Sid Ryan Bites Back

I don't. I see clarification, after a group of people with a definite pro-Israeli agenda deliberately distroted the intention of some off the cuff comments, through prevarication on point, in order to smear the only politician clearly opposed to Israeli apartheid. .

"This prevarication on point about the rights of "individuals", is being used to smear by exstension the whole campaign of boycott and divestment"

Really?  Seems to me that a lot of responders were just fine with a boycott... just not a boycott of individuals.  Want to get Israeli corporations out of the pension fund?  Fine.  Want to bar some Israeli professor of neurology unless he swears an oath?  I don't think it's unreasonable, nor do I think it's indicative of Zionist Quisling status, to not agree with that.

For a person so sensitive to smearing, you certainly seem to go that well a lot.

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The arguement about "individuals" is intended to cause confusion, and drag people along in the anti-boycott campaign

Sid Ryan is a grownup.  If he didn't want people to focus on what he said, he should have chosen to say something else. 

For some "unimportant" wording, they sure did erase it from the record pretty quickly, huh?  Thank god for the web.  In the old days they had to go around to everyone who owned the book and cut out that page.  Now you can just replace the page, and if it weren't for Google's cache, nobody would be the wiser.

Now you are seriously going to have this debate about individuals vs representatives.

My case in a point, does he mean: "Israeli academics" as representatives of an institution, or "Israeli academics" as individuals?

Those who wanted to attack Ryan, did so by choosing to assert the latter definition over the former. They are in fact "both" of course.

Exactly, the point about the so called "oath" is that it would allow the individual to clearly seperate themselves from their role as an Israeli Academic representating and Israeli institution. That was the point.

The approach has been changed because this construction of the appeal has proven to be easily exploited.

Position A: Boycott all Israeli academic institutions: no student exchange programs, no joint research or publishing projects, no visiting professorships, no guest lecturers, no sabbaticals, no scholarships, no attendance at academic conferences and symposia, NO EXCEPTIONS.

Position B: Same as position A, except that, in order to alleviate unnecessary hardship to individuals who are genuine allies of the Palestinian struggle, an exception may be made.

Sid Ryan picks Position B, and suddenly Position A magically morphs into a boycott of individuals, not institutions?

Snert's position makes no sense at all.

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Hey, snert, why don't you try to be more like Ryan

Can do!  Tonight, while everyone's asleep, I'll edit all my posts and then tomorrow I'll just pretend I never said any of this stuff. 

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Would you be happier with Position A, which collaterally punishes those few individual Israeli academics who are actually our allies?

As everyone seems to want to note, "worked with South Africa".

And it's consistent.  And it doesn't force people into the utterly disgusting situation of having to swear an oath.  Surely the "allies" would understand? 

 

 

Snert] <p>[quote wrote:

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The approach has been changed because this construction of the appeal has proven to be easily exploited.

No, it was painted over because Sid was getting heat for having proposed a bad idea on behalf of thousands of CUPE members.  The appeal wasn't "easily exploited", it was wrongheaded.

Notice, though, that contrary to your gratuitous smear above, people aren't up in arms about the new appeal?  Huh.  You'd think that as paid agents of Zion, they'd be criticizing that one too, but nobody seems to be.

Then you haven't been reading the papers or even this board. The main line of attack on Ryan is that he is a closet anti-semite, who is singling out Israel, and by extension all Jews. This smear even appeared directly as part of the discussion we had on the last thread about this topic, where a poster (scc)chimed in:

scc wrote:

Way to go Moist. People in my union local who take an interest in international affairs think Ryan is a loudmouth idiot. And perhaps maybe an anti-Semite though there is no definite proof of that yet. But suspiciously, the only group he singles out happens to be 80-90% Jewish.  

That is the main line of attack.

The issue of "individual rights" has made hardly a blip on the radar, anywhere but here and in academic circles. Though conveniently it acts as weak point where all this other crap is leveraged in, so as to immobilize opposition to Israeli polcies with the anti-semtism charge.

Your nuancing of this by making a big issue of the technical details of what constitutes a persons individual right, against the responsibilities, of the institutions they work for, in order to distance yourself from the Zionist crowd, is to make an issue of trivia in the face of the grotesque manipulation of the meaning of the word anti-semetism to mean anything that impugns Israel, in order to distract from the horendous war crimes Israel is committing in Gaza, which is what this attack is about.

