Canadian Cabinet Minister Drops Oxfam for Boycotting Israel

Canadian Minister of Employment and Social Development Jason Kenney dropped Oxfam, an alleged anti-poverty conglomerate, for its Boycott Israel activities. Instead, he will support its target – SodaStream, an Israeli company with a factory in Judea that hires Israelis and Palestinians.

Canadian Cabinet Minister Jason Kenney at Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial museum in Jerusalem in 2009. (Photo: Isaac Harari/FLASH90)

“I’m dropping Oxfam as a charity and I’m picking up SodaStream as a new customer,” Canadian Minister of Employment and Social Development Jason Kenney stated in response to Oxfam International’s decision to drop actress Scarlett Johansson as its Global Ambassador.
Johansson had been in partnership with Oxfam, which describes itself as a “confederation of 17 organizations working to find lasting solutions to poverty and injustice,” since 2005.
According to Canadian media source Sun News, Kenney had donated money to Oxfam in the past in order to assist the poor.
Oxfam, a promoter of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel, dropped Johannson, who had not only agreed to represent SodaStream International Ltd., an Israeli company, as its first Global Brand Ambassador, but she also refused to drop that role when the BDS movement exerted pressure against her. She kicked off the partnership on Sunday by starring in a Super Bowl commercial.

Scarlett Johansson not bowing to anti-Israel pressure. (Photo: Johanssonweb.org)

SodaStream’s plant in Judea and Samaria employs approximately 900 Palestinian Arabs and “pays them wages that are four times the Palestinian average…ensuring steady work in a part of the world where the unemployment rate routinely exceeds 20 percent,” Sun News points out.
“Thanks very much to all the nutters at Oxfam for marginalizing the Palestinian people,” Kenney said in an interview with Sun News, in which he slammed the BDS movement “for ignoring the Iranian government and Iranian companies and exporters.”
“Not a word about a country that executes leaders of vulnerable religious minorities like the Bahá’í Faith,” Kenney continued. “A country that executes political dissidents, a country that executes gays and lesbians.”
“You know, you can create a long list of the worst human rights abusers in the world, and the organizations that are obsessively focused on Israel for some reason don’t say a word about that long list. There’s something terribly wrong about this,” Kenney declared.

Kenney was part of the delegation that accompanied Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper on his recent historic visit to Israel, where he pledged to support the Jewish state “through fire and water.”
The Canadian delegation to Israel “felt at home because we were in another Western democracy that respects human dignity, human rights and the rule of law,” Kenney told Sun News.
Date: Feb. 2, 2014