John Mearsheimer and the University of Chicago

This is a guest post by Joseph Weissman.

By endorsing Gilad Atzmon’s new book, The Wandering Who, John Mearsheimer heaps praise upon the racist writings of an antisemite who argues that Fagin and Shylock accurately represent Jewish evil, and that Hitler could be proven right.

Stephen Walt allowed Mearsheimer a guest post on his Foreign Policy blog, to defend himself from “smears” suggesting Mearsheimer had endorsed an antisemite.

In order to defend Atzmon, Mearsheimer sanitised Atzmon’s arguments. Mearsheimer commends a passage in The Wandering Who, where Atzmon draws similarities between AIPAC lobbying in the USA and Jewish lobbying in Nazi Germany. Mearsheimer wrote:

Goldberg refers to a blog post that Atzmon wrote on March 25, 2010, written in response to news at the time that AIPAC had “decided to mount pressure” on President Obama. After describing what was happening with Obama, Atzmon notes that this kind of behavior is hardly unprecedented.In his words, “Jewish lobbies certainly do not hold back when it comes to pressuring states, world leaders and even superpowers.” There is no question that this statement is accurate and not even all that controversial; Tom Friedman said as much in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago.

In the second half of this post, Atzmon says that AIPAC’s behavior reminds him of the March 1933 Jewish boycott of German goods, which preceded Hitler’s decision on March 28, 1933 to boycott Jewish stores and goods. His basic point is that the Jewish boycott had negative consequences, which it did.

Writing days later in Foreign Policy, David Rothkopf deconstructed Mearsheimer and Walt’s backing of Gilad Atzmon.

A professor at the University of Chicago, Mearsheimer has given his academic endorsement to Atzmon. To date, there has been no official reaction from the University of Chicago.

However, a philosopher of law from the University of Chicago, Brian Leiter, has accused Mearsheimer’s critics of opposing “academic freedom”, and of spreading “right-wing smears.”

Universities have a duty of care towards their students, and the university campus should be safe for Jews. The University of Chicago is clearly a safe environment for Jewish students. Yet two U. Chicago professors are now dismissing anyone concerned about the antisemitism of Gilad Atzmon, as anti-freedom and anti-intellectual.

Now, the university’s student paper The Chicago Maroon, has published an article defending Mearsheimer for endorsing Atzmon, on “academic freedom” grounds. U. Chicago student Colni Bradley writes:

There is no reason to condemn Mearsheimer based on Atzmon’s previous controversial comments. The only acceptable criticism would be if he could prove that The Wandering Who? is itself anti-Semitic, and that Mearsheimer is guilty of praising those hateful elements. Goldberg does no such thing.

However, by far the worst comment Atzmon has ever come out with, is found on p.179 ofThe Wandering Who.

Read this paragraph:

“The present should be understood as a creative dynamic mode where past premeditates its future. But far more crucially, it is also where the imaginary future can re-write its past. I will try to elucidate this idea through a simple and hypothetical yet terrifying war scenario. We, for instance, can envisage a horrific situation in which an Israeli so-called ‘pre-emptive’ nuclear attack on Iran that escalates into a disastrous nuclear war, in which tens of millions of people perish. I guess that amongst the survivors of such a nightmare scenario, some may be bold enough to argue that ‘Hitler might have been right after all.”

Atzmon is trying to prove, that there are scenarios which may well prove  Hitler had the right idea all along.

In Atzmon’s scenario, Israel goes to war with Iran, and some Iranian survivors of Israeli attacks conclude that “Hitler was right”. They are bold to do so. For Atzmon, this is just one scenario in which “the imaginary future can re-write its past” – and future events could justify Hitler.

Atzmon is arguing that eventually, the terrible behaviour of Israel will cause some people to realise that Hitler might have been right after all. But for now, alas, the “Holocaust religion” prevents us in the present from realising this.

