Melanie Phillips Urges Us To Curb Our Enthusiasm Over the UK Government's Anti-BDS Stance

The stance may be driving Israel's leftist enemies into a frenzy, but Phillips says Israel and its supporters would be well advised to "temper their jubilation" because "the Israel boycott is by no means the whole problem":

BDS is to anti-Israel lunacy what ISIS is to Islamic extremism: merely the noisiest and most eye-watering manifestation of a deeply rooted and widespread lethal contamination.

The poison is incubated in the universities. This week, the co-chairman of the Oxford University Labor Club, Alex Chalmers, announced he was resigning over its rampant anti-Semitism and endorsement of Israel Apartheid Week on campus.

“Whether it be,” he wrote, “members of the executive throwing around the term ‘Zio’ (a term for Jews usually confined to websites run by the Ku Klux Klan) with casual abandon, senior members of the club expressing their ‘solidarity’ with Hamas and explicitly defending their tactics of indiscriminately murdering civilians, or a former co-chair claiming that ‘most accusations of anti-Semitism are just the Zionists crying wolf,’ a large proportion of both OULC and the student Left in Oxford more generally have some kind of problem with Jews.”

A further statement from the Oxford University Jewish Society said senior members of the Labor Club liked to regale listeners with a song called “Rockets over Tel Aviv” and endorsed Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians, stated all Jews should be required to denounce Zionism and the State of Israel, and said those who refused to do so should be shunned. And they had arranged for a group of students to harass a Jewish student and shout “Filthy Zionist” at her.

Preventing BDS will not stamp out this deranged animosity against Israel and Zionism that has now gripped most of the Labor Party and Britain’s “progressive” intelligentsia.

Indeed, the new guidance may provide a fig leaf for the derangement to continue...

Indeed--agreed. Like earlier versions of Jew-hate, the "deranged animosity" of Zionhass, the Jew-hate of our time, is a type of mania that's impervious to logic, truth or reality and will therefore continue to flourish in the hothouse environments where "progressives" gather--with or without BDS.