From Ireland to Canada, boycott Israel is the word

Good news for humanity, bad news for Israel, the world’s only surviving apartheid state.

Students at the National University of Ireland Galway (NUI Galway) have voted by an overwhelming majority to endorse the Palestinian call for boycotting Israel, Electronic Intifada reports.

Official results show that a total of 1,954 students voted “yes” to a motion “That NUI Galway Students’ Union actively supports the campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions [BDS] against the State of Israel”.

The “no” vote was 1,059.

Commenting on the 2-to-1 victory for the BDS motion, Martin O’Quigley, the chairman of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC), praised the students

who stood with the oppressed on the right side of history and endorsed this measure, despite a stream of venomous anti-Palestinian propaganda and dirty tricks being injected into the debate from off-campus forces, including the Israeli embassy in Ireland’s failed attempts at using social media to influence the outcome.

According to Electronic Intifada, the Israeli embassy took the extraordinary step of publicly campaigning against the ballot, claiming in one of its Facebook postings that a vote for BDS would be a vote for “anti-Semitism”.

Meanwhile, in Canada students at the University of Ottawa have launched a campaign to ban from campus hummus produced by the Israeli company Sabra, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reports.

Sabra is partly owned by the Strauss Group, a foodstuffs manufacturer which financially supports the Israeli army’s Golani Brigade. According to human rights organizations, the brigade is responsible for numerous human rights violations.

Lacking an indigenous culture, Israelis, whose cultural heritage lies faraway from Palestine – in Europe, Russia and the United States – claim traditional Arab dishes, such as hummus and falafel, as their own, much to the amusement of Palestinians and other Arabs.

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