03/18/16 – Ramzy Baroud – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, so welcome back to the show.
Now our first guest on the show today is Ramzi Baroud, editor of Palestine Chronicle, and we run his articles regularly at antiwar.com as well.
Welcome back to the show.
Ramzi, how are you doing?
I'm doing well, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you back on the show here.
And a very important article I think you've written here, Why BDS Cannot Lose.
And I wonder if you mean must not lose or really it cannot lose, and maybe both.
What is BDS and what's so important here?
Well, first, it's both indeed, it can't and it must not.
BDS is the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment Movement, which is the Palestinian equivalent of the South African boycott movement that started sometimes in the 50s and 60s and took off in the 80s and until Nelson Mandela was released from prison and apartheid in South Africa was crushed.
For the sake of clarification, it's important to note that equality is yet to be fully achieved in South Africa.
It's going to be a long journey for them.
But the political system that has institutionalized apartheid has indeed ended.
And there is a platform, an opportunity for South Africa to put itself back together after hundreds of years of colonialism and about 50 years or so of apartheid.
The Palestinians are vying for something similar to that model.
What they are experiencing under the Israeli occupation in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem and within Israel itself is indeed a system of apartheid as described by former President Jimmy Carter and by many South African luminaries, including Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela himself before he passed away.
That's what the Palestinians are working towards and that's what the BDS movement is all about.
The reason why it can't lose, because it's perhaps the only globally unifying platform that brought Palestinians and their supporters, including many, many Jewish activists and progressive organizations all around the world to make this happen.
It can't lose because it's nonviolent, you know, civil society centered platform that aims to end the injustice that is taking place in Palestine today.
All right.
Now, I was just mentioning Grant F.
Smith and the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy and the conference that they're putting on today in Washington, D.C. about Israel's influence.
Well, Grant, he broke the story on the show the other day, so I think it's OK.
He's going to talk about it in his talk later today on that live stream at the National Press Club.
But he did talk about this on the show the other day.
He did some Google consumer surveys.
It's not exactly the same as the telephone survey, but they do try to make it random.
It's not purely self-selected Internet, like, you know, a poll on the website of everybody's favorite MSNBC host or Fox host or something like that.
It is, you know, basically randomly selected focus groups are asked these questions and this kind of thing.
And anyway, the point is they did the test in Mexico, in Canada, in the United Kingdom and in the United States.
And only in the United States do more people believe that the Palestinians occupy Israeli land rather than the other way around.
In every other country.
And the numbers are still disappointing all the way around.
But in America, it's 39.8 percent understand that Israelis occupy Palestinian land compared to 49.2 percent that Palestinians occupy Israeli land.
I think that's why you get so much confusion and dissonance on this issue is because Americans really have never been exposed to truth that would contradict their basic understanding that the Palestinians are forever threatening the Israelis with terrorism if they won't give up some of their land.
Some of the Israelis land to them and people think, well, that's like trying to appease the Nazis, giving them a little land.
They're just going to want some more.
They just have the entire story turned completely around.
They don't understand.
This is this is incredible, Scott.
And it's the the tragedy of our time that we have been dealing with.
I mean, I have been doing this writing on the Middle East and living in the United States for about 20 years.
And I can tell you numerous such stories that make absolutely no sense.
We have more news networks in this country than anyone else.
I would say that more than the rest of the world combined.
We are streaming news about Palestine, Israel around the clock, every channel.
Yet the more we do, the less people understand.
This is not just in regarding the case of Palestine, Israel, but even there were there was a study that was conducted before and after the Gulf War in the early 90s.
And they discovered that more Americans knew less about the Middle East because of the coverage than they actually knew before the coverage.
There is something very, very sad and tragic and surreal about all of this.
And that's what makes dialogue extremely difficult.
It's like someone is out there trying to sideline the American people, trying to make them not just a very irrelevant player in all of this, but rather to fool them, to hoodwink them into actually siding with the wrong party here.
We're not trying to, you know, we are not trying to inspire people to hate.
We're not trying to tell people, you know, side with maybe it's not a football match.
It's not a sports event.
It's a very basic issue of human rights and justice.
You have a group of people who have been occupied for the last 68 years.
Progressive occupation that has controlled the lives of millions of Palestinians.
The vast majority of our people are refugees living all over the world in Syria, in Lebanon, in Iraq, all over the place, and in numerous refugee camps within the region and within Palestine itself.
We want to end this.
We want to live as equals in our own homeland and share the land.
We are not asking for any ethnic cleansing.
We're not asking for genocide.
We don't want another Holocaust.
All of this nonsense comparing us to the Nazis and our leaders to Hitler and all of this is just playing on this emotional card that has been promoted by the American media for so many years.
And it needs to stop.
You know, we have no army.
We have no air force.
We have no navy.
We're a group of people who are struggling in various means, you know, in Gaza, in the West Bank and elsewhere.
And we need to bring this tragedy to an end.
