16.06.22
Editorial Note
Prof. Ariella Azoulay, a former Israeli academic at Brown University, has promoted the highly controversial Boston Mapping Project. Azoulay, a radical pro-Palestinian activist who even adopted the name Aisha, was offered a position at Brown, where she has engaged in countless anti-Israeli activities, including BDS.
By far, the Boston Mapping Project has been egregious. According to media reports, the group alleges sinister connections between Jewish and pro-Israel groups across Massachusetts and the US government, politicians, the police, and the media and blames these groups for various nefarious activities. The group’s map draws links between the Jewish groups and the institutions they are supposed to influence.
BDS Boston, the local chapter of BDS is backing the project, which some progressive Democrats have also embraced in the region. BDS Boston proclaimed: “From our friends at the Mapping Project! Their map and articles illustrate how local support for the colonization of Palestine is structurally tied to policing, evictions, and privatization locally, and to US imperialist projects worldwide.”
A perusal of the project reveals its anti-American and anti-Israel purposes.
The Mapping Project claims it aims to expose “policing and systemic white supremacy here where we live, and to US imperialist projects in other countries.”
The Mapping Project explains it is a “multi-generational collective of activists and organizers on the land of the Massachusett, Pawtucket, Naumkeag, and other tribal nations (Boston, Cambridge, and surrounding areas) who wanted to develop a deeper understanding of local institutional support for the colonization of Palestine and harms that we see as linked, such as policing, US imperialism, and displacement/ethnic cleansing. Our work is grounded in the realization that oppressors share tactics and institutions – and that our liberation struggles are connected. We wanted to visualize these connections in order to see where our struggles intersect and to strategically grow our local organizing capacities.”
To achieve their goals, the group constructed an interactive map to illustrate the “connections between harms such as privatization and medical apartheid, which are often facilitated by universities and their corporate partners. Since local universities engage in these multiple forms of oppression and produce much of the ruling class, and because they are major land holders in our area.”
For them, “the university as a central nexus that ties together many of the harms traced on the map.”
The group adds, “The map is not a complete representation of local institutions responsible for the colonization of Palestine or other harms such as policing, US imperialism, and displacement.”
They provide several examples:
“Boston’s Colonial Universities Grab Land for Profit, War, and Medical Apartheid: Universities in Cambridge and Boston colonize land and put it to work for private profit, imperial war, and perpetuation of medical apartheid. These land grabs increase property values and rent, fueling the displacement and ethnic cleansing of local communities. Yet history shows that this colonial loop can be disrupted, and has been challenged at every stage by organized resistance of the people it seeks to push out.
Zionism, Policing and Empire: A Dispatch from the Mapping Project: Examines the networking of police agencies across Massachusetts as highly militarized forces that share resources and information to enforce the intersecting systems of white supremacy and capitalism, and reveals their connections to universities, weapons companies, and certain NGOs. It highlights the role of the Department of Homeland Security, with its use of “counterterrorism” as a catch-all for programs of surveillance and militarization, in organizing and funding these networks, often using Israel as a point of reference for ideology, policy, technology and organization.
Mapping US Imperialism: US imperialism is the greatest threat to life on the planet. This article explores the vast and complicated network of US imperialism, both hard and soft power, then turns its focus to the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, a local institution that demonstrates the level of ideological and material cooperation required for the machinery of US imperialism to function. The Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) brings together police executives from across the country for yearly meetings at Boston University, and also organizes meetings between US police executives with their counterparts in Israel and in other colonial and repressive regimes. This article looks at their 2018 handbook The Police Response to Mass Demonstrations as an example of a counterinsurgency doctrine aimed at isolating leaders and radicals, and reveals the role of the ACLU in helping police to develop policy.
Charity is Theft: The Gann Foundation and Boston’s Zionist NGO circuit: Charity is fundamentally misconstrued as a selfless and generous act. In reality, charitable donations are supporting the colonization of Palestine and violence worldwide. This article provides an introduction to united states tax law as it applies to charitable donations, highlighting legal tax evasion, the ways in which taxes nurture wealth building, and the transfer of wealth to the political darling projects of the rich.”
The group received a lot of criticism. Jake Auchincloss, representing a Boston area with a large Jewish population in Congress, denounced the Mapping Project in the strongest possible way: “It is tapping into millennia-old antisemitic tropes about nefarious Jewish wealth, control, conspiracy, media connections and political string-pulling … to name names and keep lists, which has a very sinister history in Judaism, in terms of how we are targeted, is very irresponsible.”
