A report issued by Christian Middle East Watch and UK Lawyers for Israel asserts that boycott campaigns against Veolia have been a resounding failure. Veolia has been repeatedly targeted by the BDS cru activists for daring to provide transportation services in Israel and in the disputed territories.
(BDS'ers lie? Really?? Who'd ever have guessed?)
From the JC.com
David Lewis, the lawyer who led the project’s research, submitted 18 Freedom of Information requests to local councils that had been targeted by BDS campaigners, asking them how contracts on which Veolia had bid were awarded.
In every response, he was told that all contracts were decided for sound commercial reasons despite claims by boycotters that they had successfully pressured councils not to contract with Veolia.
Some of the councils did do business with the company...
The report concludes that local authorities have acted correctly in ignoring political pressure, and additionally that the emotive rhetoric used by BDS campaigns is unhelpful and often misleading.
Nick Gray, director of Christian Middle East Watch, said: “The BDS campaign is very vocal, very active, and very little is done to combat what they do. This report is the beginning of a way to fight back.”
From the Report's Executive Summary:
Our research included 17 situations where BDS campaigns had pressured local authorities to break their legal obligations in spending public money by asking them to deny Veolia the opportunity to bid for contracts or even to break existing contractual arrangements. We found that the BDS campaigns had failed in every case to achieve their aims.
In order to evaluate the true results of the BDS Veolia campaign in the face of dramatic claims of success at every turn, we sent freedom of information (FOI) requests to 18 councils that (a) had been the subject of a local BDS anti-Veolia campaign, and/or (b) had recently either accepted or rejected a Veolia bid for a future contract, and/or (c) were due to consider a Veolia bid in the near future, and/or (d) had voted on an anti-Veolia resolution, and/or (e) were the subject of claims of success by the BDS movement. Our FOI requests revealed that every one of these contracts was decided on straight commercial grounds and that political considerations were not applied in rejection of Veolia’s bids.
In spite of the lies, the BDS campaign against Veolia has been an abject failure. What was it that Einstein siad about doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?
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