Intersectionality: BDS professor links campus rape to Israel

Simona Sharoni is a professor, Israel-hater, BDSer and was one of those who gave Rachel Corrie college credit to go to Israel with the ISM.

Her niche in the loony Left world is to say that (because of "intersectionality") there is a link between Israel's existence and rape on college campuses.

While the idea of intersectionality had some merit when it was first defined, nowadays it is a catch-all buzzword to mean that the Jewish state is the very definition of evil.

From the far left Alternet site:

Why Feminists Should Care About the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Dr. Simona Sharoni is a feminist scholar, researcher, and activist who has focused her career on the gendered nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Currently a Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Plattsburgh, Dr. Sharoni champions the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement...

In her recent academic work, Dr. Sharoni has been exploring the relevancy of the BDS campaign to a praxis of transnational feminist solidarity.

A few weeks ago, Dr. Sharoni spoke at an event at Columbia University, co-hosted by both Palestine student activist groups and No Red Tape, the anti-sexual assault group launched in January 2014.

Dr. Sharoni asks questions like, “What do Israeli Apartheid and the campus sexual assault crisis have in common? How can a feminist intersectional analysis help us understand violence at the heart of both cases? How can we use this comparative analysis to advocate for survivors of violence and to demand accountability for perpetrators?”

Aviva Stahl: Let’s start at the beginning. Why is BDS or what’s happening with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a feminist issue?

Dr. Simona Sharoni: Firstly, there is the fact that there is a direct connection between the violence of the occupation and sexual and gender based violence against Palestinian and Israeli Jewish women. The highly militarized conflict has gender dimensions.

For example, during my military service, we started raising the issue of the connection between the violence of the occupation and violence against women, because in Israel, men who serve, even after their mandatory military service, have their weapons in their home until they’re 55. There were many murders of women—intimate partner violence, which they used to call in Israel crimes of passion—that were actually done with weapons provided by the state.

By this logic, cookbook publishers are linked to women who stab their husbands with kitchen knives.

...BDS is a movement that emerged in response to a call for solidarity. Palestinian women’s groups were part of that broad civil society group that called for solidarity.

So feminists should be Zionist because of women-run Zionist organizations that have been around for over a hundred years.

Aviva: Can you talk a little bit about some of the parallels between Israeli Apartheid and the campus sexual assault crisis?

Dr. Sharoni: Power is made invisible in the narration of both the Palestinian-Israel conflict and campus sexual assault. Focus is placed on the relationship, not on the system.

In other words, it’s not a conflict between two parties on an equal playing field, even when it’s a healthy relationship. For example when we talk about what’s happening on college campuses—sexism and rape culture, interfere with [that possibility for equality.]

As for Israelis and Palestinians—the discourse is that there’s a “cycle of violence.” And of course it’s not a cycle of violence. There’s a history of colonization, and a settler-colonial movement—that sowed the seeds for this conflict. So the violence stems from that, it doesn’t stem from, “this side did this to the other side.”

We have to highlight these structural power inequalities and the way that violence is embedded in them.

I guess police, corporate executives, government officials and teachers are inherently prone to violence because they do not have an equal relationship with the people that they have power over.

Intellectual-sounding arguments fall apart very easily when the same arguments cannot work in other contexts. What is the common denominator? The fact that a lot of people hate Israel and need to justify their hate ex-post facto!

It’s a feminist idea, based on intersectional feminist analysis that views gender oppression as systemic and intertwined with other forms of systemic oppression. Postcolonial feminism addresses specifically feminist critiques of settler colonialism. The problem is that for many liberal Jewish feminists, the idea of treating Zionism as a settler colonial project is new and challenges how they were brought up to view Israel.

If we re-conceptualize the injustice of Palestine, and reframe it by taking an intersectional look at multiple oppressions and multiple struggles, then it makes sense. If you build a movement that moves away from narrow identity politics to coalition politics, you’re going to have people who are not comfortable, because they still have this single issue, one-identity understanding of the struggle.

But Jews who are the victims of antisemitic violence - like yesterday's bus bombing - cannot claim to be intersectionalized with feminism, even though there are plenty of women victims.

Why not? Because, (handwaving, yadda-yadda), Israel!

Here Sharoni almost admits that the real reason to link the issues is a strategy to delegitimize Israel, not because there is any merit in her laughable arguments.

Aviva: What is the importance of broad-based solidarity movements?

Dr. Sharoni: I think strategically, making the connection between the two struggles [Israeli Apartheid and campus sexual assault] makes sense. We do need to move from this narrowly defined strategies of identity politics—the idea that the group that is most hurt, and most targeted, has the burden of organizing…

The problem with how "intersectionality" is used nowadays is that it can be used as a bludgeon against anything. It is a fraudulent idea because the same logic can be used to come to opposite conclusions - in fact, opposite conclusions that make far more sense. So for example, the widespread and well-known cases of sexual abuse against female anti-Israel activists by Palestinians would indicate a far more direct relationship between Palestinians and rape.

An anti-Zionist professor at UCLA is accused of sexual assault - yet using the "logic" of people like Sharoni, this should indicate a much stronger link between anti-Zionism and rape than she claims Israel has.

Here's one more "intersectional" relationship that is stronger than any of the absurd theories that Sharoni espouses:

She is one of the mentors who awarded Rachel Corrie college credit to go to "Palestine" to protest Israel. If it wasn't for her, Corrie would be alive today. She is linked to Rachel Corrie's death!

Murderer!

See how easy it is to come up with linkages when you don't have to worry about things like logic, causality or consistency?

This all shows that the anti-Israel academic crowd are frauds.

It is no surprise that Sharoni is one of the frauds who signed a letter to McGraw Hill asking them to reinstate the Map that Lies in a textbook that had no reason to refer to it to begin with.

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