U. Chicago student Bradley also writes:

I think we should commend anyone who seeks to push the boundaries and uncover the difficult truths, particularly when the questions are so messy. I am not saying I agree with Mearsheimer’s opinions on these issues: I don’t even know all of them. But I don’t care. For probably the first time since coming to this University, the words “academic freedom” mean more to me than justifying questionable investment practices. Atzmon may very well be an anti-Semite, but John Mearsheimer is not.

How is it “academic freedom” to endorse a racist book?

How is it “pushing the boundaries”, to suggest that Israeli  evil couldl eventually prove to the world that Hitler was right all along? Why should Mearsheimer commend such a work?

How would we feel about someone endorsing Mein Kampf itself - would we say they are being edgy, and making the full use of their academic freedom? Or would we say they are knowingly pushing a racist text?

This is not a rhetorical question.

In Gilad Atzmon’s recent interview with Keith Barrett, he tells his host (from 13:00):

“Mein Kampf is an interesting read, a very important document, I could hardly find anything about the Jews – only 2 and a half pages out of 400  about the Jews. This book was a major bookseller, and I didn’t want to think the Germans were all stupid, they were one of the most advanced  societies. It was a very very interesting read. I, for the first time, understood why Hitler managed to impress so many Germans.”

Here are some of Hitler’s quotes on Jews from Mein Kampf:

Here he stops at nothing, and in his vileness he becomes so gigantic that no one need be surprised if among our people the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.

The ignorance of the broad masses about the inner nature of the Jew, the lack of instinct and narrow-mindedness of our upper classes, make the people an easy victim for this Jewish campaign of lies.

While from innate cowardice the upper classes turn away from a man whom the Jew attacks with lies and slander, the broad masses from stupidity or simplicity believe everything. The state authorities either cloak themselves in silence or, what usually happens, in order to put an end to the Jewish press campaign, they persecute the unjustly attacked, which, in the eyes of such an official ass, passes as the preservation of state authority and the safeguarding of law and order.

Slowly fear and the Marxist weapon of Jewry descend like a nightmare on the mind and soul of decent people.

For a racially pure people which is conscious of its blood can never be enslaved by the Jew. In this world he will forever be master over bastards and bastards alone.

Now begins the great last revolution. In gaining political power the Jew casts off the few cloaks that he still wears. The democratic people’s Jew becomes the blood-Jew and tyrant over peoples. In a few years he tries to exterminate the national intelligentsia and by robbing the peoples of their natural intellectual leadership makes them ripe for the slave’s lot of permanent subjugation.

The end is not only the end of the freedom of the peoples oppressed by the Jew, but also the end of this parasite upon the nations. After the death of his victim, the vampire sooner or later dies too.

Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: ‘by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.’

Atzmon channels Hitler,  plays down the racism of Mein Kampf, and argues that  a nightmare scenario involving Israeli evil could eventually prove Hitler right.

Mearsheimer and Walt then channel Atzmon, arguing that his book is “fascinating” and “Jews and non-Jews alike” must read it.

Where will this end?

Natalie Rothschild – potted Pappé

Natalie Rothschild begins her review of Ilan Pappé’s new book,

“The most astute observation in Israeli historian Ilan Pappé’s book Out of the Frame: The Struggle For Academic Freedom In Israel is that writing about himself was an ‘embarrassing’ experience. Rarely has so much poorly structured, skewed and conceited tripe been squeezed into 220 pages.”

Read on.

Noam Edry – Zionist art at Goldsmiths

This piece by Karen Glaser is from Jpost.com.

Noam Edry

Artistic defiance

Noam Edry decided to challenge demonization against Israel on her campus in her own creative way by breaking taboos through ‘zionist’ art.

That this Israeli artist has ruffled British feathers is obvious from the moment I walk through the door of the world-famous art college.  “I’ve come to see Noam Edry’s show. Could you direct me?” I ask the student- steward at reception.  “Just follow the noise,” she replies with an ironic smirk. “It’s impossible to ignore.”

