Spanish government cancels teachers’ tolerance seminar by BDS group

BDS Pais Valencia was responsible for excluding American Jewish singer Matisyahu from music festival for being a ‘Zionist’

By Cnaan Liphshiz 19 May 2020, 9:34 pm 1

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Cnaan Liphshiz was a Jewish World reporter at The Times of Israel

Students and their teacher walk past a street art mural on the facade of a house in Fanzara near Castellon de la Plana, on December 15, 2016. (JOSE JORDAN/AFP via Getty Images)

JTA — A regional government in Spain canceled its teacher training contract with an organization that is widely regarded as anti-Semitic.

On Monday, the government of Valencia pulled offline the registration form for the training by the BDS Pais Valencia organization titled “Solidarity and human rights. Learning to teach against hatred and racism (Judeophobia, Islamophobia, and Palestine-Israel).”

The 20-day online seminar for teachers was scheduled to begin on June 8.

The government did not explain its decision to cancel the seminar, which had provoked international protests by Jewish groups and ACOM, a pro-Israel organization in Spain.

In 2015, BDS Pais Valencia initiated what resulted in the exclusion of the American singer Matisyahu from a music festival because he’s a “Zionist.”

Illustrative: Demonstrators protesting outside the Spanish government delegation in Barcelona, October 20, 2015. (Albert Llop/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images via JTA)

ACOM on Twitter compared the seminar to having “a Nazi lecturing against racism, or a member of the Ku Klux Klan speaking on racial persecution.”

The Anti-Defamation League and the European Jewish Congress also protested the government’s sponsoring of the seminar.

Multiple courts in Spain, including in Valencia, have declared the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, against Israel as a racist or discriminatory endeavor.