Friday, March 20, 2015

THIS IS NO DEBATE BUT A RALLY OF HATE DIRECTED AT ISRAEL


Video of the week: MAPPING ISRAEL'S BORDERS
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Earlier this month we once again saw what hotbeds of extremism and hatred some of our university campuses have become.

Douglas Murray, Mar 13, 2015
For the full article go to: http://tinyurl.com/ko5zzkd
                                                      
Taxpayers are funding this repulsive outpouring of anti-Semitism
The fact that Mohammed Emwazi (aka “Jihadi John”) had been a student at Westminster university could have surprised no one.

Nor could the discovery that on the very night Emwazi was unmasked his university was due to host a radical preacher who preaches the most hardline versions of sharia.

In the same week as a new video revealed commonplace anti-Jewish hatred on Britain’s streets, the Cambridge University Union Society once again chose to debate the motion “Israel is a rogue state”.

The Cambridge Union – the oldest in the country – enjoys debating that motion more than any other. It is a fixture in its termly schedules.

And once again last week the students of Cambridge decided to hold Israel guilty among the nations. Needless to say there is no record of Cambridge students debating whether Pakistan (created in the same year as Israel) is a rogue state. Despite there being far more reasons to do so.

Nor does the Cambridge Union annually denigrate any of Israel’s neighbours in the Middle East. During last week’s Cambridge debate the notorious anti-Israeli activist and discredited academic Norman Finkelstein explained to the students that Israel is worse than North Korea.

The students agreed with him. Next month the University of Southampton will become the latest university to fix its position on this bandwagon of hate.

As reported in the Daily Express earlier this week, on 17-19 April Southampton University will host a three day conference titled “International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism.”

University of Southampton will become the latest university to fix its position on this bandwagon of hate.

The organisers claim that the conference is “the first of its kind and constitutes a ground-breaking historical event on the road towards justice and enduring peace in historic Palestine”. Of course this is purest academic claptrap.

The idea that one of the world’s most intractable political problems could be solved by a group of a gaggle of academics sitting in Southampton is laughable. Or it would be if the whole set up weren’t such a hate-fest from start to finish.

The University of Southampton’s Vice Chancellor, the beautifully named Professor Nutbeam, claims that this is a matter of free speech. It isn’t. Free speech is a precious British tradition which most of us would do everything to defend. But true free speech includes hearing different viewpoints.

And that is not what Southampton is organising. They are organising a one-sided anti-Israel rally. Anyone in any doubt about that simply needs to look at their speaker line up.

Every single panel is stuffed full of low-grade academics and self described activists drawn from near and far but from a single political direction.

They are people like Dr Ghada Karmi who tours this country’s universities whipping up hatred of Israel. She was at Cambridge last week arguing that Israel is a “rogue state”. She describes herself as an “activist” and well she might. There is little recognisably “academic” in her routine.

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She routinely and repeatedly calls not for peace in the Middle East but for the end of the world’s only Jewish state. Other speakers in Southampton will include one Dr Jeff Handmaker who claims that companies like Ikea which have business dealings with Israel are complicit in human rights abuses.

I shall think of Dr Handmaker next time I buy a flat pack lamp and meatballs. But it is the same thing on panel after panel. Speaker after speaker has a track record of calling for the same things: boycotts of Israel, demonization of Israel and indeed the end of Israel.

It is a conference dedicated to annihilation. So how appropriate that as the delegates finish their tax-payer subsidised lunch on the first day their “after lunch speaker” will be the disgraced academic Richard Falk who claims that Israel behaves like the Nazis.

This is one of the common themes among many of the participants, and is worth reflecting on. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is a very complex matter. But none of Israe actions bear any resemblance whatsoever to the genocidal inferno of Nazism.

So why do figures like those heading to Southampton next month so commonly compare Israeli security policies to those of the Nazis? The answer is simple.

They compare the security policies of the State of Israel to the crimes of Nazism because they wish to taunt the first victims of Nazism. They wish to hurt Jews. This is what passes for academic debate in Southampton in 2015: vile and routine Jew baiting.

You do have to put some effort into putting together such a one-sided hate-fest. The number of people in Britain so utterly and weirdly obsessed by Israel is really quite small. Most ordinary, fair-minded people looking at the Middle East can see that Israel is the only liberal and free society like ours in the region.

People are not being beheaded and brutalised, hanged from cranes and thrown off buildings. These anti-Israel obsessives are fringe weirdos in wider society.

One of the only places where they are not is university campuses. It is high time that non-Jews stood with Jews against this rising hatred.

Let’s start by demanding that the Government stops giving our money to universities like Southampton if they cannot stop themselves transforming from centres of learning into epicentres of hate.  


3 comments:

  1. Why aren't the Police stepping in to warn the organisers that this conference could encourage anti-semitism, is racist and they could be prosecuted ?

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  2. As usual, another British University is debating Israel in a wholly one sided approach. Uni's seem obsessed with Israel bashing, fuelling antisemitism. If this were aimed at any other ethnic group it would not be tolerated. The government needs to stop funding this Unit's that set out to demonize Israel or any other ethnic group in the unlikely event that would be allowed.

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  3. I am horrified that our country who pays lip service to free speech - try being a Christian and saying you do not
    think it right to be homosexual according to the Bible or standing on a street corner and declaring the word of God, or outside an abortion clinic and showing pictures of babies in the womb being aborted. Christians are arrested for these things, yet there is no law against them. However during the Quds march a couple of years ago, Muslim supporters of Palestine were allowed to walk the streets of
    London shouting racial abuse and death threats about the Jews, and there is a law against racial dis-
    crimination and hate speech - one little child of 7 or 8 carried a banner saying 'all Jews are pigs - kill
    the pigs'. No one was arrested and the march was allowed to carry on. We are trying to stamp out radicalisation of our young men and yet we allow Universities to hold so-called free speech debates, where no one speaks for the Jews (in fact last year a Muslim living in Israel tried to tell the university group his thoughts on Israel and living there, and he was shouted down and drowned out!) and every speaker tells lies, because they feed these lies to the students. That is slander but no one is reprimanded. What is the matter with our Universities today? I can understand the students full of angst and desire to fight battles, always thinking they know everything and can solve everything, that is youth. These youths should be guided in these years to spend their time learning, thinking and gathering wisdom and who should be overseeing this but the very people who are allowing these hate filled, angry and ignorant people to start the radicalisation process; to me it shows that the people in charge of educating our young men and women, and being paid by us to do so, are ignorant of world affairs and not bothering to check the validity or veracity of the people they allow in so speak to their students - our future. Shame, terrible shame. God help us..

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