Azoulay is one of the many radical Israeli academics who migrated to the West, where they lend legitimacy to anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic projects. As IAM repeatedly noted, they are in high demand in the Palestinian advocacy circles because they are Jewish and Israeli. Some critics call them “useful idiots,” a term allegedly coined by Lenin to describe people who “propagandizing for a cause without fully comprehending the cause’s goals, and who is cynically used by the cause’s leaders.” This is a misrepresentation of these cohorts. Azoulay and her ilks, such as Ilan Pappe, Eyal Weizman, and others, are sophisticated players in the soft war waged against Israel, which produced the bulk of the work claiming Israel is an apartheid state whose military engages in Nazi-like practices against the Palestinians.
IAM would continue reporting on these issues.
Check it out: mapliberation.org
The Mapping Project
What is the Mapping Project?
Welcome to the Mapping Project. We are a multi-generational collective of activists and organizers on the land of the Massachusett, Pawtucket, Naumkeag, and other tribal nations (Boston, Cambridge, and surrounding areas) who wanted to develop a deeper understanding of local institutional support for the colonization of Palestine and harms that we see as linked, such as policing, US imperialism, and displacement/ethnic cleansing. Our work is grounded in the realization that oppressors share tactics and institutions – and that our liberation struggles are connected. We wanted to visualize these connections in order to see where our struggles intersect and to strategically grow our local organizing capacities.
Our interactive map illustrates some ways in which institutional support for the colonization of Palestine is structurally tied to policing and systemic white supremacy here where we live, and to US imperialist projects in other countries. Our map also shows the connections between harms such as privatization and medical apartheid, which are often facilitated by universities and their corporate partners. Since local universities engage in these multiple forms of oppression and produce much of the ruling class, and because they are major land holders in our area, we’ve emphasized the university as a central nexus that ties together many of the harms traced on the map. (For more on what we think the map reveals, see What We See page and read our articles.)
We acknowledge that our map is not a complete representation of local institutions responsible for the colonization of Palestine or other harms such as policing, US imperialism, and displacement. We also recognize that the struggles of local Indigenous nations against US colonization are underrepresented on our map. We would be grateful for suggestions and knowledge shared with us by those who engage with our map, and hope it can continue to grow and improve through your contributions.
This map is intended first and foremost to cultivate relationships between organizers across movements and deepen our political analyses as we build community power. Building community power, for us, has meant seeking the knowledge of those organizing in community with us and highlighting the radical analyses and resistance of earlier generations which have been suppressed.
Our goal in pursuing this collective mapping was to reveal the local entities and networks that enact devastation, so we can dismantle them. Every entity has an address, every network can be disrupted.
View map
total of 482 entities, 1351 links
- View the interactive map
- View the plain-text version
- Read our definitions of entity types, link types, and harms.
Articles
- The Architecture of Banishment
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Displacement (or “gentrification”) is often incorrectly conceptualized as an unintentional consequence of inevitable transformations which occur in urban areas over time. The Berklee College of Music’s “homeless spikes” are a stark reminder of the intentionality behind the efforts of local universities and tech, biotech, and pharmaceutical corporations to reshape the Boston area into a haven for majority white and professional populations, through the planned banishment of preexisting (Black and Brown, working-class) communities deemed undesirable.
- Boston’s Colonial Universities Grab Land for Profit, War, and Medical Apartheid
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Universities in Cambridge and Boston colonize land and put it to work for private profit, imperial war, and perpetuation of medical apartheid. These land grabs increase property values and rent, fueling the displacement and ethnic cleansing of local communities. Yet history shows that this colonial loop can be disrupted, and has been challenged at every stage by organized resistance of the people it seeks to push out.
- Zionism, Policing and Empire: A Dispatch from the Mapping Project
-
Examines the networking of police agencies across Massachusetts as highly militarized forces that share resources and information to enforce the intersecting systems of white supremacy and capitalism, and reveals their connections to universities, weapons companies, and certain NGOs. It highlights the role of the Department of Homeland Security, with its use of “counterterrorism” as a catch-all for programs of surveillance and militarization, in organizing and funding these networks, often using Israel as a point of reference for ideology, policy, technology and organization.
- Mapping US Imperialism
-
US imperialism is the greatest threat to life on the planet. This article explores the vast and complicated network of US imperialism, both hard and soft power, then turns its focus to the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, a local institution that demonstrates the level of ideological and material cooperation required for the machinery of US imperialism to function.
- Massachusetts’ Imperialist Landscape
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Visualizing Massachusetts’ imperialist landscape with a few maps.
- The Police Executive Research Forum, the ACLU, and Counterinsurgency
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The Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) brings together police executives from across the country for yearly meetings at Boston University, and also organizes meetings between US police executives with their counterparts in Israel and in other colonial and repressive regimes. This article looks at their 2018 handbook The Police Response to Mass Demonstrations as an example of a counterinsurgency doctrine aimed at isolating leaders and radicals, and reveals the role of the ACLU in helping police to develop policy.