The Zionists are not at all interested in protecting the individual rights of Israeli professors, they are interested in Israel being able to continue to violate the individual rights of Palestinian, free from criticism, and above all, any kind of effective action to limit the excesses of the state they are protecting.

1. Sid Ryan has been the most consistent and staunch among CUPE leaders (and indeed among almost all union leaders in Canada) in advocating action against the Israeli apartheid state.

2. Sid Ryan, however, made a couple of tactical errors, both of which he has publicly retracted. This should help us to shut up the pro-Israel fanatics who jumped for joy at his errors, seeing in them a way to fraudulently divert and discredit the growing calls for BDS.

3. We should not waste one more second defending Sid's errors, which he himself has renounced, thus playing into the hands of the damned enemy.

4. I have little optimism that these four points will make any difference to the ongoing utterly diversionary dogfight that has been haunting this board on this issue.

Good for Sid Ryan, his new stance is honourable and deserves support. 

There's points on the individual worth institutions distinction that could be made (and there is a Position C), but maybe time to move on now. 

This is wrong. I continue to commend Brother Moist for taking a stand against bigotry.

It appears that the international movement behind the Israeli academic boycott favours what I called Position A, upthread at #10. That is, a boycott with no exceptions made for individual allies of the Palestinian struggle.

Here's how the position was formulated four years ago:

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Mona Baker, a British professor of translation studies, set out principles of who and which institutions should be boycotted. This is an important issue, because [b]the boycott must avoid the appearance of discrimination and the risk of dilution due to individually chosen exceptions.[/b] The proposal was to cast the academic boycott as an economic boycott "to undermine the institutions that allow a pariah state to function and claim membership of the international community." [b]When considering a boycott of, say, tourism to Israel, Baker noted, "supporters of an economic boycott do not ask whether the individual hotel workers who are being laid off in Israel are individually for or against the occupation. But we do keep returning to this question in relation to academics affiliated to Israeli institutions."[/b]

When cast as an economic boycott, therefore, [b]an academic boycott implies that all academics at Israeli institutions should be boycotted, and Israeli academics working abroad would be exempted. Similarly, non-Jewish academics at Israeli institutions also would be boycotted.[/b]

[url=http://www.wrmea.com/archives/Jan_Feb_2005/0501015.html][color=mediumblu...

Sid Ryan attempted to soften the impact of the academic boycott on the tiny handful of allies of the Palestinian struggle in the Israeli academy by proposing individual exemptions, before he was persuaded to back off. It is therefore highly ironic that he should be pilloried by the Zionists and the right wing of his own union as a bigot and a racist for deviating from the strict international boycott position, which the Zionists and the right wing union bureaucrats oppose anyway.

 

 

Hey, it's not really that hard to pick out the handful of Israeli academics who are supporters of the Palestinians. They are well known to the Palestinians and Israelis alike. That's not the problem with Ryan's position.

The problem is with failing to treat the academic boycott as just another component of a comprehensive economic boycott of Israel - the kind of boycott in which it is impractical to take into consideration the collateral hardship to individuals who may be at least partly sympathetic to the cause.

M. Spector wrote:

It appears that the international movement behind the Israeli academic boycott favours what I called Position A, upthread at #10. That is, a boycott with no exceptions made for individual allies of the Palestinian struggle.

 

Good find, M. Spector, and I'm glad to read that, because that is my position as well. A boycott is a boycott. My problem with Sid Ryan is his [i]lack of effectiveness[/i] in putting the position forward. He should stick to his guns, but figure out whether they are loaded first. Otherwise, and I know we are repeating ourselves, our enemies get to scream about Ryan and about some of the debatable fringe aspects of boycott, instead of the debate being situated where it must be - [b][i]the urgent need to embark on the BDS campaign[/i][/b] and start mobilizing one organization and institution and government after another to get on board.

The very term "Zionist lobby" is anti-semitic and implies that Jews control world events. Sounds like far-right white supremacists going on about the world being controlled by "ZOG" (Zionist Occupation Government).

If you want to talk about there being a "pro-the policies of the current Israeli government lobby"  that's fine. Leave all this use of the word "Zionist" as a term of derision to the rightwing loonies - unless you wnat your position to be discredited.

Snert wrote:

It's the whole idea of the ideological purity test that people find repugnant about Ryan's plan, so if he could have left that part out, we probably wouldn't be having this discussion.