It’s true: Edry’s MA graduate show at Goldsmiths College is one noisy piece of installation art. But this is not why it has been impossible to ignore. Edry’s exhibition has been impossible to ignore because it is a Zionist take on the Middle East conflict — on display in an institution that routinely refers to Israel as an apartheid state.

Actually it’s more complicated. “Conversation Pieces: Scenes of Unfashionable Life” is an installation comprising paintings, drawings, video, sound, sculpture and performance that look at the Arab-Israeli conflict through the artist’s Jewish-Israeli eyes. In so doing, it tries to challenge the ways in which people arrive at their political opinions.  A lot of the individual exhibits are ambiguous and open-ended. But knowing how reviled the Jewish state has become on many British campuses, and preempting, surely, her detractors, Edry herself writes: “Call it a Zionist show, call it what you like.” She is, in short, being provocative.

You could see this provocation as a riposte to months of antagonism from the other side. When Edry moved to London to start her master’s in Fine Art, following a first degree at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, she thought she was on reprieve from the Middle East. The world’s most bitter conflict was certainly the last subject on which she expected to be making art.  “I had always thought of myself as apolitical,” she says. “I was sure of one thing only – that the conflict was not as simple or clear-cut as a black-and-white painting.”

But then, on her first day at Goldsmiths, the Ramat Yohanan kibbutznik was assailed by posters at the university calling her homeland an apartheid state.

It was a punch to the stomach: “Apartheid? In what way? I had gone to art college with Arab artists where we had built our exhibitions side by side. Before that I had served in the army with Beduin, sharing the same awful, oily food and consoling ourselves with Arab coffee that we brewed for each other in makeshift pots. My army commander was a Druse.”

EDRY’S INITIAL response was to lie low, a tactic that most Israelis at Goldsmiths, of whom there is a good handful every academic year, employ for the duration of their degrees. During her first year, she never brought up the Israel-Palestine question, and she certainly didn’t make art about her Israeli identity.

But it didn’t work. Edry was constantly confronted about the conflict – on the way back from a party, over lunch or a cup of coffee in the student union bar. And there were ever more posters plastered on the university’s walls – ostensibly about her homeland, but actually depicting a place that was “barely recognizable, so crass was the misrepresentation.”

When she attended a meeting of the Palestine Twinning Campaign, it felt, she says, like the clock had rewound to 1939.  “I was expecting real dialogue, but instead they were calling for an academic boycott of Israel, rallying young people who were desperate to be passionate about something to silence people like me – artists and intellectuals who believe in human beings and mutual tolerance, the very people who are, in fact, the real hope for peace in the region,” she says. “I was horrified.  What next? Would they start burning Israeli books?”

Not yet. But what she did next was to make a complex work challenging the relentless campus demonization of the Jewish state.

The show begins in a corridor outside the studio, where Jewish Israelis serve Arab-Israeli coffee to members of the public while wearing, and giving out, T-shirts with the slogan “I come from the most hated place on earth” – continuing on the back, “second to Iran.” Before you enter the room, a security guard checks your bag; he’s part of the show, but for me, at least, it took time for the penny to drop.  Inside, there is a massage therapist rehabilitating volunteers’ left sides.

The noise to which the student-steward sniffily referred comes from various sources: a video installation screened on an ’80s portable television, entitled Groovy Little War Mix and featuring war footage (including a simulated bombing of Goldsmiths College) mixed with music that scratches back and forwards; another video of Edry talking about her work; and a live performance that includes a screaming woman running into the room before hysterically throwing herself on the floor and disappearing in what looks like a pile of mud. Two words spring immediately to mind: suicide bomb.

THE STEWARD isn’t the only person to object to the volume. Students in neighboring studios have complained that her noise is “infiltrating our space.” And a visiting gallerist asks her how she managed to get such a big room for her show. Not everyone understands her ironic answer to both questions: “I am Israeli. What do you expect?”