- Charity is Theft: The Gann Foundation and Boston’s Zionist NGO circuit
-
Charity is fundamentally misconstrued as a selfless and generous act. In reality, charitable donations are supporting the colonization of Palestine and violence worldwide. This article provides an introduction to united states tax law as it applies to charitable donations, highlighting legal tax evasion, the ways in which taxes nurture wealth building, and the transfer of wealth to the political darling projects of the rich.
Most connected entities by type
Weapons/Robotics: Raytheon Lockheed Martin General Dynamics Boeing Lenco Armored Vehicles Elbit Systems
University: MIT Harvard University Harvard Kennedy School of Government Tufts University Boston University The Broad Institute
State/Local Government: State of Mass. City of Cambridge City of Boston Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) Newton Public Schools Massachusetts Technology Collaborative
Real Estate: BioMed Realty Trust, Inc. DSF Group Small Property Owners Association (SPOA) Cruz Management Co Harvard Real Estate Inc. Maloney Properties
Prison/Prison-Industrial Complex: MCI-Framingham Prison Suffolk County Jail Aramark Middleton Jail and House of Correction
Politician: Ed Markey Elizabeth Warren Charlie Baker
Police: Central Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council (CEMLEC) Greater Boston Police Council Northeastern Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council (NEMLEC) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Metropolitan Law Enforcement Council (Metro LEC) Department of Homeland Security
NGO: Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Combined Jewish Philanthropies (CJP) Ruderman Family Foundation Kraft Family Philanthropies Seth Klarman, and the Klarman Family Foundation Joseph and Rae Gann Charitable Foundation
Military: U.S. Navy in Massachusetts U.S. Air Force in Massachusetts U.S. Army in Massachusetts Kostas Research Institute at Northeastern University U.S. Air Force: Hanscom Air Force Base Fort Devens Army Base
Media: JewishBoston The Jewish Journal Boston Globe
Lifestyle: Puma CYBEX INTERNATIONAL Harpoon Brewery
Labor: AFL-CIO (Massachusetts) International Union of Police Associations New England Regional Council of Carpenters UNITE-HERE (Massachusetts) International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)
Israeli Government: Consulate General of Israel to New England
Healthcare/Pharma: Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Pfizer Millennium Pharmaceuticals/Takeda Oncology Novartis Tufts-New England Medical Center Biogen
Finance: Fidelity Charitable Citigroup Baupost Group MassMutual RTN Federal Credit Union Fidelity
Cultural: Boston Museum of Science Jewish Arts Collaborative Israel360 BOMBYX Center for Arts & Equity Jewish Teen Foundation of Greater Boston Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA)
Consulting: McKinsey Boston Consulting Group (BCG) Gemini Industries Odyssey Systems Consulting Group Deloitte Nixon Peabody LLP
Construction/Engineering: CDM Smith Kleinfelder Northeast Excelitas Technologies Elkus Manfredi Architects HDR Architecture Finegold Alexander & Associates
Computing/Logistics: IBM Amazon Microsoft Google Hewlett Packard Enterprise Apple
Agribusiness: DuPont
Boston BDS map of Jewish groups has ‘potential to incite violence,’ Auchincloss says
A Boston BDS group released a chart alleging Jewish groups were connected to a network of government, media and police and linking them to a range of malign activities
By Marc Rod
June 9, 2022
Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) said on Wednesday that a report released last week by a Boston-area Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement group plays on millennia-old antisemitic tropes and could inflame violence against the Jewish community.
The group, calling itself the “Mapping Project,” alleges sinister connections between Jewish and pro-Israel groups across Massachusetts and government, politicians, the police and the media, and blames these groups for a range of nefarious activities. The group plotted the locations of the organizations on an interactive state map — drawing lines between the Jewish groups and institutions the project claims they influence — and released the addresses and names of some of the groups’ staffers.
The project’s organizers accuse the groups — which include the local Jewish Community Relations Council and Synagogue Council, the Anti-Defamation League and American Jewish Community, a Jewish high school, local philanthropies, an arts group and J Street — of ties to “harms that we see as linked, such as policing, US imperialism, and displacement/ethnic cleansing.”
“Our goal in pursuing this collective mapping was to reveal the local entities and networks that enact devastation, so we can dismantle them,” the organizers wrote in an op-ed published on Mondoweiss. “Every entity has an address, every network can be disrupted.” Local Jewish leaders have said this amounts to a call to “dismantle” the entire Massachusetts Jewish community.
“This is just chilling to me. It is tapping into millennia-old antisemitic tropes about nefarious Jewish wealth, control, conspiracy, media connections and political string-pulling,” Auchincloss, who represents an area in the Boston suburbs with a large Jewish population, and is himself Jewish, told Jewish Insider. “To name names and keep lists, which has a very sinister history in Judaism, in terms of how we are targeted, is very irresponsible. [The group] needs to take this down and apologize.”
