When the chips are down

BDS is all wrong. 

Palestinians and many of their gullible followers campaign against “collective punishment”. In their opinion, the Israeli blockade of Gaza is wrong in principle. While they simultaneously campaign for BDS that looks extremely hypocritical. 

Despite their appalling record of suicide bombings and terrorism, Palestinians demand that Israel caters for their every need. In addition to supplying their utilities, they insist that Israel should let them in and out of Gaza willy nilly; back and forth, to mingle freely with the Israelis they despise, no matter how many of Israel’s citizens they’ve murdered or how many rockets they’ve unleashed in the direction of Israel’s civilian population.

Self-inflicted hardships, entirely due to Gaza’s corrupt, warmongering, democratically elected leadership are not going to go away through BDS. Until the Palestinians opt for peace Israel’s defensive measures are essential. When that happens, things will look up. 

What BDS really is is a pointless and disingenuous publicity stunt aimed at getting outsiders to show solidarity with people who wallow in cutting off their nose to spite their face. Who will actually suffer from these boycotts?  If the boycotting were enforced with rigor proportionate to passion, it would entail life-size deprivation and inconvenience. Computers, mobile phones, medicines, scientific innovations of all shapes and sizes, stuff based on Intel chips, academic collaborations and much more; simply the boycotters’ loss and nobody's gain.

Boycotters fail to make it clear to people like cosmologist Stephen Hawking that what they really object to is Israel itself. They want it gone. Really really really wanna zigazang ha.

 Poor Stephen Hawking. The world-famous cosmologist, who suffers from motor neurone disease, was set to attend the Israeli Presidential Conference Facing Tomorrow 2013 in Jerusalem next month. But not any more. Apparently he’s decided to go with the flow and do his bit for the BDS movement. Ironically, apart from a cheek-twitch or two, movement is something of which Hawking is incapable.

 Totally dependent on others, he’s stuck in a wheelchair unable to communicate  without the help of some extremely sophisticated Intel technology that responds to cheek twitch as well as mouth and eyebrow movements, which enable him to send intelligible signals to his computer.

One may speculate that if he took this boycotting malarkey to its ultimate, purest of purist logical conclusion, he’d have to forfeit that lot. Israel is heavily involved in ultra sophisticated technology and developing twitch-sensitive speaking devices is just up their street. Not to mention cutting-edge medical research which would seem a shame for someone like poor Hawkey to have to eschew. 

What a crazy mixed up affair. First of all he’s going, then he’s not going, then the BBC and the Guardian announce he’s boycotting, then Cambridge deny that and announce it was purely a medical decision, then, as you were, he’s boycotting again.

It’s just another eminent celebrity taking a stupid populist decision, and this time it’s not just a silly old commie like Alexei Sayle or a smart arse like Annie Lennox, but someone with so many brains he seems to have gone full circle, through some black holes and back again to really stupid. 

(At the time of writing) Who knows what will happen next.