Benjamin Netanyahu has called for a boycott of products made and sold by the Islamist militant group ISIS. It is unclear what products he is referring to however.
The Israeli PM has also accused activists who boycotted Israeli goods of “hypocrisy” and claimed that the UK national unions of students, who voted to join the BDS on Tuesday, support the Islamic State terrorist group.
“They boycott Israel but they refuse to boycott Isis. That tells you everything you want to know about the [boycott, divestment and sanctions] movement,” he said. “They condemn Israel and do not condemn Isis; they condemn themselves,” Netanyahu said.
Antiwar reports:
ISIS doesn’t have a functioning economy right now, nor any real exports to speak of, so it is of course impossible. Netanyahu’s comments are just the latest in an increasingly desperate campaign to damage the reputation of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which aims to pressure Israel for an end to the occupation through economic pressure. Boycotting Israel is illegal in the United States, but is increasingly popular in Europe as the Netanyahu government condemns the peace process.
The strategy to make this somewhat about ISIS is a rather awkward attempt to copy the effort to keep Israel off the list of forces that carried out attacks on children in 2014, which somehow worked on the grounds that it’d be weird to put the IDF on the same list as ISIS, even though the Israeli military did overtly attack UN-run schools full of civilian refugees in the summer Gaza War.
There is, of course, already a substantial international embargo campaign against ISIS, irrespective of its lack of theoretical exports, and it goes far beyond a handful of academic boycotts and private campaigns against Israeli companies in the occupied West Bank. It’s just that ISIS doesn’t have billionaire Sheldon Adelson bankrolling summits against the international campaign on them, so it doesn’t get the publicity the BDS movement does.
Niamh Harris