It is clear that the proposed boycott has its roots in this highly suspect effort because it does not aim at peace between Israelis and Palestinians within two-state solution but rather is part of the rejectionist campaign to dismantle Israel as a country.

This shows that the aim is not any specific government policy of Israel but rather the existence of jewish people in Palestine by portraying them as social outcasts.

Is this anti-semitism ? not necessarily but it maps onto it rather beautifully dont you think ?

I notice you didn’t complain on John Quiggin’s great shave post about why he singled out cancer for funding. You seem to only single out the instance of Israel for criticism of “inconsistency”.

I think your emotions on this – your willingness to call me anti-semitic when I haven’t said anything negative about Jews is a hint – are not entirely genuine. It’s a classic case of politically motivated action. Maybe you don’t like people supporting muslims…

are you an islamophobe then? Not necessarily but you energise hatred of muslims and your outlook seems to map onto islamophobia.

I am guessing but this seems like classic case of politically motivated action and if my hunch about the bogusness of your moral outrage is right, it has nothing to do with Palestinian peoples suffering either.

Are you an anti-semite then ? not necessarily but you energize anti-semitism and your outlook seems to map onto anti-semitism.

Therefore, I am not going to be held back from applying a boycott (if I think it`s right in this case; I haven`t said if I do), just because to do so would privilege the Palestinians` suffering over that of other people. I am, in fact, quite happy to aid those I think I can help, and not aid those I think I can`t, and if that is inconsistent well, bugger me sideways with a fishfork. And if it just so happens that those oppressors who “suffer” from assistance happen to be mostly Jewish, well bugger me with a fishfork again, and call me an anti-semite while you do it.

Or is it that my particular moral scruples are irrelevant ( white , western liberal etc ) because from a higher form of morality that you share with your followers, the boycott is the right thing to do ?

Here`s the point: life`s not fair. Now why don`t you go and tell that to the kiddies in Abb1`s piece above. And then you can explain to their parents that you are powerless to take any action against the people shooting them, because there are other more powerful states doing equally bad things which you can`t intervene in, so in the interests of fairness everyone has to die in the mud. Except you of course, you get to sit in your ivory tower refusing to cast judgement, even when the victims are asking you to.

Suppose that the police devote disproportionate resources to catching burglars rather than white-collar fraudsters. I think I might agree that the police ought to re-allocate their resources, but I wouldn’t think that arrested burglars have a complaint of unfairness against the police.

Lets make the point about discrimination differently then. Suppose that a parent singles out for punishment one of his children only, even though the other children have behaved same or worse. His reason for singling out this particular child is that it is convenient for him. Is this fair ? Clearly not.

Can you block criticism of this parent by pointing out that he has different duties from the sort of duties states posses ? No ,that would be irrelevant because what is salient is that the punishment which involves exclusion and ostracism needs to be based on showing why this particular person and not others equally guilty are treated in this way; why they are singled out.

As should now be obvious what is key is the child’s right to be treated fairly and this is why the parent is open to the discrimination criticism.

Absolutely same reasoning applies to the boycott case : it doesnt matter how you organize yourself or what you call yourself or how big /small you are ( or what other unique suis generis duties you possess ). As long as your actions involve people with right to be treated fairly , and you fail to do so , you open yourself to discrimination charge and this is what is wrong with this particular boycott.

Repugnant, huh. Here’s what former Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times Chris Hedges writes:————————————————————————…Barefoot boys, clutching kites made out of scraps of paper and ragged soccer balls, squat a few feet away under scrub trees. Men in flowing white or gray galabias—homespun robes—smoke cigarettes in the shade of slim eaves. Two emaciated donkeys, their ribs protruding, are tethered to wooden carts with rubber wheels.

It is still. The camp waits, as if holding its breath. And then, out of the dry furnace air, a disembodied voice crackles over a loudspeaker.

“Come on, dogs,” the voice booms in Arabic. “Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!”

