Malevolent Mappers // BDS, meet MLK

Were an avowed white supremacist group to issue a comprehensive map for its supporters’ use showing the location of civil rights organizations and people of color, most citizens would consider the offering to be outrageous. And rightly so.

As it happened, a perfect parallel to that sort of intimidation bordering on incitement was proudly proffered late Erev Shabbos/Shavuos by BDS Boston, an anti-Israel group, which shared something an anonymous group had prepared and labeled the “Mapping Project.” It is a color-coded, interactive map of Israel-supporting and Jewish groups, institutions and individuals across Massachusetts.

BDS Boston, a local arm of the wider Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, says it wants to call attention to “Zionist leaders,” politicians, financial groups and media companies (in which group it includes the Boston Globe) that it sees as providing “local institutional support for the colonization of Palestine.”

The list of entities includes places of worship, Jewish schools, towns with considerable Jewish populations, and politicians’ offices.
The organizers said they want to “dismantle” the targeted individuals and groups. “Every entity,” the map’s homepage helpfully explains, “has an address, every network can be disrupted.”

Even if we were living at a time of waning, not waxing, anti-Semitic violence, such a map would be wildly irresponsible. In times like ours, it is nothing short of despicable—a virtual invitation to haters to act on their hatreds.

And, amusingly, like so many mindless radicals, the people behind the “Mapping Project” seem unaware of the incandescent irony inherent in their self-description: a “multi-generational collective of activists and organizers on the land of the Massachusett, Pawtucket, Naumkeag, and other tribal nations (Boston, Cambridge, and surrounding areas).”
This, from folks who consider Arabs to be the indigenous residents of the land from which the Jewish people were exiled and which has been known for millennia as Eretz Yisrael. The malevolent mappers should consider abandoning New England and returning to the old one, or to from wherever their forebears emerged.

The upside of the story is that the bald effort to target Jews and their institutions has drawn broad condemnation from across the political spectrum.

From people like progressive Congresspeople Ayanna Pressley (“It is not acceptable to target or make vulnerable Jewish institutions or organizations, full stop”), Ritchie Torres (“Scapegoating is a common symptom of anti-Semitism, which at its core is a conspiracy theory”) and Jake Auchincloss (“[the map taps] into millennia-old anti-Semitic tropes about nefarious Jewish wealth, control, conspiracy, media connections and political string-pulling”) to conservative Republicans like Lee Zeldin (“The sick and twisted lies being pushed by the Mapping Project are part of an anti-Semitic movement that must be identified, called out and crushed in all forms”).

Massachusetts Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, for their part, said in a joint statement that they “strongly condemn anti-Semitism and will continue working for the safety of all vulnerable people at home and abroad.”

It is worthwhile, though, for elected officials, and all decent Americans, to understand just why the imagined scenario with which this column opened, about a racist group sharing a map of civil rights groups and people of color, is so obviously odious.

That would be because the point of that “map project” would clearly be an expression of animus not toward some political movement but toward a group of people, non-Caucasians. And, likewise, while the BDS movement claims to embrace a political agenda, its true and ugly colors are blazingly revealed in its Boston affiliate’s map.

Because its targets include a Jewish arts group and a Jewish high school, a Jewish newspaper and a congregational network. Not to mention a Jewish philanthropy that directs funds to mental health, homelessness prevention and refugee resettlement, and an academic institution, the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies.

So who exactly does BDS consider “the enemy”? Take three guesses. You shouldn’t need more than one.

None other than Martin Luther King Jr. said it clearly and succinctly in 1967, when he admonished a young man for making a derogatory comment about Zionists by responding: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism.”