British Universities Jihad against Israeli Universities

The Guardian reports that a new wave of Israel-bashing and Jew-baiting is breaking out among British universities. The Association of University Teachers' annual council, which begins on April 20 in Eastbourne, will also debate whether to boycott three of Israel's eight universities - Haifa University, Bar Ilan University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem - over their "alleged complicity with the government's policies" on the Palestinian territories.

The great irony here is that these Israeli universities are all themselves bastions dominated by the Academic Left, including some extremists that make Ward Churchill look like a sane moderate. These Israeli versions of Taliban John will be exempt from the British boycott, because the motion contains a clause to exclude "conscientious Israeli academics and intellectuals opposed to their state's colonial and racist policies". Naturally, the British in question will not be boycotting any colleges in Syria, Iran, Egypt, Dubai or Saudi Arabia.

The boycott being proposed is in response to a call from a PLO-front group, "The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel," which called for a boycott last year. They have been joined by a host of other anti-Jewish organizations and web sites. In autumn 2003, Oxford University suspended Andrew Wilkie, a professor of pathology, for two months after he refused to accept an application from an Israeli student for a PhD because he had a "huge problem" with Israel's "treatment of Palestinians." We know of no British academic who boycotts Palestinians for the treatment by the PLO of Jewish children on buses. Mona Baker caused an international row in 2002 when she sacked two Israeli academics from the board of a translation journal she edited, citing the boycott. She was "cleared" of breaking any rules in a Columbia University-style internal inquiry by her employer, the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology.

One of the most comic accusations by the British boycotters concerns my own university, the University of Haifa, whom they accuse of "restricting the academic freedom of researchers whose theses were critical of Israel." What they are referring to is a fraudulent MA thesis that was prepared by a far-leftist aging student political activist under the supervision of Ilan Pappe, Israel's academic answer to Lord Haw-Haw, in which they fabricated a non-existent "massacre" of Arabs that supposedly took place in 1948, perpetrated - they claimed - by the Hagana Jewish militia. It was a "massacre" that Arab journalists on the scene in the village in question never witnessed and for which no evidence at all has ever been uncovered. The Hagana vets sued the student for libel, and the student - in the presence of his lawyer in court - signed a confession that he had invented the enitre "massacre." For full documentation of the affair, see here. Pappe was not fired for the fraud, although he should have been, nor was he "suppressed." None of that matters to the British boycott pogromochiki.

We have no doubt that had Baker and the rest of the Brits involved in this been alive in the late 1930s, they would have been organizing boycotts of Czechoslovakia and Poland at the behest of Germany, all for alleged mistreating Sudeten and other ethnic Germans at their universities.