Organisations
New body to pressurise BDS & Varsities
Israel Apartheid Week, which this year will run on campuses and other sites from 10 to 16 March, is planning to be bigger and better, BDS-SA’s Desai told SAJR Online. But the SA franchise of the global Lawyers For Israel group say they have discovered how IAW gets funded by “irregular misuse of public funds” and plans to do something about it.
ANT KATZ
Israel Apartheid Week, it emerges, is relying on Univerity’s using Public Funds for BDS – just how much remains unclear as much of it, says SA Lawyers for Israel, may be hidden away in the books!
The dates of Israel Apartheid Week 2014 will be from 10 to 16 March. BDS’ chief executive, Muhammed Desai, today told the Jewish Report that the organisation is planning to have an IAW “three to four times larger than last year.” He says there will be many more additional sites than last year “and many more organisations endorsing the campaign.”
David Rosenberg, an associate Professor of accounting at Rhodes, who is an internationally-recognised speaker on good governance, says he has been shocked at what he has seen emerging from the investigation.
The investigation is being conducted by “SA Lawyers for Israel” – a local offshoot of the international Lawyers for Israel movement of which well-known Joburg lawyer Hugh Raichlin sits on the panel. Thus far the organisation says it has discovered irrefutable evidence of BDS-SA and its CE Muhammed Desai together with students and university staffers at all levels having a hand in targeting, entrapping and removing a senior staffer who was against IAW.
BDS “encorages universities to fund IAW” -DESAI
Asked about how the IAW events would be affected if universities were not able to fund the events this year, Desai remained bullish that this would not be the case. “We encourage universities to fund this event,” said Desai.
Desai told Jewish Report that the formal launch of the campaign would be on Thursday 6 February.
SA Lawyers for Israel (SALFI) says it has already discovered trails implicating several universities in the funding of IAW. To date, most of the transactions unearthed by their investigation, say LFI, “show that such expenditure has also not been reflected as what it actually is, but is getting lost in some other accounting line item in order to obscure its true nature,” In other words, transactions are not reflected as an extraordinary expense – and that in terms of public policy, “many or most of these ‘subsidies’ could be construed as irregular,” says the organisation.
“Deceitfulness crosses the line” – Professor Rosenberg
“Such cases of deceitfulness would clearly have crossed the line of good corporate governance,” says a letter the organisation has sent to Vice Chancellors and Chairs of Councils at all SA universities where transgressions have been identified, warning the institutions ahead of IAW 2014 next month.
Those behind the investigation and the investigators on the ground are still active on numerous campuses around the country and for security reasons have asked that their names not be disclosed at this stage.
What they have found to date, says SALFI, reveals that such support for IAW is widespread and is normally authorised and recorded as if it were in the normal course of a department’s business affairs and reflected in manners such as:
• Air fares for speakers and dignitaries;
• Hiring of outside venues and/or tents;
• Free use of institutional resources such as chairs, tables, cleaning services and the like;
• Providing food and accommodation for participants and visitors;
• Advertising and printing of pamphlets, posters and literature;
• Use of institutional offices and officers; and
• Use of institutional resources, including telephones, vehicles, manpower, etc.
“This information is being brought to the attention of the highest authorities at universities,” said Mike Fisher, spokesman for SA Lawyers for Israel, “as politicised members of their institutions’ activities probably will not fall under their personal purview . “We hold tons of evidence and are quite happy to share it with any University authority that wants to rein in this illicit spending spree,” Fisher told SAJR Online this week. Fisher says that so far, it “seems that universities may be putting millions into IAW, without their accounting and accountable office-bearers even being aware of it. READ MORE ON THIS: www.sajr.co.za
The Jewish Report spoke to the Wits communications department who referred the call to Vice-Chancellor Professor Adam Habib’s office. A message was not returned by the time of going to print. Similarly, Rhodes’ communications department referred Jewish Report to Ms Susan Smailes and an urgent message was left for her, too, Wednesday morning – also to no avail. UJ were not answering their switchboards.