Irony born of bitter experience. When she was preparing her show, several of her tutors nicknamed her “The Zionist Terrorist.” She thinks they were being playful, but it can’t have been much fun. Other teachers said that because they disagreed with her political persuasion, they found it hard to discuss her ideas with her. To which she replied: “But this work is not about the politics of the Middle East – about who is right and who is wrong.”

Despite this, she says her tutors have generally been supportive and, more important, genuinely intrigued by the finished work. “They have certainly been asking me lots of questions. It shows, I think, that you can make art from an unpopular political position and it can still affect people and be open-ended.”

This open-endedness also affects, and baffles, many of the thousands of visitors who come to see her show. Yes, thousands.  This year at Goldsmiths, it is a Bezalel alumnus who has the art world talking – in all directions.

Here’s one exchange.  Visitor: “I don’t want to offend anyone, but I am pro-Palestinian. What position are you?” Edry: “Well, have a coffee, walk around and see what you think.” Visitor, after her walk-around: “You know, I don’t understand this issue of homeland. It’s not in my DNA, I’m Australian. l think I still have my prejudices, but maybe that’s because my friends are all pro-Palestinian. But I do, er, hate Zionists [pause]. Well, you wouldn’t be in favor of what’s happening in your country, that’s for sure… I guess?”

Or the man who comes in shouting, “This is just all propaganda! Everything you say about Hamas is rubbish [although nothing is directly said about Hamas in the piece]. I know what Israel is like. I read the papers” – but who, after extensive conversation with the coffee-stand volunteers, leaves saying, “Okay, maybe, I don’t know.”

And the student who tells Edry, “You seem to me to be someone who supports the demolition of Palestinian homes.” “Really?” she asks. “Why do you say that? Do you see that in my work?” “I don’t know,” the student says. “I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

Meanwhile, other Brits, perhaps more ignorant about the Middle East than they realize, can’t quite put their finger on the artist’s ethnicity, asking, “Are you Israeli or Palestinian?” And they certainly don’t know what to make of ironic graffiti such as “Zionist prick” and “The bad guys are coming.” The Hebrew graffiti scrawled across walls is, naturally, even more confusing. “For me, just writing in my mother tongue was to break a big taboo,” says Edry. “ As was writing the word ‘Zionist.’ I felt so good when I had done it.”

TABOO. THE word goes to the heart of this artwork. Zionism is arguably the most unpopular ideology in art circles, and Goldsmiths – the alma mater of artists such as Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas – is at the center of the British art world. The London University college is also the birthplace of Engage, a campaign against academic boycotts of Israel, founded by sociology lecturer David Hirsh; its website has become a crucial resource for countering anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in British academia.

However, it’s fair to say that most Israeli artists at Goldsmiths deal with the discomfort of campus anti-Zionism by either keeping quiet or joining in the criticism – which some would call self-abnegation.

Edry has done the precise opposite. “In my first year at Goldsmiths, I felt voiceless. I saw the daily delegitimization of my country, the dehumanization of the place which made me who I am, and I felt powerless. I didn’t have the words, the flashy slogans and the fashionable labels,” she recalls. “This work has been my voice. I have forced dialogue to take place and I have shown Israel’s detractors the faces of the people [the coffee-stand volunteers] affected by their hate campaign.  There is now an Israeli voice in Goldsmiths, and it’s loud and won’t be silenced.”

And in the process, she has also been given a voice in her native land. Since the Goldsmiths show, there has been interest aplenty from British and American galleries and art collectors. This week, the artist also had calls from two major Israeli museums. In her (noisy) video, she says she thinks her kind of political art will ruffle Israeli feathers, too. We’ll see.

This piece by Karen Glaser is from Jpost.com.

Eric Lee, Kim Berman, Salim Vally on Israel and apartheid

Eric Lee writes on his blog:

I visited South Africa twice in recent years, both times as the guest of the trade union movement. On my second visit, to Cape Town, I found myself walking along a beautiful beach with a leader of South Africa’s Communication Workers Union. He told me that under apartheid, if he’d be found walking on this beach, he could have been shot. This was a whites-only beach. That’s what apartheid means. It means you can be shot for walking on the wrong beach.

