Participants at the first public conference for pro-Israel activists to be held next Monday in the European Parliament in Brussels are expected to call for the European Union to outlaw the anti-Israel BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) which, they argue, is a proponent of hate speech and anti-Semitic rhetoric and whose final goal is to deligitimize and bring about the end of the Jewish state.

‘’Anti-Semitism is as old as the world, and much like the ugly flu virus, it continues to mutate and resist all efforts to stamp it out. BDS is such a mutation. It places special emphasis on the State of Israel,’’ Alex Benjamin, Director of Europe Israel Public Affairs (EIPA), a leading Brussels-based pro-Israel advocacy group, told European Jewish Press, which organizes the conference in partnership with the Israeli Mission to the European Union and in cooperation with the European Coalition for Israel and

‘’For us at EIPA and our speakers, BDS is clearly anti-Semitic. Its blatant Israeli hating is at times masked and dressed up as concern for human rights and free speech. But we will expose BDS for the hate-mongers and anti-semites that they are and working towards EU laws to have them branded as such,’’ said Benjamin.

‘’We seek at EU Institutional level, not only to expose the movement, but for concrete EU action to be taken to hold to account, and to outlaw such vile, disruptive, disingenuous and divisive language, and those who perpetuate it,’’ he told EJP.

He added:’’ We are all for free speech, after all Israel is the only real democracy in the Middle East, but we must all draw the line in the sand when free speech is used as a tool to isolate, harass and differentiate. This is the central theme of the conference.’’

The conference, titled ‘’Include, Invest, Involve, 3’’i’s to counter the BDS, will be held in the prestigious Yehudi Menuhin Hall of the European Parliament in the presence of guests from the EU and Israel. ‘’The conference will be a discussion on why Inclusion, Investment and Involvement is a much better model than the divisiveness and isolationism of the BDS movement,’’ explains EIPA’s Director.

Guest speakers will include Israeli Minister for Social Equality Gila Gamliel, Deputy Speaker of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, Yehiel ‘Hillik’ Bar, Member of the Knesset Yoav Kish and German MEP Elmar Brok, Chairman of the European Pariament’s Foreign Affairs Committee and member of the European People’s Party (EPP), the largest in the parliament.

In France, the Cour de Cassation, the country’s highest court of appeals, ruled that promoters of a boycott oagainst Israel through the BDS movement are guilty of inciting hate or discrimination. Several of them have been convicted. ‘’BDS is illegal in France,’’ said Pascal Markowicz, head of the legal department of the CRIF, the umbrella group of French Jewish communities.

In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party (CDU) has passed a resolution opposing the BDS movement because the anti-Israel action is anti-Semitic. The CDU likened NDS to the National Socialists who boycotted Jews in the 1930s. The party said BDS ‘’dresses up anti-Semitism in the new clothes of the 21st century as anti-Zionism.’’