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.