“The so-called War on Terror is a criminal fraud, designed to frighten Americans and the citizens of its allies into supporting systematic violations of international law. It was from the outset Islamophobic both in intention and in the wars of aggression it has been used to justify,” said Prof. Michael Keefer in an exclusive interview with Fars News Agency.

On the US special relationship with Israel and Washington’s unconditional support for the Tel Aviv regime, Prof. Keefer says, “The US policy of seeking to dominate Eurasia through control of Middle Eastern and central-Asian hydrocarbon resources aligns with Israel’s concern to ensure that no Middle Eastern state has the power to interfere with its policies of continued colonization of Palestinian land.”

“The powerful and well-funded Israel lobby supports these policies—though there is evidence of a growing alienation among young Jews both from this lobby and from the state of Israel,” he added.

Michael Keefer is a professor emeritus at the University of Guelph’s School of English and Theater Studies. He is a former president of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English. He studied at the Royal Military College of Canada, the University of Toronto, and Sussex University, and has held research fellowships at Sussex University in the UK and at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt Universität, Greifswald, Germany.

He has published widely on English Renaissance literature and early modern philosophy, and has also written widely on issues of contemporary politics and cultural politics. His books include an edition of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (2008), Antisemitism Real and Imagined (2010), and Sabotaging Democracy, a forthcoming study of electoral fraud in Canada’s 2011 federal election. He has written numerous articles about the US foreign policy, the War on Terror, Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories and the plight of the Palestinian nation since 1948.

FNA had the opportunity to conduct an extensive interview with Prof. Keefer and ask him questions on the Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions movement against Israel, the influence of the Israeli lobby on the US government, the excuse of anti-Semitism and how it is used to vilify the critics of Israel and the US foreign policy in the Middle East. What follows is the text of the interview

Q: One of your recent articles has touched upon the Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions movement against Israel, which is apparently gaining momentum across the world. However, it seems that the Western governments will resist the movement and won’t allow their firms and companies to implement economic sanctions against Israel. What’s your view on that? Do you think that the Western companies and firms have the readiness and freedom to impose sanctions against Israel over its policies in the Occupied Territories and the Gaza Strip?

A: Corporations are not moral agents; they act according to calculations of profit and loss. But they can be persuaded by public pressure to withdraw from economic activity and investment in the Occupied West Bank and in Israel. Boycott campaigners have been able to prevent companies implicated in the infrastructure of the occupation from winning contracts for similar work in Europe; other companies are becoming increasingly concerned about damage to their reputation, and hence their sales, in North America, Europe, and elsewhere. And in Norway, the Netherlands, and the US, large pension funds have begun to respond to demands that they withdraw investments from Israel. This is the same process that led to the collapse of apartheid in South Africa.

Most Western governments, meanwhile, are providing ever more flagrant displays of the same hypocrisy they showed decades ago in dealing with South African apartheid. Israel is in open violation of many instruments of international law, among them the Fourth Geneva Convention, whose first article requires signatories “to respect and ensure respect for” that convention “in all circumstances.” Western governments can’t stop corporations from withdrawing from Israel, but some of them (France, followed in this by the US, Australia and Canada) have been attempting to criminalize the human rights activism of BDS supporters as an “incitement of hatred.”

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