There are many ways to say the Boulder-Nablus Sister City Project is an ill-conceived way to create person to person understanding, a stated goal of the sister city concept.

In reality, BNSCP, like the whole Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions Movement (BDS), is an attempt to SO isolate Israel and the Jewish Diaspora that they will commit to a set of policies and politics that will weaken the security of the Jewish state and enable a military solution in favor of the Palestinians.

What the Palestinians and their friends in the West need is a transmission belt for their propaganda into the daily lives of the American people. The sister city concept is one way of institutionalizing this strategy. It is their hope to pilot such projects in more progressive cities such as Boulder and make them mainstream with other cities later.

So, when Mahmoud Abbas, leader of Palestinian Authority, goes before the United Nations Assembly and declares that the PA does not spread hatred of Israel and Jews, we can assert boldly that Abbas is not correct and is likely deliberately lying. But such lies spread confusion among the American people because he seems so determined and forward about this assertion.

However,

The problem for Boulder goes beyond the problem that this proposal abrogates its own goals of a sister city project. As a transmission belt for Palestinian propaganda, it will cause divisions within the population of the city, the infusion of security problems such as the recent terrorist Tsarnaev brothers living in Boston, and the eventual rise of a qualitatively different form of anti-Semitism.

The writer Hannah Arendt conceptualized for us the banality of evil after the experience of the Holocaust. It goes beyond that. Evil is more than banal, it is the pleasure principle. Jews have the peculiar position, like the Afro-American population, of a rather strange attraction of evil to gain pleasure in subduing those that are conceived, not as different, but merely vulnerable. It is the result of the pleasure people can derive from the lack of protection afforded Jews. Without Israel, Jews are more vulnerable, and without the Jewish Diaspora, Israel is more vulnerable.

The well-known director Lars von Trier conceptualized this kind of thinking and sociology in his film, “Dogville,” which was first shown at the Telluride Film Festival in 2004. I am not speaking only in personal terms.

The Radical Islamists understand this, and their American friends understand this as well. No reasoned argument will suffice. Stripping Jews of their protection, isolating them and even killing them is a sad principle that dominates the politics of the Middle East.

I am asking the City Council to consider these points and vote against the Boulder Nablus Sister City Proposal.  In that regard, I submit evidence of Palestinian anti-Semitism and bad faith bargaining in the form of a report from Palestinian Media Watch.

Stan Kreis