Auchincloss tied the release of this project to current debates in the House over gun violence, explaining that he believes history shows that previous efforts to “keep lists” of Jews “can incite violence” and “inflame the deranged among us to take the next step from contemplating to acting upon violence.”
The Mapping Project’s organizers did not respond to a request for comment.
“[The organizers] need to recognize actions that have the potential to incite violence, especially in a moment of heightened antisemitism and gun violence,” Auchincloss continued.
He said that the project carries echoes of “a very sinister vein of Western history” — efforts to identify and keep rosters of Jews, including, but not limited to, the Holocaust.
Auchincloss said he plans to raise the issue with colleagues and with groups in the area that have promoted the Mapping Project, and will urge his colleagues to do the same.
“I will give direct and stark feedback about how inappropriate and unacceptable this is,” he said.
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), tweeted on Wednesday that “Targeting the Jewish community like this is wrong and it is dangerous. It is irresponsible. This project is an anti-Semitic enemies list with a map attached.”
The other members of Massachusetts’ congressional delegation — including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Ed Markey (D-MA), who are named in the Mapping Project — did not respond to requests for comment.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) has been endorsed by the advocacy group Peace Action, whose local chapter, Massachusetts Peace Action, has amplified the Mapping Project.
Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) also called out the project, saying that it “accuses Jewish and ‘Zionist’ institutions of various evils in American society,” adding, “Scapegoating is a common symptom of antisemitism, which at its core is a conspiracy theory.”
The project has caught the attention of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, whose spokesperson, Lior Haiat, tweeted earlier this week, “This whole project is reminiscent of a dangerous antisemitic pattern of activity known from antiquity through the horrors of the 20th century: a pattern which has led to violence against Jews and their institutions.”
Jeremy Burton, director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Boston, told JI, “We see this as an explicit effort name and identify and put a target on physical Jewish spaces in Greater Boston, with the purpose, explicitly in their own words, of dismantling our Jewish community here in Boston,” which could “inspire others to dangerous action.”
Burton urged lawmakers with ties to groups like Massachusetts Peace Action that have amplified the project to enact “consequences in those relationships.”
US, Israeli officials call out Boston group over ‘mapping project’ linking Jewish groups to media, government
One Massachusetts congressman called it ‘an anti-Semitic enemies list’
By Ronn Blitzer | Fox News
Fox News
June 9
A Boston-area group that opposes Israel is facing accusations of antisemitic “scapegoating” and conspiracy theorizing after it promoted a project that alleged ties between Jewish groups, the media, and government institutions, while posting their addresses online.
BDS Boston, which supports the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, posted an endorsement of the Mapping Project, claiming that various organizations and institutions are “structurally tied” to police, American imperialism, evictions, and the oppression of Palestinians.
The project features a map with markers for 482 agencies, organizations, media outlets, and politicians, including local police departments, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, Massachusetts Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren, the Boston Globe, and groups such as the Jewish Teen Foundation of Greater Boston, Jewish Arts Collaborative, and the Synagogue Council of Massachusetts.
“Our goal in pursuing this collective mapping was to reveal the local entities and networks that enact devastation, so we can dismantle them,” the project’s website says. “Every entity has an address, every network can be disrupted.”
Rep. Jake Auchincloss, D-Mass., a Jewish member of Congress who represents a district with a large Jewish population, was appalled by the project.
“This is just chilling to me. It is tapping into millennia-old antisemitic tropes about nefarious Jewish wealth, control, conspiracy, media connections and political string-pulling,” he told the Jewish Insider website. “To name names and keep lists, which has a very sinister history in Judaism, in terms of how we are targeted, is very irresponsible. [The group] needs to take this down and apologize.”
NEWTON – AUGUST 23: Jake Auchincloss, a Democrat vying for the fourth Congressional Democratic nomination in the primary race, poses for a portrait in Newton, MA on Aug. 23, 2020. (Photo by Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images) (Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., tweeted that the project is “wrong” and “dangerous,” calling it “an anti-Semitic enemies list with a map attached.”
Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., rebuked the project for accusing Jews “of various evils in American society,” noting that “[s]capegoating is a common symptom of Antisemitism, which at its core is a conspiracy theory.”
Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs also weighed in upon learning of the mapping project. A spokesperson for the ministry said in a Twitter threat that Israel “strongly condemns” it.
“This whole project is reminiscent of a dangerous antisemitic pattern of activity known from antiquity through the horrors of the 20th century: a pattern which has led to violence against Jews and their institutions,” ministry spokesperson Lior Haiat tweeted.
israel-academia-monitor.com 