Douglas Murray: Academic Freedom Opposed by "Who"?
It is that time of year again. News arrives of 343 "university teachers" who signed a letter pledging that henceforth they will not cooperate with Israeli academic institutions. Their joint letter took up a full page today in Britain's left-wing Guardian newspaper (where else?) and has caused almost no stir in Britain. It comes days after a letter signed by 150 leading British writers, musicians and others -- including JK Rowling, Simon Schama and Hilary Mantel -- opposed any and all such boycotts against Israel, and pointed out that in the eyes of most people, intellectual and cultural exchange is a good thing.Those well educated and despicable anti-Semites
The anti-boycott letter was signed by some of Britain's leading intellectuals. The main response to the pro-boycott letter, however, may well be, "Who?" Who knew, for instance, that Israel -- or any state -- would be diminished if it could not gain from the wisdom of Professor Alex Callinicos, one of Britain's most obscure Marxist academics? He is the author of numerous interminable tracts; his efforts to bring his thoughts into mainstream politics reached their summit during his involvement with the Socialist Worker's Party, an entity too extreme even for Jeremy Corbyn's Labour party. As almost nobody in Britain wants Prof. Callinicos's thoughts, why would anybody in Israel be begging for them?
Or consider another figure on the letter, one Professor Jane Hardy who teaches at the University of Hertfordshire. It would come as a great surprise to most people in Britain -- and possibly to many people in Hertfordshire -- that such an institution exists. But a quick internet search reveals that it does, and that until 1992 it was known as "Hatfield Polytechnic." So what are the students in Israel unilaterally going to lose the right to know, thanks to the stance taken by Professor Hardy? Well, her own profile page says, "My research and publications on regional development, and the gender and class impacts of change have been underpinned by a concern with the lives of ordinary people and how they have contested neoliberalism." One tries to be polite, of course, but it is worth pointing out that this kind of "study" has never been helpful in finding a place in the job-market for British students (apart, possibly, in furthering their studies in low-grade academia). Why the withdrawal of Prof. Hardy's research on regional development, gender and class in a Hertfordshire context should be such a loss to students in Israel, one is at a loss to guess.
The Guardian, the leading British leftist newspaper, just published an appeal to sever any ties with Israeli universities. The appeal has been signed by 350 professors working in UK academia.Israel Is Beyond Logic
These BDS supporters are the grandchildren of those Max Weinreich called “Hitler’s Professors”.
If Italy’s Fascism had writers and philosophers such as Gabriel D’Annunzio, Luigi Pirandello, Giovanni Gentile and Tommaso Marinetti, Hitler’s Nazism had an even greater list of talents: Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Gottfried Benn, Ernst Jünger, Mircea Eliade, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Ernst von Karajan, Knut Hamsun, Emile Cioran and Louis Ferdinand Celine.
The best of European culture embraced Nazism just as today it is embracing new anti-Semitism. The cowardice of the intellectuals, academics and men of letters on the “Jewish question” is repeated today on the issue of Israel.
Henry Rousso called it “Le Syndrome de Vichy”. The reference is to France under Nazi occupation, when the cream of Paris’ writers continued their work, pleasing the Germans, getting favors, condemning the Jews to death by their indifference and hypocrisy.
There’s only one place in the world where history, archaeology, empirical science, psychology and journalistic integrity don’t apply: Israel.
Consider that we live in a world that recognizes the claim of Palestinian Arabs to what they consider their homeland (which can be backed and documented for at best several hundred years — for the small percentage of those Arabs that didn’t arrive throughout the 19th and 20th centuries as transient Bedouins or marauding tribes), while ignoring the Jewish people’s documented connection to Israel that’s almost four millennia old. If the Torah were taken by the world merely as a historical document, and history supposedly mattered to the world, then the Jews of Israel should be considered the oldest landowners alive. But history doesn’t matter in Israel.
Consider that the world recognizes the antiquity of Haram al-Sharif — the al-Aqsa Mosque (Temple Mount) — as the third-holiest site for Muslims and its centrality to Palestinian nationalistic yearning. And yet, this same world readily overlooks the archaeological digs that unearthed pieces of pottery and scrolls that prove absolutely the ancient and continuous connection between the Land of Israel and the Jewish People. With a world so passive to practical proof, the Palestinians (since Arafat and the mufti before him) have audaciously claimed that there’s no connection between the Jews and Yerushalayim, specifically the Temple Mount. As if the al-Aqsa mosque isn’t very clearly sitting atop the Western Wall that archaeologists have “scientifically proven” (through carbon dating) to belong to the ancient Israelite temple as originally mentioned — where else? — in the Torah. So the world believes in archaeology that dates back to the 7th century C.E. but not as far as the 9th century B.C.E.? Archaeology, it seems, is meaningless when the digs prove too Jewish. (h/t Cliff)