As for “apartheid Israel,” suffice it to say that my two sons were born in a hospital that serves the residents of the Jezreel Valley — Jews and Arabs. The staff, including doctors and nurses, were a mix of all ethnic groups and religions, as were the patients. There was no segregation, no separate facilities, no differences at all in how Jews and Arabs were treated.

Does this mean that Israel is a perfect society, a real paradise on earth for everyone? Of course not.

But if one cannot see the difference between running the risk of being shot for being on the “wrong” beach — and having your child born in a hospital full of Jews and Arabs working together — if you can’t see that difference, you understand nothing at all.

See the whole piece, on Eric Lee’s blog.

Eric’s piece relates to Kim Berman’s open letter to Salim Vally, originally published onEngage.

Salim Vally’s reply is here, on the UJ website

David Hirsh on the UJ boycott; and letter responding to a boycotter;  and on how it is progressing at UJ; and Hirsh on the apartheid analogy.

For the Engage archive on the Israel / Apartheid analogy click here.

John Strawson on UJ.

For  the debate around the South African campaign for an academic boycott of Israel, with Desmond Tutu, David Newman, Neve Gordon, David Hirsh, Robert Fine, Ran Greenstein, Uri Avnery, Farid Essack click here.

 

 

University of Johannesburg is not boycotting Ben-Gurion University

This letter, by David Hirsh, is from the South African Jewish report.

The boycott campaign wants to make people feel that Israel is a unique evil and it makes progress towards this goal whenever its arguments are treated as a legitimate side of a public debate.

Even when the campaign loses, therefore, it also wins, when, unlike other antisemitic campaigns, it is treated with respect.

There is a sense in which the (mis)educative function of the campaign is more important than actually excluding Israelis from the cultural, academic and sporting life of humanity.

This can lead the boycotters into the realm of the absurd.  When celebrated intellectual Slavoj Zizek recently spoke in Tel Aviv, the campaign tried to spin his visit as a boycott because he spoke in an independent bookshop.

When Roger Waters, formerly of Pink Floyd, played a gig in Israel, the campaign tried to portray this as a boycott because he played in a mixed Arab/Jewish village.

Now, scientists from UJ and BGU are quietly resuming their important work together, both institutions have ratified the agreement, and UJ has, ostensibly anyway, re-doubled its commitment to academic freedom.

The antizionists are pretending that there is a boycott while the scientists and their universities carry on doing what they do, scientific collaboration.

The boycott of BGU has taken a dent but there remains enough mirage of the boycott for the campaign to carry on its work, which is to portray Israel as the pariah of humankind.

David Hirsh

Goldsmiths, University of London

Prominent Belgian Jewish figure resigned from Brussels University Board to denounce anti-Semitic incidents

This piece is from the European Jewish Press.

BRUSSELS (EJP)—A prominent figure of the Jewish community of Belgium has resigned from the Board of Free University of Brussels (ULB) after denouncing several grave anti-Semitic incidents within the institution.

Jacques Brotchi, an internationally renowned neurosurgeon and honorary professor at the ULB, told EJP: “I resigned from the Board of the University Foundation which collects funds for research because I deeply deplored the absence of a strong and appropriate reaction from the university authorities to a succession of anti-Semitic incidents.”

In his letter of resignation addressed to the ULB Rector, he wrote: “I don’t feel at home anymore at ULB.” He added, “I asked if the university of free-examination has not become the university of free anti-Semitism.”

The incidents, which have been repeatedly denounced by the Union of Jewish Students of Belgium (UEJB), included the staging of an Israeli military checkpoint on the university campus, the invitation of anti-Semitic French comic Dieudonne to a conference and the absence of reaction to the comments he made, a Nazi-style student feast and the publication of an article in the magazine of Solvay, the economics and management school, in which the author used anti-Semitic stereotypes and prejudices comparable to those of the Protocols of Elders of Zion.