LATEST: Ms Smailes did return SAJR’s call, but after the newspaper had gone to print. She was most helpful but said that she did not know if SALFI had contacted Rhodes. Ms Smailes said she could not comment as the matter was outside of her scope of activity. The Vice-Chancellor, she said, was in New York and would only be returning for one day before taking a long leave. She could not say who would deal with the matter in Dr Badat’s absence.
SAJR Online will continue to attempt to contact universities and update the story on this website. For further reading on this matter, see:
USA LAWYERS FOR ISRAEL ADVISORY MEMBERS
Related Reading:
Gary Selikow
Feb 6, 2014 at 6:30 pm
‘Another vile hate fest by supporters of child-killing terrorists.
\n
\n160 000 murdered by Assad in Syria in two years, tens of thousands of women and girls executed for ‘sexual immorality’ in Iran, Regimes that starve out their entries populations like North Korea and Zimbabwe . These do not prick the consciences of these obsessive maniacs with their bottomless hatred of anything and everyone Israeli.
\n
\nBut once the likes of Mohammed Desai, Steven Friedman , Ronnie Kasrils, Suraya Dadoo and Firoz Osman can identify all Israelis as Nazis, the stage is set for the genocide of Israel’s Jews down to the last child. Ironically the real Nazis set up Europe for the Holocaust of Jews by demon zing them to such an extent that their mass murder was seen as a rightful act of justice. The BDS supporters, and pro-Palestine propagandists are doing exactly the same thing. Israelis are not to be regarded as human. Their slaughter is an act of justice and a fashionable process of progressive liberation.
\n
\nThe enemies of Israel want the physical elimination of the Jewish people from the Land of Israel. This constitutes anti-Semitism. The point is that they want a Judenreihn \”Palestine\” the same way that Hitler wanted a Judenreihn Europe. The anti-Zionists claim that they are not anti-Semites but that think the only country on the earth that must be annihilated is Israel. The anti-Zionists claim that they are not anti-Semites but that think the only country on the earth that must be annihilated is Israel. The anti-Zionists claim that they are not anti-Semites but that the only children on earth whose being blown up is okay if it serves a good cause are Jewish children.
\n
\nAs regards the so-called 1 state solution favoured by so many sophisticated leftwing intellectuals today, we can discuss this all day and all night , but dismembering Israel into a single Arab dominated state means a second holocaust. It means methodical massacre of millions of Jews , of hundreds of thousands of Jewish children. Anyone who pushes for this ‘1 state solution’ is actually pushing for a second holocaust. Denying a nation’s right to exist is genocidal racism, akin to Nazism, hence in my opinion ,Anti-Zionism is Nazism. Only the hard-hearted, hate-filled and cowardly will deny Israel the right to exist and defend herself. One must always continue to ask why the powerful organizations, unions, church groups, academics ,governments etc advocate a boycott of Israel and only Israel, while not advocating any boycott or censure of States that do enrage in genocide or severe repression and persecution like China, North Korea, Zimbabwe,Syria Iran or Sudan. THEY NEVER have an answer!
\n
\nIn March 2008 Arab terrorists murdered eight young Jewish seminary students at study of the Torah.
\n
\nShortly after this a survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Media Research revealed that 84% of Palestinians supported the attack!
\n
\nItamar Marcus of Palestinian Media Watch points out that the leaders of the propaganda for Hamas and Palestinian Authority TV (with their televised sermons, cartoons, comic books and school books) have constructed a machine to incite mass murder similar to that of the Hutu journalists who spearheaded the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda. \”The Islamic refers to Jews as the sons of pigs and monkeys to be exterminated just as Hutu supremacists spoke of Tutsis as ‘serpents’ to be crushed.
\n
\nHamas and Hezbollah, two of the terorist organizations that work for the physical annihilation of Israel describe Jews as ‘pigs’, ‘cancer’. ‘garbage’,’germs’ ‘parasites’ and ‘microbes’.
\nIranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in continually vowing to ‘\”wipe Israel off the map\” for which he is building a vast nuclear arsenal without the world or the Obama administration lifting a finger to stop him, uses the expression ‘dead rats’
\n
\nNot only do the rabid anti-Zionists who boycott and demonize Israel display gross and racist anti-Semitism , but they also responsible to a large extent for terror against Israeli women and children.