And since you feel such a compulsion to continue to defend his plan, I guess we'll keep having it.

Not with me, you won't.

I refuse to debate with people who continue to repeat lies after the truth has been pointed out to them.

You're still prattling on about "oaths" - repeated twice in your latest fevered screed - even though you know it's a lie. That's beneath contempt. 

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I refuse to debate with people who continue to repeat lies after the truth has been pointed out to them.

You're still prattling on about "oaths" - repeated twice in your latest fevered screed - even though you know it's a lie.

I'll leave it to any reasonable reader to decide whether boycotting an individual unless they explicitly condemn the university bombing and the assault on Gaza in general constitutes demanding an oath or not.  Sure sounds like one to me.  And those bolded words are Sid Ryan's exact words from his original press release, so I trust you'd agree that whether or not Sid Ryan said them is beyond debate.

I'll also leave it to the reasonable reader to decide for themself which of us is the liar. 

The same could be said for people who won't denounce terrorism, or violence in general.  Who likes people who won't publicly declare their distaste for terrorism and violence?  Who should feel badly if someone doesn't care to have to raise their hand and say so?

M. Spector wrote:

Quite right. That explains the position of our enemies. But it doesn't explain the position of our supposed friends, like Paul Moist.

I believe we should defeat or neutralize enemies and win over fence-sitters. I don't believe we should alienate all possible allies, even inconsistent and weak-kneed ones, by condemning them as enemies. And I am as tired of this canonization of Sid Ryan as I am disgusted by his demonization (see "Winnifred" above - shame!). If the BDS movement needs a leader, it will need a more skilful one than he.

Stockholm wrote:

The very term "Zionist lobby" is anti-semitic and implies that Jews control world events. Sounds like far-right white supremacists going on about the world being controlled by "ZOG" (Zionist Occupation Government).

 

 

Oh step outside and breathe for a while.  There can be a powerful lobby that is successful at raising money and exerting influence without there being a world-wide "ZOG" conspiracy.

 

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But what of white "allies" who were willing to raise their right hand and denounce apartheid?  Weren't they given the option to retain their trade and investment options if they did?

I'm not sure about this, but I do recall how the cultural boycott of South Africa prevented musicians such as the members of the mixed-race band, Juluka, from performing in Europe.

Frustrated Mess wrote:

If only he had. If only he had. And at the same time, he could have taken a stand against murder, oppression, colonization, war crimes, and gross violations of human rights. Instead, he chose to take a stand against a brother who did do those things. Shameful indeed.

Each to their own I suppose. But it just is not as black and white as I read here. I was at an anti-Isreal rally in Toronto and I did hear some pretty distatsefuul stuff. This letter today in the post http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=1204113 is reasonably written even if I usually disagree with the writer. From time to time we need to acknowledge mistakes.

Winnifred wrote:

I was at an anti-Isreal rally in Toronto and I did hear some pretty distatsefuul stuff.

Working undercover?

Working undercover?

And I do agree that if there are pro-Israeli protestors that engage in death calls against Palestinian Canadians Farber must denounce it. Put the video here and lets see if he does.

M. Spector wrote:

Right now, Sid Ryan, for all his faults, is the best-known trade union spokesperson for the BDS campaign in Canada. He is fearless and outspoken - exactly what is needed. As a result he is a magnet for all the anti-labour, pro-Zionist, right-wing crap that people can muster against the campaign, and I think that his allies in the struggle ought to cut him a lot of slack, at least until a more skilful leading spokesperson comes along. That's my idea of building alliances.

People who rush to disassociate themselves and their unions from Ryan's BDS campaign are doing mischief to the cause.  

Your position puts Sid Ryan as an individual, ahead of the campaign. Ryan set back the campaign by ham-handed idiocy in selling it -- and let's be honest, this is a campaign that needs to be SOLD to the Canadian public. If the BDS campaign is the priority, then make it the priority.  

Winnifred wrote:

Working undercover?

And I do agree that if there are pro-Israeli protestors that engage in death calls against Palestinian Canadians Farber must denounce it. Put the video here and lets see if he does.

 Your story is getting a little weird Winnifred. You say you heard some things at the rally you attended that distressed you. Yet you say nothing specific, then you link us to an article, which also has nothing specific in it, except for some allusions to translation from Arabic.

What precisely did you hear when you attended this event, where was it, and how good is your Arabic?