Pet Shop Boys make a principled stand against the BSD movement

I’ve always liked the Pet Shop Boys, an 80s band that was part of the background soundtrack to my early 20s. I especially liked this song:

The Pet Shop Boys just went up enormously in my estimation by taking a principled stand against the fundamentally antisemitic Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement against Israel, whose proponents pretend Israel is the new South Africa. Although, I agree with Evelyn Gordon that Neil Tennant, the half of the duo who wrote the post, is off the mark in claiming the Israel engages in”crude and cruel” policies, I also agree with her that the core statement — that Israel is nothing like South Africa — is an important one and cannot be sufficiently emphasized:

I don’t agree with this comparison of Israel to apartheid-era South Africa. It’s a caricature. Israel has (in my opinion) some crude and cruel policies based on defence; it also has universal suffrage and equality of rights for all its citizens both Jewish and Arab. In apartheid-era South Africa, artists could only play to segregated audiences; in Israel anyone who buys a ticket can attend a concert. Neil x

I wish more entertainers had the moral courage to call out the BDS movement for what it is:  a hopelessly biased cause that tries to frame the only true liberal democracy in the Middle East (and it is a true liberal democracy by any measure, not just Middle Eastern) as a tyrannical apartheid state.

(As an aside, although I like them, I had no idea that Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe are “the most successful duo in UK music history.”  Maybe part of why they’ve done so well is because they’ve got their heads screwed on the right way.)