2017-01-01



Screenshot of Denver University’s Students for Justice in Palestine website, built using Israeli web development company Wix.

Anti-Israel campus activists earned the dubious distinction of having made this year’s greatest blunder where their efforts against the Jewish state were concerned — by advertising their endeavor on a site created by an Israeli company.

Denver University’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) was “honored” by advocacy organization StandWithUs for exhibiting the greatest blooper in its own anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.

In a video called “5 Worst BDS Fails of 2016,” StandWithUs mocked SJP for using Wix, and Israeli invention, to call for boycotts of Israeli-made products.

“First call of action for Denver SJP — boycott your own site,” the narrator of the video says.

This isn’t the first time anti-Israel activists have been called out for boycotting the Jewish state while utilizing technology developed by the startup nation — with Wix at the center of the BDS botch-ups on a number of occasions.

The radical group Code Pink, Cornell University’s SJP and outspoken anti-Israel journalist Max Blumenthal all committed the faux-pas of building their websites — which include calls for academic boycotts of Israel; accuse the Jewish state of “ethnic cleaning;” and raise money for anti-Israel activities — with Wix. When this fact was brought to Blumenthal’s attention, he said that he had “no idea” and that it “shouldn’t be hard to get it replaced.”

Also given a nod by StandWithUs: the refusal of the Egyptian judoka to shake hands with his Israeli rival at the 2016 Rio Olympics — a move for which the athlete, who lost the match, was sent home by the Olympic Committee; the decision by the Spanish High Court for Israel’s Ariel University to be compensated after Madrid unconstitutionally excluded the school’s students from participating in a competition; the embarrassment of a British BDS group after it was caught posting already-retracted fake news stories about Israel; and frontman of the band Eagles of Death Metal telling rabid BDS supporter and musician Roger Waters, “F*** you…ain’t nobody going to keep me from my people here in Tel Aviv,” after being pressured by Waters to cancel a performance.

Watch the “5 Worst BDS Fails of 2016” below:

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