Is Rolling Stones ‘Boycott Israel’ Facebook Page a Hoax?

Image by getty images
A Facebook page claiming victory in getting the Rolling Stones to boycott Israel is an apparent hoax.
The “Rolling Stones: Boycott Israel” page, established Wednesday, on Thursday reported that the group had cancelled a planned June 10 concert.
It cited “sources with the Rolling Stones,” but there has been no such announcement.
The page also posted a letter asking the group to boycott Israel and signed by the page organizers as well as supposedly by Electronic Intifada and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
But Electronic Intifada, an anti-Zionist news site, denied signing the letter and noted that it does not sign letters institutionally; moreover, the news site reported, the letter is a duplicate of a 2007 letter urging the Stones to boycott Israel that appeared on the Electronic Intifada site and was signed by 350 individuals.
Most of the Facebook page’s commenters are currently pro-Israel, suggesting that word of the page’s existence was more widely disseminated in the pro-Israel community than it was among backers of BDS. As of Friday, the page had 219 “likes.”
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
