Sanctions.

There has for last few years been a great deal of talk about academic boycotts against Israel and I have always felt that they were simply token gestures that say “you know what, we don’t like what you’re doing here” in such a manner that the targeted party must take notice but not in such a manner that it does any actual damage to them. They are boycotts not sanctions they do no real harm and yet the word racist has recently started to be bandied about. This is at a time when sanctions have been levelled against the Palestinian people on the basis that they have voted in the wrong government a government that refuses to recognise a country that also refuses to recognise them and yet has no such sanctions against them. You can argue all you like about the relative hypocrisy of this but what one can not argue about is the fact that men woman and children are dying because there hospitals have no money for medicine or anything else for that matter the fact of the matter is that these sanctions are killing. If suggesting a boycott against Israeli academics is racist and in some ways it may well be, then what new word must we invent to describe the barbarity of these sanctions?