Divestment blues (Update)

While cruising the net last night I came across this blog [dead link] about the fight last year in Somerville, Massachusetts over whether the city's retirement fund should divest from Israel bonds and companies doing business with Israel. I lived in Somerville for over ten years (left in 1995) and found this an astonishing story. Apparently a small group of anti-Israel activists calling themselves the Divestment Project [dead link] decided that Somerville was the place to further the divestment movement. Hard-working Somerville residents managed to stop this move after the Divestment Project almost slipped the proposal through the Somerville City Council. If you take a look at the Divestment Project's web site, you'll find a plethora of anti-Israel postings, some of a particularly repulsive nature.

The article "Zionism in Boston" is especially hilarious, because it starts out with the claim that "the state of Israel has established key outposts in Boston, Massachusetts." What do these "key outposts" consist of? First of all, the Israeli consulate, then the Anti-Defamation League and the Combined Jewish Philanthropies, and finally two private initiatives - CAMERA and the David Project. I often disagree with CAMERA, but it certainly was not established by the State of Israel! Richard Hugus, the author of this article, seems incapable of distinguishing between the state of Israel and Jews living in America. Read the whole article for his signal distortions of Zionism. A point that I particularly like is his denunciation of those who disapprove of genocide in Darfur, because apparently our only goal is to attack Arabs and support Zionism. The article also refers to American genocide in Iraq and Israeli genocide of Palestinians. Mr. Hugus seems to be unaware of the over 300,000 innocent people murdered by Saddam Hussein's regime before his overthrow in 2003.

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Update from April 22, 2018

The Divestment Project website is no longer extant on the web, but Hugus also has a blog with some of his articles posted on it - https://richardhugus.wordpress.com.