Music legends, such as Elvis Costello, Santana and Pete Seeger just came out in support of the movement for divestment and boycott of the Jewish State. The Swedish best selling writer Henning Mankell is preventing the Hebrew translation of his books.
South Africa’s University of Johannesburg just voted to sever links with Israel’s Ben Gurion University. It seems like a Nazi fantasy, but these are teachers who have spoken of removing any Israeli presence from academic institutions, as well as any scientific cooperation with Israel.
Today there are many Israeli targets of the growing boycott movement: Teva, Agrexco, Intel, Delta Galil, Better Place and Sabra. But nothing is attracting this high tech antisemithic demonization more than Ahava, the famous Israeli cosmetics company.
The Ahava shop in Covent Garden, London, was just closed by the company after years of protests and demonstrations. The boycott was starving the shop’s activities. The peacenik organizations that filled the streets of Europe during the years of the Iraqi war have found in Ahava their new ideological enemy. Ahava, which in Hebrew means “love”, has factories located in the kibbutz Mitzpe Shalem,at the Dead Sea.
The company’s problems began in 2002, when the superstore Harrods in London banned Ahava. In the last two years, hundreds of Western women in bikinis, belonging to the femminist association Code Pink, protested in front of Ahava shops in Washington and in the European capitals. These women are usually streaked with mud, some feauturing the words “Ahava is a dirty business”.
The first symbol of the boycott campaign against Israel, the Caterpillar company, was far removed from public opinion and public consciousness. Ahava ,however, is the perfect target. It deals with beauty and vanity, digging deeply intp the flawed and rotten conscience of the European “chattering classes”.
Ahava works well as a scapegoat.
It doesn’t matter that two-thirds of the Dead Sea belongs to Israel.
It doesn’t matter that Mitzpe Shalom is on the Israeli side.
Ahava became the symbol of the anti Israeli hysteria. The slogan of the campaign is fashionable and catchy: “Stolen Beauty”.
Ahava is also topping the list of Israeli products boycotted by the Christian liberal churches. Even the Dutch government promoted an investigation to determine whether Ahava should enjoy tax privileges granted to foreign goods. The “Sex and the City” actress Kristin Davis was suspended by the humanitarian group “Oxfam International” after she unknowingly waded into Middle East politics by joining an Ahava advertisement campaign.
Sixty percent of Ahava’s capital is held by the kibbutz movement, the symbol of leftist collectivism. Arabs work in Ahava’s laboratories and their jobs are now at risk due to this growing boycott.
Ahava’s haters don’t want to “end occupation”. They want to strangle Israel’s economy.
In the past the blood libels were focused on stories of Jews seeking to kidnap Christian and Muslim children before Passover in order to murder them and use their blood for matza. Then came the modern twist which was to accuse Israel of distributing drug-laced chewing gum and candy, intended to kill children and to make Arab women sexually corrupt. Now the mud of antisemitism and anti-Jewish paranoia is personified by these satanic Ahava body lotion tubes.