And this is why it's essential for the American people to understand this is not a matter of choice.
Americans are being hoodwinked for a very specific reason.
Their money are being used in order for them to supply the Israeli army with weapons, in order for them to sustain the illegal settlements project on Palestinian lands in the West Bank and in Jerusalem, in order for them to ensure that the Israeli army and government's policies are being sustained.
If they understand the reality, they will not stand up for this.
They will not support this anymore.
This is why ignorance is not a choice at this point, because there's a human life at stake.
Yeah, absolutely.
And now I want to point out, too, as long as we're talking about polls, there was one, I believe it was a Gallup poll that they talked about at Mondoweiss blog a couple of weeks ago, where super majorities of U.S. Jewish students agree with your position entirely, which just goes to show they are interested in simple human rights, simple fairness, and they are interested enough in the subject to know a little bit about it.
So they know who's occupying who in the West Bank, and they won't stand for it.
And they won't let Israel claim that it represents them, because it doesn't.
That makes perfect sense.
This trend of younger Jewish students and Jewish act has been going on for a while now, and I credit that to the rise of social media and the Internet.
The whole idea that I can fabricate a narrative, a fictional narrative, and push it and sustain it and promote it throughout the years and get away with it is no longer applicable at this point.
Yeah, that's right.
Those days are over.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry.
Let me let me stop you right there.
We'll be right back on the other side of this break.
More from Ramzi Yousef from PalestineChronicle.com.
And you can, of course, follow him and read his articles at AntiWar.com as well.
The latest is Why BDS Cannot Lose.
More from Ramzi Yousef from PalestineChronicle.com.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
Oh, my God.
Ramzi, did I just call you Ramzi Yousef?
I'm so sorry, dude.
I'm the worst.
I swear to God.
I'm the worst person in the whole world.
You know, Ramzi Yousef was the only Ramzi I knew for so long, except for who's the old attorney general?
Anyway, I just got this groove in my brain where Ramzi is just connected to the wrong last name there, man.
Don't blame yourself.
Listen, I got stopped at an airport once over Ramzi Yousef.
Don't worry about it.
Oh, man.
I don't know what is wrong with my brain.
Seriously, that's unforgivable.
Thank you.
You're very gracious, and I'm very sorry.
All right, listen.
So now, wait a minute.
There's good news here, sort of, kind of, which is that this whole BDS thing, I don't know, how is BDS doing compared to what you expected when you first heard of it?
Well, when we first started BDS, we were really quite unclear on how do we want this movement to, you know, what kind of direction, what kind of structure.
I was of the opinion at the time that was early 2000, mid 2000, I was of the opinion that the call has to come from Palestinians themselves, partly because I was on tour in South Africa, and I met with some former colleagues of Nelson Mandela and other members of the ANC, the African National Congress, who told me that you can't have this elitist movement that comes from universities across Europe and the United States and call it a grassroots Palestinian movement.
It doesn't work that way.
So basically, the call indeed came in 2005, when hundreds of Palestinian civil society organizations issued a statement after following a conference calling for boycott.
And we used that as the first step to garner international support.
With time, it's morphed into this kind of decentralized movement, kind of loose networks all over the world that does not speak on behalf of an organization.
We don't have a central command, if you will.
We don't have just a group of individuals who are controlling the thoughts and the ideas.
When I went to Barcelona last month, for example, the BDS activists there, yes, they are part of the spirit of the movement, but they are focusing on local issues.
They are targeting local players.
Everybody is playing the game based on his own local factors and needs and priorities.
And this is why it's succeeding.
Because in the old days, whenever you had a movement like this, it would be targeted.
Sometimes Israel, I mean, many of our leaders were killed in Cyprus and Greece and whatever in the 70s, you know, but you know, you can't criminalize a civil rights movement.
You can't criminalize thousands of organizations around the world.
There's nobody to target.
This is why it's an extremely difficult problem for Israel, because there is really no matter what you do, you can't possibly silence such a growing number of people speaking so many different languages all over the world.
To give you an example, I'm going on a speaking tour in New Zealand and Australia to speak about BDS next week.
Going with me is my partner, Ali Abunama.
Ali was denied a visa to Australia, and the university started pulling the invitation for him to come and speak.
But all that it took is for us to start petitions on Change.org and other platforms, and thousands of people came to his support, and every single decision has been reversed.
So this is kind of really the power of the masses, if you will.
And it's working really well for us.
And I really don't see any reversal in the successes of BDS at this point.
All right.
Now, there was just news last week, I guess, of a pretty major international security company that withdrew from their, I guess, deals with the West Bank or Israel entirely.
Can you elaborate on that one for us?
Indeed, from the West Bank and Israel, because this is a G for us.
It's the largest security...
And Israel entirely, not just in the West Bank.
That's right.
Because their performance, I mean, what they are doing in Israeli prisons, they are providing the kind of, you know, so-called security that is targeting Palestinian prisoners.
Because thousands of the Palestinians, you have about 9000 Palestinian prisoners in Israel right now.