I stand up. I walk outside the hut. The invective continues to spew: “Son of a bitch!” “Son of a whore!” “Your mother’s cunt!”

The boys dart in small packs up the sloping dunes to the electric fence that separates the camp from the Jewish settlement. They lob rocks toward two armored jeeps parked on top of the dune and mounted with loudspeakers. Three ambulances line the road below the dunes in anticipation of what is to come.

A percussion grenade explodes. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old, scatter, running clumsily across the heavy sand. They descend out of sight behind a sandbank in front of me. There are no sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shoot with silencers. The bullets from the M-16 rifles tumble end over end through the children’s slight bodies. Later, in the hospital, I will see the destruction: the stomachs ripped out, the gaping holes in limbs and torsos.

Yesterday at this spot the Israelis shot eight young men, six of whom were under the age of eighteen. One was twelve. This afternoon they kill an eleven-year-old boy, Ali Murad, and seriously wound four more, three of whom are under eighteen. Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered—death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo—but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.——————————————————-

This is what’s going on there, this is what’s going on there every day, and this is what this is all about.

I’ll give you all – Bernard, rilkefan, Zdenek, JJ and the rest of you – I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and say that you’re a bunch of ignorant fucks, but in all likelyhood it’s much worse than that.

First, I believe that one of the fundamental rights of individuals is to be treated as individuals and not to be convicted by association

So then how does one do anything to stop anything in this world? In the absence of strikes, boycotts, pickets and in fact anything more than (carefully directed) harsh words, what can one do?

Fair enough. I’m not the one who argued that science is a one-dimensional search for truth. I don’t agree with the statement that the truth search “isn’t that important” – advancement of knowledge is after all a primary objective of science – but ethics do matter.

I’d still argue, though, that the examples you raise – prisoners, conscripts, Chinese subjects, the Tuskegee syphilis experiments – all relate at bottom to the ethics of the science itself. The reason you cite for boycotting Chinese research – i.e., that Chinese experimental procedures provide insufficient guarantees of informed consent – goes to the ethics of the research, not to the policies of the Chinese government in Tibet. It’s also bounded by the relevance of consent to the research in question: for instance, the objection would pertain mainly to controlled experiments and wouldn’t apply to a case study of accidental traffic injuries in Shanghai.

(I’d add that I’m unfamiliar with Chinese research practices and don’t know whether or to what extent these consent issues exist, so no moral judgment on China should be implied from this comment.)

Reasonable minds can disagree (and yours evidently does) about whether the ethical considerations should extend beyond those particular to the researcher and his methods. I’d argue that they shouldn’t, for three primary reasons. First, I believe that one of the fundamental rights of individuals is to be treated as individuals and not to be convicted by association. Second, the justification you cite for such boycotts – i.e., deterrence – becomes increasingly attenuated as the net is cast wider. Punish scientists for bad informed-consent protocols and they might improve their ways; punish scientists for their government’s foreign policy and the government isn’t likely to care. Finally, the more extra-scientific ethical concerns come into play, the more value is discarded: for instance, if you reject all traumatic-injury literature that arises from unjust wars, then you have to disregard a substantial amount of human experience in that field.

I also think it’s important that any ethical standards be applied impartially and across the board, but that’s another argument.

“So tell me: would you have supported a boycott of South African Academics (or North Koreans now)?”

I’m not Tracy, but: no and no, unless the academics personally partake in or advocate morally objectionable policies. North Koreans who experimet on prisoners deserve to be boycotted, North Korean geologists or marine biologists don’t. And I’d boycott those academics who do participate in or advocate objectionable policies even if they’re Swedish or Andorran.

Of course we’re now getting into the question of “whose morality” again. But as long as we’re talking about my morality, a fairly major part of it, as stated above, is that individuals should be judged on their own ethical merit.

(BTW, comment 177 was mine, not Tracy’s.)