More bad news for the BDS-holes – at least of the British variety. A new poll indicates strong opposition in the UK to the BDS movement.
What effect are these celebrities having in the fight for British hearts and minds?
Some insight can be found in the largest-ever poll on the popularity of the BDS campaign in Britain, the results of which were published Wednesday.
It doesn’t look too good for BDS.
In the poll of 4,005 British respondents, only 10 percent agreed that Israel should be boycotted, compared to 46 percent who disagreed, according to the Ipsos MORI polling company. It conducted the survey in 2016 and 2017 for the Institute for Jewish Policy Research and the Community Security Trust.
Significantly, another 42 percent said they either had no opinion or did not know, with the remaining 2 percent saying they would rather not express an opinion.
And the news get worse for the BDS-holes:
Another key finding came from the report’s attempt (the most comprehensive so far) to tackle the contentious claims that BDS is motivated by anti-Semitism. Boycott advocates say their response is merely to Israel’s human rights violations and control of Palestinian land.
In addition to being asked about BDS and apartheid, Respondents to the poll were asked also to agree or disagree with a set of assertions regarded as anti-Semitic, including “Jews think they are better than others,” “Jews get rich at the expense of others” and “Jews exploit Holocaust victimhood for their own purposes.”
The respondents who supported BDS and the apartheid analogy were significantly likelier than others to agree with these “more traditional anti-Jewish tropes,” the report said.
Among supporters of a boycott, only 5 percent endorsed none of the anti-Semitic tropes. By contrast, 58 percent endorsed five tropes or more. Among those who indicated that they think Israel is an apartheid state, 16 percent endorsed no anti-Semitic trope, while 47 percent endorsed six anti-Semitic tropes or more.
It “would be wrong to regard agreement with either the apartheid or boycott statements as being anti-Jewish under all circumstances,” the report’s authors wrote, noting that 16 percent of the respondents who agreed with the apartheid statement displayed no anti-Jewish feelings. But, they added, “the fact remains that agreement with either statement positively correlates with anti-Jewish sentiment.”
And I’ll just leave this here:
To Mark Gardner, the communications director of the Community Security Trust – British Jewry’s watchdog and security group – these and other nuances show that the British celebrities promoting BDS “are largely irrelevant, despite the impression some of us may have about what they represent.”
