View the H-Antisemitism Discussion Logs by month
View the Prior Message in H-Antisemitism's November 2007 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] View the Next Message in H-Antisemitism's November 2007 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] Visit the H-Antisemitism home page.
I have a piece on the Engage website and in The Jewish Tribune about the defeat of Britain's Univeristy and College Union's boycott of Israeli academics and about the antisemitic backlash to this defeat from the pro-boycotters. The piece is short, so I've pasted it in below. For those interested, all my pieces published on Engage can be found here: http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/search.php?search=Brian+Henry The Engage forum is here: http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/ And the Engage journal is here: http://www.engageonline.org.uk/journal/ Engage is an indispensible resources for anyone studying contemporary left antisemitism, particularly in Britain, and for anyone wanting to counter this new antisemitism. Yours, Brian Henry editor & writer bhenry_ed@hotmail.com Toronto, Canada Boycott declared illegal - quelle surprise! by Brian Henry A shorter, earlier version of this article appeared in the October 25 Jewish Tribune, a community paper published weekly by B'nai Brith Canada. Good news from Britain: The Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) finally thought to ask a lawyer whether their proposed boycott of Israeli universities was legal. The answer: No of course not! Such a boycott would be discriminatory. Lord Lester, the architect of Britain's Race Relations Act, wrote the legal opinion for the UCU. He advised it would be: "unlawful for the union.to call for, or to implement, a boycott...of any kind of Israeli universities." It can't have come as a surprise to the UCU that their proposed boycott contravened Britain's Race Relations Act. The union represents university professors after all - allegedly a bright, well-informed lot. Moreover, anti-boycott activists have pointed out all along that the boycott was discriminatory and antisemitic. Two prominent lawyers - Anthony Julius in Britain and Alan Dershowitz of Harvard - publicly offered to represent any victim of the boycott, gratis. The boycott had also been condemned by more than 11,000 academics worldwide, including 33 Noble laureates and 450 university presidents, who told the UCU: if you boycott Israelis, boycott us, too. Many Canadian academics and most university presidents joined in the general condemnation. Principal Karen Hitchcock of Queen's University in Kingston, for one, declared the boycott antithetical to the idea of academic freedom. However, the condemnation wasn't unanimous. Professor Margaret Pappano of Queen's launched a petition demanding that principal Hitchcock withdraw her statement condemning the boycott. Pappano's petition gathered some 200 signatures, mostly from students. But Renee Stephen, who will stand as the NDP candidate for Kingston in the next federal election, also signed the petition, as did Professor Michael Neumann of Trent (notorious for an article titled "What is Antisemitism," where he stated: "I think we should almost never take antisemitism seriously, and maybe we should have some fun with it.") Louise Arbour, formerly of the Supreme Court of Canada and currently United Nations high commissioner for human rights, put in a good word for the boycotters. She told the Jewish Forward she "thought it was a good thing for academics to have a debate on this issue." However, "as human rights commissioner," she said she didn't "have an opinion on the outcome." That's odd. As human rights commissioner, Arbour should be front and centre condemning any discriminatory boycott. I suspect the international uproar and the threat of ruinous legal action must have made the union's executive nervous. Possibly the lack of support from their membership also bothered them. The anti-Israel crowd had been able to pass their boycott resolution because they'd captured a majority of the union rep positions. However, few British academics supported their union's proposed boycott. A survey of faculty at Oxford and Imperial College, for example, found over 90% opposed the boycott. For whatever reason, the union executive finally called in the lawyers, who officially informed them that, yes, the union was up to something unlawful and ugly. Accordingly the UCU cancelled the boycott, and the pro-boycotters immediately started screaming they'd been gagged. The next step, you see, was not to proceed directly to the boycott but to conduct a series of staged debates on the "moral implications" of academic contact with Israelis. A panel of learned Jews were to plead the notion that even Israelis are human, while Palestinian professors were to be their inquisitors, accusing Israelis of apartheid (the slur de jour) and perhaps also of killing children for sport, infecting Palestinian women with AIDs, or poisoning wells. (Anti-Israel propaganda provides a wide range of lies to choose from). But fortunately, in Britain, the question of whether Israelis and Jews enjoy human and civil rights has already been decided as a matter of law, and so the inquisition was cancelled, along with the boycott it was supposed to lead up to. The boycotters and their allies are enraged: "We can detect the not-so-hidden hand of that [Israel] lobby in this latest episode of stifling debate," wrote Amjad Barham head of the Palestinian Union of University Professors. The supposed "hidden hand" of the Jews is, of course, a classic theme of racist antisemitism. Similarly, in a piece in the Guardian and posted on the Canadian-Palestinian Network, Priyamvada Gopal of Cambridge accused the "Israel lobby" of suppressing dissent. Indeed, according to Gopal, the American Israel lobby enforces "two unbreachable taboos: anti-Americanism, and criticism of the Israeli state and its occupation of Palestine." Apparently, Gopal isn't familiar with the New York Times, which breaches the supposed taboo of criticizing Israel regularly, as does most media on the planet. Finally in another piece in the Guardian, Ghada Karmi of Exeter University, accuses the "Jewish lawyer" Alan Dershowitz and "Jewish lawyer Anthony Julius" of "intellectual terrorism." I had thought phrases such as "the Jew Dershowitz" went out of style with the Nazis. Apparently not. And I'd thought of terrorism as blowing up people on a city bus. Apparently not. That's a "martyrdom operation," according to Karmi. "Terrorism" is threatening to sue people for illegal discrimination. Sigh. The union executive says the boycott is off because it breaks Britain's anti-racism law. The boycotters respond: No, it's not the law; it's the Jews - a response that's all too predictable. Brian Henry is a Toronto writer and editor and a refugee from Canada's social democratic party, the NDP. -- Yocheved Menashe List Editor, H-Antisemitism
|