UK Boycott Sponsors Vow to Fight On
British academics responsible for last month’s Association of University Teachers (AUT) academic boycott against Israel vowed to continue their anti-Israel struggle despite the union’s decision to reverse the boycott in favor of building bridges between Israeli and Palestinian academics.
Sue Blackwell, who championed the original boycott motion, refused to accept defeat in the AUT vote, claiming “a very well-organized, well-funded pro-Israel lobby” pressured AUT members to reverse their votes.
She also said future action against Israel would be easier because the “genie was out of the bottle”. “This is the start not the end as far as the boycott campaign is concerned,” she said. “We have put this issue firmly on the map and we have shown that people in British academia do care about what is happening in the occupied territories.”
Steven Rose, who called for a general European academic boycott against Israel in 2002, also promised to continue pushing for sanctions against Israel, comparing the Jewish state to Nazi Germany.
“I regard Israeli academics as shameful and silent, just as ordinary decent Germans were silent their Jewish colleagues were kicked out of universities,” he said. “Of course, many German academics disapproved, but they were silent. And British academics continued to deal normally with them. Do you not see the parallels? We have no right to treat Israel as if it were a normal state.”
Members of the AUT disagreed, voting by a two-thirds majority to cancel the boycott.
leme guesse…jewschool is in favour of the boycott..*rolls eyes*
Why is that left wing, anti-Israel “academics” like Steven Rose can make all the Holocaust/Nazi references they want, but if Jews do it – like the Jewish Star protest by the Gaza people – its some sort of desecration?
European leftists go on and on about how sick they are of hearing about the Holocaust and how Jews and Israel exploit it for propaganda purposes. But they never miss a chance to expoit it themselves.
If they didn’t talk about so much themselves, maybe they wouldn’t be so sick of it, It just shows how little integrity these people have.
I am jewish and I write poetry. I am a little worried that I might be too attractive to be a Jewish poet and that my humour is not self depreciating enough. Could you reassure me?
Sorry, duh, wrong place.
Haha. Sue Blackwell’s ranting reminds me of Darth Maul’s death screams…she knows she’s screwed so she just keeps howling.
I don’t think there are any officially sanctioned Jewschool positions, Jess.
“Sue Blackwell, who championed the original boycott motion, refused to accept defeat in the AUT vote, claiming “a very well-organized, well-funded pro-Israel lobby†pressured AUT members to reverse their votes.”
Not like the very well-organized, well-funded pro-Palestinian lobby that funded this little gem of academia. The one that pressured professors to vote the way they wanted, whose members held down oppositional voices, and ultimately held the vote on a Jewish festival (the Sabbath, dude) despite protestations so that the opposition would have difficulty voting against it.
The one that trumpeted the victory of democracy…until it now loses in a subsequent revote.
The one that now plays the victim to a shadowy, expansive and unnamed ober-organization, thus manufacturing a climate of fear that can be exploited for easy sympathy and righteous indignation.
No, nothing like that at all.
Its the Jews, I swear.
Well, that’s politics for ya. Gotta love politics.
In an entirely unrelated non-story, no academics anywhere ever called for an academic boycott against English academics for not protesting loudly enough their country’s ccupation of Northern Ireland, and the establishment of Scottish Protestant settlements over the last 1000 years and up until this very date.
“Why is that left wing, anti-Israel “academics” like Steven Rose can make all the Holocaust/Nazi references they want, but if Jews do it – like the Jewish Star protest by the Gaza people – its some sort of desecration?”
Stephen Rose is Jewish
The Second Coming — W. B. Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
though perhaps some individual contributors to jewschool may be in favor of the boycott, jewschool as an entity in and of itself, is not.
frankly jess, i’m rolling my eyes are your presumptiveness. personally, this excites me more than any sort of academic boycott.
Rose is Jewish the same way Chomsky and Finkelstein are Jewish. In other words, they may be born of Jewish mothers, but they have turned against the Jewish people.
Rose and his ilk would be the first to complain about pro-Jewish or pro-Israel Jews making comparisons to Nazi Germany. Then he’d talk about how the youth in Europe have grown immune to all that Nazi talk.
Is anyone really surprised at their response. I am not. What bothers me most is that it took so long to muster a response.
We should be aware of people like this and act accordingly when they rear their heads in this manner.
OK Jack, what’s the proper response when this shit comes up again?
If you’re not fast, you’re last?
a good place to look at the responses to this shit is Engage, a grassroots website run by some AUT members which became the home of the anti-boycott campaign. there are some good articles linked from this site: http://liberoblog.com/
israel is expecting boycott efforts to continue:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/s…