Anti-Israel demonstrators
Anti-Israel demonstratorsReuters

Anti-Israel advocates are ramping up their rhetoric this week in a new promotional "trailer" for the events of "Israeli Apartheid Week 2014." The annual week-long event, starting in the last week of February, will see opponents of Israel protesting in dozens of nations around the world.

The short video calls on viewers to take part in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to delegitimize Israel by pressuring the Jewish state over its alleged "racism" in not letting descendants of Arabs who left the country around the War of Independence in 1948 "return."

The wrongful accusations of apartheid were disproved last September by Reverend Kenneth Meshoe, a member of the Parliament of South Africa and founder of the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP). Meshoe argued "anyone who knows what apartheid really is and still makes such a claim [about Israel] should be told to their faces that they are lying."

The reverend noted in South Africa basic rights, such as voting, were denied on the basis of race, whereas Arab citizens enjoy full rights. "Apartheid was very painful," Meshoe recalls, "anyone who claims Israel is an apartheid state is actually minimizing the pain of apartheid."

"Israeli Apartheid Week 2014" the trailer can be seen here:

The film shows various leaders of the anti-Israel BDS campaign, including left-wing Canadian Jew Naomi Klein, Roger Waters of the band Pink Floyd, former South African President Nelson Mandela, and physicist Stephen Hawking.

Aside from the fundamental flaw that Israel is not an "apartheid state," President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz noted this Tuesday that the boycotts "do not solve anything."

Many governments are starting to take notice and act against the discrimination: last Thursday a bill was introduced in the US House of Representatives that proposes revoking all federal funding for any US academic institution that decides to boycott Israel.

A major failure of the BDS movement occurred recently when actress Scarlett Johansson stepped down as an ambassador for Oxfam, after the group tried to force her to boycott Israel by not appearing in a commercial for Israeli company SodaStream.