As one student put it, “the situation at the university has become particularly difficult for Jews.”

The Union of Jewish Students urged the academic authorities to take measures against the “deteriorating climate” on the campus.

Brotchi, who is also a member of the Belgian Senate for the Liberal party, has met the university authorities to explain his decision but he didn’t had the impression they understood the gravity of the situation.

“I explained them that I know Jewish families who prefer to send their children study at UCL, the Catholic university,” he told EJP.

In an interview published last month by the Belgian weekly Le Vif-L’Express, the Rector, Didier Viviers, flatly denied that his university has become anti-Semitic “because of  several regrettable incidents”, and spoke of a “smear campaign.”

According to Brotchi the situation at Brussels University is not isolated. “It is comparable to what is happening in other universities in Europe and elsewhere with the academic boycott of Israel campaigns where anti-Zionism takes the form of anti-Semitism.”  “But this is no reason to stay without reaction,” he added.

This piece is from the European Jewish Press.

James Mendelsohn, Senior Lecturer in Law, Huddersfield University, Resigns from UCU

Dear Sally

Thank you for your message.

I was happy to sign the petition of no confidence in the government’s HE policies and, like you, I have very serious concerns about the White Paper.

Regrettably, though, I am no longer able to join in UCU’s fight against the government’s measures. This is because I am no longer a member of UCU. Following the passing of Motion 70 at the most recent annual Congress, I felt that I had no choice but to resign. Not only does Motion 70 reject the most widely-used definition of anti-Semitism in the world, it fails to provide any alternative definition. The motives of those who proposed the motion are clear: they rightly understood that, according to the EUMC Working Definition, their obsessive campaign to single out Israeli academics for boycott year on year might indeed be anti-Semitic. Whether intentionally or otherwise, this has made UCU an even more uncomfortable place for Jewish members than it was previously. I can no longer contribute money to such an organisation in good conscience.

Please do not send me the same generic response you have sent to others who have resigned on  these grounds. Sadly, your repeated claim that UCU abhors anti-Semitism is not borne out by the evidence; rather, the evidence points overwhelmingly in the other direction. For example, a union which truly abhorred anti-Semitism would have no truck with Bongani Masuku, whose statements were correctly defined as anti-Semitic hate speech by the South African Human Rights Commission. UCU, by contrast, invited Masuku to promote the boycott campaign. Does that sound to you like the mark of a union which abhors anti-Semitism?

Speaking on a more personal level, I sent you three emails on related issues in 2008, which are attached. I think you would agree that a trade union which abhorred anti-Semitism would take such emails from an ordinary member seriously. Regrettably, I never received a reply to any of them.

I no longer wish to contribute my money to an organisation which has a problem with institutionalised anti-Semitism. I am sure I will not be the last Jewish member who feels forced to resign, even at a time when trade union protection and solidarity are more important than ever.  Once again -please do not send me your generic reply. All I would ask you is: do you realise that the boycott campaign is now weakening the union’s numbers and credibility, at a time when a strong union is needed more than ever? And do you ever lie awake at night wondering why, in the 21^st century, Jewish members have left UCU in droves?

Yours sincerely

 James Mendelsohn

Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Huddersfield

In 2009 UCU Congress was asked to mandate the union to investigate these resignations.  But Congress said no, it didn’t want an investigation into why people were resigning from the union citing antisemitism as a reason.

