The Anglosphere′s jihad

Moves are currently under way to mount a legal challenge to the way in which the AUT voted to implement its disgusting boycott of Bar-Ilan and Haifa universities in Israel and launch an investigation′ into the Hebrew University. The process was demonstrably unfair, given that no speeches opposing the boycott were heard at all, the later votes were taken on a show of hands even though the voting was very close — the first motion to boycott Bar- Ilan was passed by a mere four votes — and the whole thing took place on Friday afternoon, when orthodox Jews were not able to be present.

There have been calls for members to resign in protest from the AUT, and a few have already done so. Understandable though this reaction is, it is surely short-sighted. The urgent need now above all is to overcome this evil that has taken over the AUT, and that can only be done if people of principle stay in the union and fight it.

Indeed, a much broader battle now needs urgently to be waged within the universities, to challenge the lies about Israel and prejudice towards the Jewish people that have been allowed to drive out the truth. In particular, this means that those academics who have made careers out of promulgating such mendacious propaganda should have their arguments publicly deconstructed and the lies they tell held up to public scorn and opprobrium. It is not enough to oppose this boycott on the grounds of protecting freedom of speech, important though that is. The demonisation of Israel within the universities has been allowed to go by default. The boycott is merely the culmination of this process. Now the process itself, which has corrupted thought itself, must be challenged.

A start could be made by publicising, through the mainstream media, the false allegation which lies behind the boycott of Haifa university. Haifa stands accused of censoring a student′s thesis for political reasons. This thesis, by a student named Teddy Katz, claimed that in the War of Independence in 1948, Jewish forces perpetrated a massacre in the Arab town of Tantura — a massacre which never took place. Haifa university — which the AUT never asked for its side of the story — has now issued a statement in which it says:

An independent committee was asked to examine the validity of the quotes that were used as the "scientific basis" for the highly controversial charges proffered in this thesis, authored by Mr. Teddy Katz. After a thorough examination, the committee members concluded that, in fact, the quotes in the written text did not match the taped comments of the interviews and that the text was grossly distorted. Therefore, they disqualified this MA thesis. This decision, it is important to note, matched a court decision given on the same matter′.

The thesis, however, was being supervised by the Israel-hating far-left academic Ilan Pappe. The university statement goes on:

As Dr. Pappe did not like the committee decision, despite the undeniable discrepancies between the text and the taped interviews, he reacted by calling the academic community to boycott the members of this committee and the University of Haifa.′

It was this account of the disputed thesis and the boycott call that has now been recycled by the AUT. Details of the story behind the alleged massacre′ itself, along with Pappe′s role in pushing this account, are to be found on the Dafka website as follows:

In fact, there was no massacre at all. The student had simply invented the story as part of the leftist campaign by self-hating Israeli Jewish anti-Semites to libel and delegitimize the country. The thesis was supervised by Ilan Pappe, Israel′s academic version of Taliban John, a vile anti-Semite who openly calls for Israel′s annihilation, an "academic" whose publication record consists mainly of anti-Israel screeds published in a PLO propaganda "journal", the Journal of Palestine Studies, and by a radical Druse professor.

Later Katz admitted in court with his lawyer present (the Marxist lawyer Avigdor Feldman) that he had fabricated the story, this after being sued for libel by the Palmach veterans organization. SInce then, the story has come to symbolize the leftist pseudo-scholarship and extremist faculty sedition common in Israel and especially at the University of Haifa.

Today, the newest twist to the story was exposed. The IMRA news service reveals that the PLO itself was involved in financing Katz and his activities. Pappe by the way has written about the "massacre" for a wide number of Islamist and anti-Jewish papers and web sites and the "story" of the "massacre" is now standard fare on the PLO′s web site as well as neonazi web sites around the world.′

In the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick does not just excoriate the AUT but rightly sets the incident in the context of the escalating hate-fest against Israel and the Jews in decadent Britain -- whose fate as a dying lion′, she concludes, cannot now be reversed:

Anti-Semitism, which has become pervasive among Britain′s aristocracy and the chattering classes in the media, culture and academia, is a sign of Britain′s steep and steady slide into nihilistic self-destruction.′

But as she also points out, much of the ammunition is being provided by Israeli academics like Pappe:

The highest density of anti-Israel activists in Israeli society is to be found in the humanities and social science faculties of Israeli universities. Indeed, it is Ilan Pappe from Haifa University who, while scandalously receiving a taxpayer-financed salary, travels around the US and Europe vilifying his country and calling for anti-Semites like the members of the AUT to boycott us.′

The fight for Britain′s soul is not over. Indeed, it has barely begun. But if it is to take place in earnest, it must tackle the very source of the rot: the universities, where hitherto insular academics must take their heads out of the sand and restore truth, objectivity and integrity to the corrupted scholarship that is feeding this monster of lies, prejudice and hate.