Friday, May 29, 2015

"Canary Mission" website about campus BDS leaders unnerves anti-Israel advocates

Forward  A new website is publicizing the identities of pro-Palestinian student activists to prevent them from getting jobs after they graduate from college. But the website is keeping its own backers’ identity a secret.

“It is your duty to ensure that today’s radicals are not tomorrow’s employees,” a female narrator intones in a slick video posted to the website’s YouTube account.

Called Canary Mission, the site has posted profiles of dozens of students and recent graduates, alongside those of well-known activists like Omar Barghouti, founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Some of the students are active in Students for Justice in Palestine; others were involved in recent pro-BDS resolutions at campuses in California. Many of them have relatively thin activist résumés.

“The focus on young people and students is an effort to try to tell people that there will be a price for you taking a political position,” said Ali Abunimah, founder of the pro-Palestinian website The Electronic Intifada. “It’s an effort to punish and deter people from standing up for what they believe.”

Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, defended the tactic as a way of forcing people to understand the seriousness of their political stands.

“Factually documenting who one’s adversaries are and making this information available is a perfectly legitimate undertaking,” Pipes wrote in an email. “Collecting information on students has particular value because it signals them that attacking Israel is serious business, not some inconsequential game, and that their actions can damage both Israel and their future careers.”[...]

13 comments:

  1. I can't say that I support this approach but these kids are sick in the end. Traitors to their people and to logic and facts.

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  2. No, no, no. Bad, bad, bad idea. College is a place and time to act, in many ways, unwise. What's next? Pictures of students who get drunk at frat parties, high in dorm rooms, wild at basketball games? Now this website wants to make a political litmus test for employment. Where will these cowards who hide their identity focus their efforts tomorrow? Talk about "canary in a mine." Let's take evasive action now before we have websites documenting all the foibles we honed between 18 and 22. (Full disclosure: I was a model student -- HAH!)

    Data. Show me the data. Are yesterday's campus radicals really tomorrow's dictators? I don't think the evidence supports that across the board. In Rabbi Dovid Eidensohn's conference call class last Wed. night we learn that Leon Trotsky's school made an error in expelling him. A lot of times good comes out of including, not marginalizing, one's foes.

    A friend of mine told me this Russian adage: Hold your friends close, and your enemies closer.

    A story: someone in the DC area was in danger of being deported back to his country, where he almost certainly faced imprisonment and/or death because there had been a regime change in his country, and he had been part of the old guard there (I think he had been employed by the embassy here). He reached out to people, and eventually contacted the Rabbi of the Shul here, who got him an attorney, who was able to help the man remain in the U.S. The Rabbi told the attorney: tell the man you are doing this, helping this man, precisely because you are a Jew, and this is how a Jew acts.

    The man whose life was saved told the Rabbi: Where I come from we were taught to hate Jews. I know now I was misled.

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  3. Joe,

    I couldn't disagree more. Social media has changed the rules, and you can't put the genie back in the bottle now. Young adults -- nay, everyone -- need to know that the choices you make today will forever be accessible, whether you like it or not.

    What you and I remember at that age? Forget it. It's a new world. The Canary project is taking the fight exactly where it belongs....fight it on today's terms.

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  4. Yes, it does make you an anti-Semite because it employs the historic tool of anti-Semites: lies about Jews. Israel does not engage in massacres. They are hunting down individuals who engage in massacres. If people who massacre bother you, start with the Arabs. Then move on to your government in the US who killed 1/2 million Iraqis over the last decade.

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  5. "Are yesterday's campus radicals really tomorrow's dictators?"


    How about our current president?

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  6. You wouldn't be able to get away with saying that if he was a dictator. Is anyone banging down your door right now? unlikely.

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  7. So the rules are someone can put a bag over their head as the "The Unknown Judge" and be the prosecution, judiciary, and jury, and ruin people's job opportunities before their careers even start. Oh, Brave New World. Maybe SeaSlipper's onto something, after all. The dictatorship of the anonymous masses, at Tetragb/sec. upload speeds.

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  8. I say we do this to the getora people. They're doing this to proper jews, using these exact methodologies, we should do this back to them.

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  9. Was he a campus radical? I spoke with a number of his classmates in columbia and in harvard. No body, nobody, remembers him. And in the press, too. None of his 'classmates' remember him.

    And who were his classmates that he visited pakistan with? Not identified. And he claims he's not muslim. But his only overseas trip before he got involved with politics was to two muslim countries: pakistan and malaysia.

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  10. Practically every phrase of your statement is a bold faced lie and distortion.


    The Palestinians and are the fake people and rogue state promulgated by the refusal of Arab states to incorporate these evil refugees of Jordan and Egypt that were told to leave Israel prior to the mass slaughter being prepared by the Arab states. They are totally non productive, truculent and violent warlike states with no other goal than to cause trouble for the peaceable and docile Israelis. You are apparently a gourmet glutting yourself on all the false propaganda spread by virulent anti Semites such as yourself.


    Israelis are too weak in their attacks in response to the atrocities of the Palestinians and shouldn't be as bend over backwards concerned about civilian casualties as they are.



    They never take US money for these attacks and they pay for all weaponry that they receive from the US.



    The BDS slime are evil war mongering scum of the Earth pushing the Islamist supremacist agenda on the world


    Hopefully their efforts on exposing these evil and pernicious vandals and criminals will bear fruit and they will suffer serious damage to their rotten goals and aims.

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  11. Joe,
    Please go easy with the rhetoric. This is a video on a website....one of billions.
    Let's start realizing that something appearing on the web is not synonymous with the death penalty or ruin. Canary is evening the playing field...more power to them.

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  12. If it makes me an anti-Semite to call this organized madness, well it be so

    "Anti-Semite" is a soft term for you and your ilk. You're a vicious Jew-hater. If you had lived in Nazi Germany, you'd have been beating Jews in the street, and joining the SS.

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  13. screw them. they're willing to put me out of my job and then they cry that they won't be able to get a job later on?

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