Oakland Block the Boat Fail. 5th Anniversary edition. And Zim keeps on Truckin.

San Francisco's Arab Resource Organizing Center is celebrating the 5th anniversary of their failure to permanently prevent Zim cargo from off-loading in Oakland.

The  2014 action, dubbed "Block the boat" was a triumph of bullying, ultimately achieving nothing.  Zim trailers still abound in the Bay area.

Oakland Block the boat fail

Oakland Block the boat fail

Oakland Block the boat fail

Even in the tumultuous world of international shipping, with the on again, off again tariffs, Zim's doing just fine financially, with total revenue of $834.3 million in Q2 2019, a 3.9 % increase from last year. Thats in spite of the best efforts of the BDS holes.

In the 2nd quarter of 2019, ZIM carried 731 thousand TEUs, its' second highest carried volume ever.

Zim's doing quite well, thank you

AROC's narrative and the reality of their attempt to keep Oakland free of the scourge of olives and artichoke hearts are far removed

Rather than an action reflective of "activists working in close partnership with members of ILWU Local 10, "  as claimed by AROC, the gates to the docks were physically blocked, with activists using their bodies, their bikes, and their children to prevent workers from uploading the ships.

Yeah, nothing says "close partnership" more than yelling obscenities.

Oakland Block the Boat Bullying

Is this what solidarity looks like?
                                                                 

AROC and  the Block the Boat campaign made it clear that the "B" in BDS stood for bullying.

Its not surprising that AROC would consider this event as one of the "most successful" in US history.  Sound and fury, signifying nothing.  Wishing them many more such "victories"

Read what really happened 5 years ago at the Oakland dock here: 

No Solidarity in Oakland, as protesters bully Longshoremen

Block the Boat has morphed into Operation Annoy Zim's Customers

Lies the BDS holes tell.

Lies the BDS holes told.

Via Noura Khouri.

She tweets: "2014  will forever go down in history as when we stopped Zim from coming to the US."

No, it won't Noura.

Zim Shipping still has a robust American presence , in spite of your best efforts.

Just this week, the Zim Istanbul off loaded in New York harbor.(That's in the US, Noura) before moving down to Norfolk VA (That's also in the US, Noura)

Again, Noura Khouri proves that in the absence of any concrete victory,  BDS holes are more than happy to lie. 

Seattle: Block the Boat fail

The Seattle block the boat party fared about as well as the Tacoma action, with the targeted Zim Chicago docking and unloading right on schedule

From our neighbors to the north, via the Mike Report

Following embarrassing efforts in the Bay Area and a complete flop in Tacoma, the block the boat circus finally made it to the Port of Seattle's Terminal 18 on Harbor Island where the Zim Chicago was scheduled to dock this afternoon.

Demonstrators began to arrive around 3:45pm and at their height numbered about seventy. What they lacked in numbers though, they made up for in unrestrained obnoxiousness. The pro-Hamas activists taunted and provoked police officers and harassed the hard working truckers and union workers who depend on the port for their livelihood.

Screaming in a glass shattering high decibel voice, a woman self identified as Mary Jane ordered truckers to turn off their vehicles and to honor their picket line. Her pleas were universally ignored as truckers and dock workers pressed through the thin cordon. Eventually law enforcement offered the terror-groupies the choice of getting off the street or facing arrest. One chose arrest, the rest reluctantly complied.

Officers were pelted with epithets, one protester screamed "what the hell are you doing you f*cking pig!" Another offered a police officer the one finger salute.

Read it all here. (Pssst. He's got photos!)

 

And what did the Block the boaters do in the face of incontrovertible failure?  They declared victory.

Block the Boat Fail: Unleashing the scourge of red lentils upon the world

Its all about the "occupation", they’ll tell you. 

And that’s why dock workers and longshoremen at the Port of Oakland were harassed for four days.

All to prevent crates of sparkling wine, olives and ceramic tiles from Spain, cheese and rice from Italy and organic red lentils from Turkey from being unloaded from the Zim Piraeus. Or perhaps the fanatics were targeting the irrigation equipment and solar heaters that happened to be manufactured in Israel.

More likely the protesters simply didn’t care. 

They didn't care that the Piraeus ZIM Piraeus wasn’t Israeli-owned or flagged. They didn’t care that ZIM America contracts with a Greek company Costamare to manage and operate ZIM Piraeus. Slightly more than 30% of Zim is owned by Israeli interests and that was good enough for them

For years, anti-Israel activists have been struggling to grow their movement, to find linkages with progressive causes. Unions were a natural target, and the International Longshore Workers Union Local 10 has been courted by the haters for years. What role the union and the local in particular played in this fiasco are yet to be determined.