Go Ahead, Make My Boycott!

From Aish.com

In December 2013, the American Studies Association jumped on the “I wanna be politically correct and boycott Israel, too!” bandwagon and voted to shun any involvement with Israeli universities, claiming denial of human and academic rights to Palestinians. With their announcement, this previously obscure and odious little group gained instant notoriety.

This “me-too!” anti-Israel virus is really getting tiresome, and clearly the so-called “academics” calling for the boycotts are slacking off on their studies. Perhaps if they bone up on some reading material other than leftist anti-Israel screeds they might stumble onto the information – readily available – that in “apartheid” Israel, Mais Ali-Salehm a female Muslim, was valedictorian in the most recent graduating class of the medical school of the Technion, Israel’s equivalent of MIT. They might have learned that a black Ethiopian immigrant named Yiyish Aynaw is the current Miss Israel. They might have discovered that a Druze, Colonel Rassan Alian, is currently the commander of the elite Golani Brigade of the IDF. They might have learned that Salim Joubran, a Palestinian, is a member of the Israeli Supreme Court. But why let facts get in the way when you are bathing in a soup of fabulously ignorant self-righteousness?

The ASA now joins their dirty hands with the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS), which announced its boycott of Israel last April. And of course there is the endless parade of other boycotts among celebrities, those paragons of knowledge and sophistication, and various other groups, against Israeli sporting events, performers, and products.

I say to all these boycotters: Go ahead, make our day. Just be consistent and boycott everything that comes from the tiny Jewish state. This promises to make the next conference of the ASA or the AAAS a tad more challenging when they discuss such pressing academic topics as Tattoos in American Popular Culture (Pitzer College), Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame, (University of South Carolina), Zombies in Popular Media (Columbia College, Chicago) and The Textual Appeal of Tupac Shakur (University of Washington).

Here’s a handy tip sheet for the next conference attendees:

1. Bring plenty of pens, pencils and notebooks – the old fashioned kind. No lap top computers and no cell phones allowed. After all, the Intel microchip processor, network firewalls, Microsoft NT and XP, keyboards for smart phones, flash drives, the ability to print straight from a computer, and much of cell phone technology were all developed by the Zionist entity. But look at the bright side: you won’t have to remind people to silence their cell phones during presentations of such exciting academic papers as “Class and Gender Fault Lines within the Neo-Colonial White Male Establishment in the Occupy Movement.”
2. Leave your environmentally friendly ideals at home. The conference planners have no choice but to meet at a hotel whose grounds are lushly and wastefully watered by hoses. Drip irrigation, you see, was pioneered in Israel.
3. Tomato-intolerance will be a plus. Modern breeds of disease-resistant cherry tomatoes were developed in Israel’s greenhouses. Those greenhouses have also pioneered many varieties of organic farming. Would you like a side of pesticides with that?
4. Bring lots of books for your free time. Anyone trying to smuggle an Amazon Kindle to the conference will have it confiscated. Its Operating System is yet another Zionist conspiracy. And don’t even think about logging onto your Facebook account from the hotel’s business center; much of the Facebook software ecosystem was developed in Tel Aviv, the Silicon Valley of the Middle East. To help you whittle down your reading choices, omit Jewish authors. Voila! Your reading options have just gone on an extreme diet.
5. Allow plenty of time to get to your evening entertainments after each day’s panel discussions. “Waze,” a social GPS mapping app that specializes in real-time crowd-sourced traffic, was purchased by Google from an Israeli start-up for $1.1 billion. That’s billion with a “B.” But you won’t have your smart phones with you anyway, so never mind.

As conference attendees revisit life in the 1970s, I hope they recommit to their plans to maintain their boycott of everything made in Israel. But before they vote, they might want to consider the following:

1. Lots of antibiotics and other medicines are made by Teva, the largest manufacturer of generic pharmaceuticals in the world. Your insurance company may or may not cover more expensive name brand options. Try not to get sick anytime soon.
2. Zionist researchers are developing a wireless laser for dentists that promises to replace painful drilling when treating cavities. But let me be clear: If you like your dentist drill, you can keep your dentist drill!
3. When you get to be 50, doctors will suggest you have a not-so-fun procedure in which a small scope enters a very private place on your body. Boycotters of all-things-Israeli by all means should continue having the old-fashioned colonoscopies. The rest of us will happily swallow the PillCam, which takes pictures from inside the colon, eliminating the need for a dreaded colonoscopy. If you decide to upload these photos on Facebook, prepare to be unfriended by at least 400 people.
4. Cancer run in your family? Boycott Israel fans will have to wait for symptoms to arise, God forbid. Meanwhile, the early warning Na-Nose artificial nose, developed by those human rights abusers at the Technion, analyzes human breath to detect cancer, Alzheimer’s, and other diseases, while ImMucin, a vaccine now in clinical trials and made by an Israeli medical research company, shows promise in one day controlling cancer and tuberculosis. Like I said, try not to get sick.
5. If you were impressed by Google glass, wait till you get a load of this. The Israeli-created OrCam is selling out as fast as it can be manufactured because for the partially sighted, the device reads, identifies objects, personal products and money notes, with an intuitive user interface. Soon, it will be able to recognize faces and places, locate bus numbers and monitor traffic lights. Coming soon: a bionic eye that might reverse blindness.

Speaking of vision problems, it’s understandable that Israeli innovators are first tackling the problems of physical blindness. Research into the causes and cures for moral blindness are ongoing. I have every confidence that Israeli-based solutions are in the pipeline!