Political, economic and cultural boycotts of unsavoury regimes have worked against South Africa and others, like Libya at present. We have seen many musicians, academics, politicians and laymen drawing a line in the sand vi-a-vis Israel. In South Africa, Johannesburg University has just cut all ties with Ben Gurion university. All our trade unions have cut ties and various other celebrities for eg Bishop Tutu and even our very courageous Judge Golstone was willing to speak up against injustice. He is now persona non grata in the local Jewish (read Zionist) community for speaking the truth. However the net tightens and in a few years when the Israelis are forced to compromise you can look back and say either you were part of the solution, or complicit. Both Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan labelled Nelson Mandela a terrorist. Who's the respected humanitarian now? In short, dont talk nice while stealing a peoples land and culture.

On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 10:38 AM, Joan Goma <jrgoma@gmail.com> wrote:

If they want boycott Israelis extremists or Palestinian extremists they should support Wikimania in Haifa.

Wikimania is about free knowledge and free knowledge will make more free Palestinians and Israelis as well as all of us.

Message: 1
Date: Fri, 01 Apr 2011 01:42:26 -0400
From: dror1975@icqmail.com
Subject: Re: [Wikimania-l] Boycott Wikimania 2011
To: wikimania-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Message-ID: <8CDBE46B7379139-14D0-1DCC4@Webmail-d112.sysops.aol.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Just to give you some background on the issue - There is currently an aggressive campaign by certain pro-Palestinian groups to boycott Israel. The campaigners are well organized and they will probably continue to send messages to this mailing list. The campaign is political, however it is not supported by any government, nor is it supported by the Palestinian Authority or any of the moderate Palestinian organizations. After about four years of growing cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians (despite the remaining disagreements, which are hard to resolve), there are people and organizations who try to pour fuel on the extinguishing fire. Unfortunately, they do not respect this forum and its participants.

I would also like to note that when Alexandria was rightfully chosen to host Wikimania (and its team did a wonderful work), there were Israelis among the bid team and the sponsors. The question of the Arab-Israeli conflict was never raised and it was deemed totally irrelevant. When Wikimania was held in Taiwan, I personally called the Taiwanese representations in Tel Aviv and Amman to check if they can issue a visa to an Egyptian citizen who wanted to participate and had difficulties as there was no Taiwanese representation in Egypt.

I hope this is the last message in this subject.

Dror K

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