Boulder is on our minds this weekend with the Boulder Jewish Festival taking place Sunday on the Pearl Street Mall. It’s always fun to see the Front Range Jewish communities come together to celebrate all things Jewish in the city that is serenely beautiful, high energy and funky, all at the same time.
Boulder is also on our minds this month as the Boulder Nablus Sister City Project is set to present its eponymous proposal to Boulder City Council.
This is a real head-scratcher.
How can a community like Boulder, known for acceptance and peaceful coexistence, seek a formal relationship with Nablus, whose children, from a very early age, are taught that Jews are “Allah’s enemies, the sons of pigs” who defiled the Koran and Jerusalem, and who “murdered children,” “cut off their limbs” and “raped the women in the city square”?
Why the disconnect between the “love and peace” vibe of Boulder and the PA-funded hatred permeating the schools and TV programs in Nablus and other Palestinian cities?
The Boulder Nablus Sister City Project (BNSCP) website states the rationale of its supporters:
“Both Arabs and Muslims are misrepresented and maligned by negative stereotyping in the US and we hope, through meaningful ex-changes, to offer the citizens of Boulder the opportunity to form friendships and to put a human face to the people of Palestine.”
Yes, the people of Palestine are human beings with the same basic needs of human beings everywhere, including Boulder. But they are teaching their children — at an age when they should be learning how to tie their shoes, recite the alphabet and mind their manners — that Christians and Jews are “inferior and smaller, more cowardly and despised” and the “enemies of destiny.” This is not the kind of human face that makes for warm, genuine friendships with tolerant, diverse people, like those in Boulder.
Opponents link the BNSCP to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement as another attempt to isolate the Jewish Diaspora. They fear that in the process of forging personal and official relationships between the citizens of Boulder and Nablus, the haters of Jews and Israel will transmit their propaganda to people of the West, and further isolate Israel.
This might not be the agenda of the average Nablus citizen, but it is the agenda of the Nablus leaders who, through terror against their own citizens, will control the Sister City relationship. It is not hard to see why Nablus officials want to reach out to the peace-loving community of Boulder, the home to thousands of Jews who support Israel.
The BNSCP is well intentioned — if we take its stated rationale at face value — but wrong. At best the supporters are idealistic and naive, enamored with the Palestinian underdog status. But the leaders of the underdogs are haters, and stand in opposition to everything Boulder stands for.
Copyright © 2013 by the Intermountain Jewish News