Out of them, about 800 held without charges, without due process.
And hundreds of them are women and children.
And G4S has been the main provider of the security apparatus that keeps these guys in prison and humiliates them and mistreats them.
But this is not just about prisoners.
It's also about the hundreds of checkpoints that have been erected by the Israeli occupation and the Israeli military throughout the West Bank and East Jerusalem as well.
So G4S has been kind of really is part and parcel of Israel's military and security system.
So targeting it in a specific region would have made no sense because they could have provided that sort of services to the Israeli military in other parts of Israel.
So as a result, we have targeted the movement and the company and all of the services.
And I would say this is perhaps our greatest achievement in years, because this is a company that is that is worth billions of dollars.
And they have insisted that there can be absolutely no effort that will dissuade them to divest from Israel, that this is a done deal.
Don't even worry about Israel.
But we kept at them, again, small groups throughout the world, picketing, fighting with them, blocking their movement, making their life extremely difficult.
And as a result, companies were divesting from G4S.
Countries were telling, like, for example, the UNESCO in Jordan just recently told G4S, we don't want to work with you anymore because of what.
So they are starting to lose money.
This is not about Ramzi Baroud divesting.
I have no stocks in G4S.
It's about companies and other countries saying, listen, I don't want to be part of this.
I don't want to be part of this conflict.
I don't want my money invested with you.
Even the Bill Gates Foundation divested from them.
So then these kind of successes really build on each other.
But now, so what about all the other Ramzi Baroud, all the people who don't necessarily have power and influence, but they want to participate in this?
What do they do?
Well, that's the beauty of it, because BDS has kind of a place for everyone to get involved.
Now, I tell people this is not about not buying Israeli hummus or not buying Israeli dates.
Yes, that will have its impact as well.
But this is about the conscience.
I mean, the fact that you are conscious of your choices, the fact that you are making a moral choice in what you eat and what you buy and what you do, it makes you it enlists you as a member of the movement in a way.
And it makes you you explain to your friends why you are not buying Israeli hummus.
You are telling your family why you are not buying this particular Israeli product, why you are not going to Israel for tourism and so forth and so on.
That part of the consciousness, the collective consciousness, I would say, is allowing us to force the debate as part of the mainstream thinking.
At one point when we started, Scott, we were not involved in this part.
You know, we were not being discussed.
There was no dialogue over BDS.
Now, even Hillary Clinton is talking about it.
She wrote a letter to Hayim Sabbah, the powerful Zionist here in this country, telling him that BDS is going to be on top of my priority once I become a president.
Thank you very much, Hillary.
Let's make this part of the debate at this point, because this is exactly what we wanted from day one.
Right.
Yeah.
And again, back to just that basic misinformation about who's picking the fight with who over there and who is occupying who.
That's how to generate this discussion.
I mean, how do you get, as you continue to describe it, virtually the entire, at least bottom up international community, not the not the leaders of the states, of course, but so-called civil society all across the world are unanimous about this.
It's not because they're all a bunch of anti-Semites.
It's because, hey, there's an occupied population going on in the West Bank that they don't get mentioned too much here.
And maybe that fact is interesting in itself, too.
Maybe there's something that people need to look at.
And and, you know, especially when you talk about Bill Gates Foundation, this and G4S, that and these, you know, big and powerful interests beginning to feel the heat and and providing an example to others that, man, you might want to go ahead and look out for your own interests at this point, too.
It's a great way to start changing the narrative to get a little bit more reality involved in the discussion here in the U.S.
And then, you know, I don't really know for sure, honestly, Ramsey, but I believe that if the American people, you know, if Wolf Blitzer ever had to show them a map and go, OK, here's 48 borders and here's 67 borders and here's the occupation now and here's this, that and the other thing.
And just explain the basic, you know, just the simple bird's eye view of the situation of the American people.
I think you would see opinions change overnight by tens of percentage points as to, you know, Americans' views towards supporting the Israelis the way we do.
Absolutely.
I agree with you, Scott.
And but there is an important reminder here that the boycott movement against the apartheid regime in South Africa started outside South Africa itself in Britain.
In the 70s.
And it really did not take off until the mid 80s.
The Americans were the last to enlist.
Ronald Reagan used to refer to Nelson Mandela as a terrorist.
Not until 2008, that's like 16, 17 years after Mandela was released, was his name removed from the terrorist watch list that was confirmed by the Congress.
I mean, believe it or not, he was not disqualified from that list until like three or four years before he actually passed away.
Oh, man, I'm sorry, Ramsey.
I'm sorry.
I just realized how far over time I am.
I got to go and get Patrick Coburn on the phone here.
No, no worries at all.
Thank you so much again for coming back on the show.
I really do appreciate this.
Thank you.
All right, that is the great Ramsey Baroud.
You can find him.
I'm so sorry about that, too.
Jeez, I'm such a heel.
It's unreal.
Why BDS cannot lose.
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