Sam Charles Hamad blocked me for criticizing his attack on BDS before I was finished kicking his ass so I went to the article on The New Arab website & continued my offensive in the comments section:
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Hard to pack more ignorance and libertarian sniveling into one article than Hamad has managed to do in this piece. It’s like a toxic waste dump. At least Hamad ought to try to get his facts about BDS straight and leave his petulant animosities against the left out of clear view–all the better to fool us that he gives a rat’s ass about Palestinian self-determination but doesn’t expose his arrant Zionism and political affinities with the rightwing and some from the very left he detests. One cannot tell the difference between Hamad’s views on Israel and those of Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, also contemptuous opponents of BDS and supporters of a Jewish-only state.
Hamad comes out slugging as an apologist for Israel & equivocal about apartheid. What’s with the “apartheid-esque” designation? In the style of, resembling apartheid? Most people would say if it looks like racist persecution, perhaps that’s what it is. Is “apartheid-esque” less racist, less violent, less discriminatory than outright apartheid? When Israeli police gunned down those three young Palestinians at Al Aqsa mosque last week, did those “apartheid-esque” bullets feel less deadly? Were the families of the young men relieved that they weren’t outright apartheid bullets?
Hard to pretend you’re a sophisticated secular scholar when you support a medieval structure like a Jewish-only colonial-settler state. But harder to pretend you have any sense of democratic principles, or any principles at all, when you support bantustates for Palestinians after watching 69 years of expropriations, settlements, military occupation, blockades, carpet bombing. Is Hamad even minimally informed about the character of the Oslo Accords? Or is talking through his hat the level of his investigative powers?
How can anyone who understands the character of the Zionist state, the history of Israel, and the role Israel plays as a fortress against democracy in the Middle East possibly oppose the economic and cultural boycott (BDS) of Israel? How can anyone watch Palestinians, vilified as terrorists, stand unarmed for 69 years against one of the most powerful militaries in the world and still oppose the international solidarity of BDS? How could anyone express as much ignorance about the Palestinian initiative, organization, administration of BDS as Hamad?
This is a shameful piece, rubbish, shabby apologia, intellectually impoverished. On the wrong side of justice.