"ALL CAPS IN DEFENSE OF LIBERTY IS NO VICE."

Monday, November 19, 2018

The AirBNB company turns anti-Israel

Looks like there's another company giving themselves a bad image by joining the BDS insanity:
On Monday, AirBNB, the home-rental company that is often used by tourists to rent apartments in locations around the globe, announced that it would not allow Jewish settlements to be listed in Judea and Samaria. AirBNB stated:

We concluded that we should remove listings in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank that are at the core of the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.

This is the sheerest form of corporate anti-Semitism in recent memory. Not only did AirBNB specifically target “Israeli settlements,” according to Professor Eugene Kontorovich of George Mason Law, they’ve announced that they will only disallow listings in Israeli settlements when those listings are owned by Jews. In other words, if a Jew owns an apartment in East Jerusalem, that won’t be allowed for listing; if an Arab owns an apartment in the same neighborhood, it’s fine for listing.
Well now everyone concerned can withdraw investments in the company and certainly not use it for research. How many of these businesses are giving such awful impressions of themselves now, I have no idea, but they should by all means be avoided.

Update: Knesset member Michael Oren's called for boycotting AirBNB in response, and this article notes:
Oren said on Monday that no one should use the low-cost service, because its policy is “the very definition of anti-Semitism.”
Hmm, good that they remind us this is a business situated in increasingly leftist California, and in SF, which is one of the worst places where leftism spawns in the same state. This could explain a thing or two about them.
Likewise, Israeli Tourism Minister Yariv Levin demanded the management of the Airbnb site cancel the move.

“This is a miserable decision and a disgraceful surrender by the company,” Levin said. He has ordered ministry staff to implement measures to restrict the activity of Airbnb throughout Israel, while encouraging tourism and hospitality throughout Judea and Samaria.

Strategic Affairs and Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan called the move a “submission to the anti-Semitic BDS organizations… a choice to take a racist political stance against some of Israel’s citizens.”
It's very sick what the company's doing, and they shouldn't even be doing business in Israel if that's how they're going to manage themselves.

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