UCU members who have resigned:

David-Hillel Ruben

Ariel Hessayon,  Goldsmiths

Michael Yudkin, David Smith and Dennis Noble, Oxford

Shalom Lappin, King’s College, London   

Jonathan G. Campbell, Bristol University  

Colin Meade, London Metropolitan University 

Eric Heinze,  Queen Mary University of London

Tim Crane, Univesity College London

Eve Garrard, Keele University

Raphaël Lévy, University of Liverpool

Sarah Brown, Anglia Ruskin University

The Following UCU members have not resigned; their points of view too need to be taken seriously:

Norman Geras, Manchester University

Lesley Klaff, Sheffield Hallam

Deborah Steinberg, Warwick

David Hirsh, Goldsmiths

Stephen Soskin, Buckinghamshire New University

Ronnie Fraser, Barnet College

Ben Gidley, Oxford

Jon Pike, Open University, Resignation from NEC

Dov Stekel, University of Birmingham

Mira Vogel, Goldsmiths

Robert Fine’s account of Congress, Warwick U

Eva Fromjovic, Leeds University

Robert Simon, LSE

76 UCU members signed a public protest about UCU’s failure to take seriously the criticism made against it by the Parliamentary Inquiry. Read their protest, published in the Times Higher.

39 UCU members signed a public protest at the UCU’s refusal to meet with Ger Weisskirchen at his request. Weisskirchen is the OSCE’s Chairman-in-Office Representative on antisemitism. The protest, which went unheeded and ignored by the UCU.

What overseas issues are UCU Congress interested in? – Ronnie Fraser

Analysis by Country of the International motions debated at UCU annual conferences 2007- 2011

The University and College Lecturer’s union obsession with Israel and Palestine is clear for all to see when one analyses by country the international motions discussed by the UCU’s annual conference in the five years since its incorporation in 2007.

Nineteen of the forty-six motions (41%) debated are about Israel and Palestine, an average of nearly four every year.  The UCU National Executive Committee (NEC) and The University of Brighton each have their names as proposers on six of the nineteen motions.  Tom Hickey, a leader of the boycott campaign, is a member of the NEC and a lecturer at the University of Brighton.

This list does not include the 2011 EUMC working definition of anti-Semitism motion which was discussed came under the Equality Committee heading.

Notable absences from the list are Afghanistan, North Korea, Somalia, Saudi Arabia….

Israel and Palestine -19

General -4

Burma -2

Colombia -2

Egypt and Tunisia -2

Iraq-2

Turkey -2

Zimbabwe-2

China -1

Cuba -1

Egypt -1

Greece -1

Haiti-1

Iran-1

Libya -1

Sri Lanka -1

Sudan -1

Why I am still in the dire UCU

“Now I’m going to explain why, in spite of this shocking state of affairs, I am not going to resign from the UCU.”

Geoffrey Alderman writes in the JC.

Martin Bright on Ronnie Fraser’s Legal Action

 

Martin Bright

This piece, by Martin Bright, is from the JC.com

Pivotal moment for unions and Labour

For many years, too many trade union members have stood by as their officers expended significant time and money on international “solidarity” campaigns. The honourable cause of Palestinian national self-determination has thus been swallowed up in an ideological pudding that bundles together Venezuela, Chile and Cuba within campaign groups often run by the same small number of hard-left organisations.

Mr Fraser, director of Academic Friends of Israel, has been driven to this course of action by his treatment at the hands of his fellow trade unionists. This should be a matter of deep shame to all his comrades in the UCU. The union that represents the country’s intellectuals and thinkers should never have allowed itself to be drawn into this kind of fringe politics. Now it finds itself the subject of a harassment complaint under the Equality Act 2010.

As it has done so often over recent years, the trade union movement has provided the stick with which its opponents can beat it. Communities Secretary Eric Pickles was able to occupy the moral high ground when he wrote in the JC last week that the UCU was sending a “chilling message” to Jewish academics and students.

The labour movement and the party that represents it has been left flat-footed once more.

The TUC leadership has so far held the line against an all-out boycott on Israel but it will come under increasing pressure to harden its stance in the run-up to this year’s Congress in September. So far Ed Miliband has been silent on the issue. He has the rest of the summer to reflect, but then he must show some leadership.

This piece, by Martin Bright, is from the JC.com