the police who killed George Floyd in Minnesota has been condemned by students at the college.
Around 1,000 people are estimated to have attended the protest, which took place on Tuesday, during which a Leeds University student told the crowd: “The American police are trained by the Israel oppression army. They are united against us.”
He then attacked his university which, he said, "like many others, invests in Israel apartheid. More than £2 billion have invested in companies which are complicit in the oppression of the Palestinian people...An Israeli official recently called for the criminalisation of the Black Lives Matter movement".
The protest was hosted by the Rhodes Must Fall campaign in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement....
Euan McGivern, 23, the Equality and Diversity Officer of Oriel Middle Common Room, said: “A speaker stood up and started bringing up Israel in a context where you wouldn’t really expect Israel to be relevant.
“He started talking conspiratorially about how Israel was responsible for racism,” Mr McGivern said, “and he used the antisemitic tropes of bringing Israel in where Israel is not relevant”.
Mr McGivern, who attended the Rhodes Must Fall protest with friends, said that when he mentioned that the speaker’s statements might be antisemitic, he received “threatening stares from people around us” and left the event after being made to feel “uncomfortable”.
Two Jewish students and six non-Jewish students have since approached Mr McGivern about the remarks at the protest, saying that they were “hurt and concerned”.
Mr McGivern sent a statement on Friday to Oriel College, in which he called on the Oxford branches of the Black Lives Matter movement and Rhodes Must Fall to “distance themselves from the speaker and the portion of the crowd that cheered.”
This particular meme started out with an American BDS group:
An American pro-boycott umbrella group has linked the death of a black man in police custody in Minneapolis to Israel, claiming that the IDF trains US officers in ‘racist’ tactics.
Commenting on the death of George Floyd after he was pinned to the ground by a white police officer last week, the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR) tweeted to its 51,000 followers on Thursday: “The Israeli military trains US police in racist and repressive policing tactics, which systematically targets black and brown bodies.”
The USCPR, whose "anti-racism principles" including standing "against Zionism as a political system that privileges the rights of Jews over the rights of others", represents hundreds of local advocacy groups across the US.
And has since, clearly, become part of the accepted wisdom in these particular circles.
There are nasty undercurrents at work here....
The meme that Israel is somehow responsible for Floyd's death because of its having given tactical training to some US police departments also appears on anti-Israel rightwing websites in the US.
What is amusing is that the anti-Israel Left (which is now just about the entire Left, even in the US - including the so-called "Center" Left) and the anti-Israel Right have just about the same view of Israel. If either side were interested, they could find a good deal of common ground.
Posted by: djf | June 12, 2020 at 11:47 PM