\n
\nThis is because Moral denigration encourages physical elimination
\n
\nIt is entirely in keeping in the character of Islamists or rabidly leftist anti-Zionists that they should carry a rabid hatred of Israel to the point of defending the killers of Israeli children.
\n
\nThere is certainly.
\n
\n‘The mainstream and left-wing world media and the likes of Desia and Friedman are also extremely culpable for fomenting mass killing of Jewish men, women and children in Israe’l.
\nAs Claude Lanzmann director of the monumental film Shoah wrote \”When ‘settlers’
\nwere killed it was intolerable to read in the newspapers stuck in a corner of the page ‘settler women killed’ or worse ‘settler child strangled’ as if the twofold stigma of Jew and settler made the murder understandable, justified it and dismissed it from our attention\”.
\n
\nThousands of Israeli Jewish men, women and children have died from bombs, bullets or knife attacks, and thousands of others have been maimed, blinded, orphaned, widowed and terrorized.
\n
\nIn 2003 on the Eve of the Jewish New Year, seven month old Shaked Abraham was shot dead in her crib by an Arab murderer who forced his way into her parent’s house as the family was celebrating the New Year.
\n
\nA ten-month-old Jewish baby, Shalhevet Pass, was shot in her father’s arms by an Arab sniper in 2001.
\n
\nThe following year, a five-year-old girl, Danielle Shefi, was shot to death at point blank range by an Arab killer, while cowering under her parents’ bed.
\n
\nThat same year, two boys, four- and five-years old, Matan and Noam Ohayon where shot dead together with their mother as she read them a bedtime story, in a kibbutz, by Arab terrorists.
\n
\nIn the summer of 2005 pregnant Jewish women Tali Hatuel and her four terrified little daughters were executed at point blank range by terrorists of the Popular Resistance Committees, one after the other after Tali’s car had been spun off the road by gunfire.
\nThen there are the thousands of suicide bombing perpetrated by Arab terrorists in malls, restaurants, schools, buses and everywhere else where Jewish men, women and children in Israel gathered.Victims were killed, burned, maimed and shards of metal infected with rat poison lodged into their bodies.
\n
\nUnlike a traditional war zone, the victims are often riding, sitting in schools or enjoying a meal.
\n
\nSo far 128 Jewish children have been killed, 9 of them less than a year old, 9 pregnant women have been murdered, 886 children have lost one parent and 31 have lost both.
\n
\nThe youngest victim of terror was just one day old.
\n
\nAt the Dolphinarium Disco on June 1, 2001, 21 Israeli teenagers were killed and 132 wounded, many maimed for life, after a suicide bomber blew himself up in their midst
\nHamas claimed responsibility and celebrated the attack.
\n
\nMeanwhile the Islamists and their hard left allies will attempt to silence us who speak up for Israel as a ‘Fascist’ or ‘reactionary’ , classic Stalinist language. And try to physically prevent Israelis from speaking or even performing music on university campuses
‘
Why Israel?
Feb 7, 2014 at 11:58 am
‘#WhyIsrael? The Ultimate Hasbara Combat Kit for Israeli Apartheid Week 2014 ‘
Gary Selikow
Feb 7, 2014 at 3:03 pm
‘Whoever posted ‘Why Israel? 07 Feb#WhyIsrael? The Ultimate Hasbara Combat Kit for Israeli Apartheid Week 2014 ‘
Why dont you also promote Meim Kampf and The Elders of the Protocols of Zion here?’
Israeli
Feb 8, 2014 at 10:40 am
‘
I only hope our young Jews will see what kind of country they are living in. Maybe they will see what an exilic existence really means to their true identity.
\n
Maybe they will realize that it is very difficult to be proudly Jewish in a country that hates Israel.
\n
MAYBE THEY WILL GIVE SERIOUS THOUGT TO GETTING THE HECK OUT OF HERE.
\n
\n
\nI see from your IP address and note from your use of the word “here” as against “there” that you, too, are living in SA -ED
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
‘
Israeli
Feb 9, 2014 at 4:14 pm
‘I might be living here , but I’m certainly not proud of it.’