State of Virginia latest to fight BDS

Originally published in Breaking Israel News

Virginia has become the seventh state to take a legal stand against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, reported Israel National News, passing identical bills this week in both its lower house and Senate.

In the resolution, lawmakers “condemn the international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement and its activities in Virginia, as its agenda is inherently antithetical and deeply damaging to the causes of peace, justice, equality, democracy, and human rights for all peoples in the Middle East.”

It goes on to say the BDS movement is “one of the main vehicles advocating for policies leading to the dissolution of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and has sought to hijack social, political, religious, academic, cultural, and economic platforms to discriminatorily isolate Israel within the international community.”

The lower house passed the bill 86 to five, with nine abstentions, while the Senate passed it by voice vote. The Bible relates that God promised blessings to those who bless Abraham or his descendants.

The state received warm responses from pro-Israel groups. Darcy Hirsh of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, said the vote is a “strong statement that BDS is discriminatory and counterproductive and has no place in the commonwealth.” Her organisation had campaigned in favour of the resolution.

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Promoting anti-BDS legislation across the US, Laurie Cardoza-Moore, founder and president of Proclaiming Justice to The Nations (PJTN), said, “We will not stop until every single US state comes out publicly condemning the anti-Semitic BDS movement. We call upon Christians, Jews and people of conscience across America to join us in pushing for similar resolutions in their home states.”

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Along with Tennessee, Alabama, Indiana, Pennsylvania, New York and Florida in the US, the UK, the city of Paris and 13 Latin American and Caribbean nations have passed similar anti-BDS resolutions. On Friday, Illinois published a list of 11 companies in which state pension funds are banned from investing for their anti-Israel actions, the first US state to take concrete action against BDS supporters.