Monday, September 10, 2012

Co Op refuse to answer any of my 20 my questions

I have finally had a response from the Co-op to my previous letter that asked 20 questions about the Co-op's choice of criteria for boycotting countries. Here is the letter from Amanda Bailey.


The fact that she has made no attempt to answer even one of my questions means it is safe to conclude that the only rational definition of what constitutes an abuse of their “Human Rights and Trade Policy” is that the country must be named "Israel". In particular we can conclude that:

1. ‘Occupation’ is the only criteria they consider as part of their “Human Rights and Trade Policy”

2. Denial of equal rights to women and/or minorities is NOT one of their criteria of interest

3. Persecution of gays and lesbians is NOT one of their criteria of interest

4. Brutal suppression of ethnic minorities and political dissidents is NOT one of their criteria of interest

5. Sponsoring and glorifying terrorism is NOT one of their criteria of interest

6. State sponsored anti-Semitism is NOT one of their criteria of interest

7. The Co-Op is happy to trade with all 58 Muslim countries in the world even though they are all guilty of the human rights abuses listed in 2-6.

8. Conducting "illegal wars far from a country’s own borders” is NOT one of their criteria of interest and that is why the Co-Op is not boycotting goods from the USA, France, Italy, Holland ... and the UK etc.

9. The Co-op is selective in which 'international consensus' it accepts. In particular, it rejects United Nations resolution 242, which specifies that the West Bank does not belong to any national territory but rather is considered disputed territory whose borders are to be determined under a final status peace agreement.

10. The Co-op also rejects the findings of the recent Levy Report

11. The Co-Op is not aware  that the only legal basis for denouncing the Jews who returned in 1967 to the homes that they had been expelled from in 1948 as “settlers” is by recognizing the Jordanian conquests of those territories, even though those conquests were never recognized or accepted. Not even by the international community.

12. The Co-op are not aware that one of the ICC ‘judges’ who was responsible for the 'international legal ruling' they refer to was Al Khasawneh who had a blatant conflict of interest, since he was an advisor to the King of Jordan and later became the Prime Minister of Jordan

13. The Co-op's notion of occupied territories fails to include the approximately 160 other territories around the world that are ‘disputed’ (each of which necessarily involves one country ‘occupying it’ against the wishes of some other country or national group)?

14. The Co-op's definition does not include genuinely brutal occupations such as: the Chinese occupation of Tibet, the Turkish occupation of Northern Cyprus, or even the Russian occupation of Abkhazia, especially as China, Russia and Turkey all of have infinitely worse human rights records than Israel

15. The Co-op are not aware that one of the disputed international territories is the Falklands Islands, which Argentina claims is illegally occupied by the UK and that a significant majority of countries in the UN now agree with the Argentine position.

16. The Co-op are not aware that any notion of an ‘international consensus’ is fundamentally irrelevant because the United Nations contains 58 Muslim states – all human rights abusers as described above - who provide a built-in ‘consensus’ on any anti-Israel motion that anybody cares to think of

17. The Co-op is happy to “continue to seek increased trade with Palestinian businesses.” despite the corrupt Palestinian Authority being guilty of all of the human rights offences listed above

18. The Co-op believes that Israel – the only liberal democracy in the Middle East where all minorities have equal rights – is a worse human rights violator than Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian Authority, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Russia, China etc

19.  The Co-op's policy to boycott goods produced by Jewish communities in the West Bank is indeed pure anti-Semitism

20. The Co-Op did indeed get hoodwinked into a nonsensical hypocritical policy (that will ultimately be self-damaging) by a small group of congenital anti-Semites disguised as ‘pro-Palestinian’ activists.


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