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The indomitable Melanie Phillips writes in Frontpage (thanks to Rebecca Bynum) about the academic "Inti-fad-a" in Britain:
In his book Intellectuals, the British author Paul Johnson wrote: “The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas.”
If anyone had ever told British academics that there would come a time when they would punish colleagues because of the views they held, would treat them as pariahs and try to destroy their livelihoods in order to intimidate others into toeing the sole approved political line, they would have been incredulous. In the Western tradition the universities are, after all, the historic custodians of free intellectual inquiry and open debate. Censorship, suppression of ideas and intellectual intimidation are associated with totalitarian regimes, which attempt to coerce people into the approved way of thinking.
Yet that is what is now happening in British universities — and the cause whose supporters are turned into pariahs is, of course, Israel. Britain’s Association of University Teachers (AUT) is about to debate a proposed boycott of Israeli academics. Not all Israeli academics, mind you — only those who refuse to denounce their government’s policies in the occupied territories. The motion proposes to exclude from the boycott “conscientious Israeli academics and intellectuals opposed to their state’s colonial and racist policies.”
How generous. In true totalitarian tradition, only those in the pariah group who denounce their own will be permitted to have a livelihood. To survive in the cradle of free expression, Israelis will have to betray their own people in the cause of hatred and lies. The motion has already been compared to McCarthyism, which is too kind. However cruel, illiberal and arbitrary that disturbing period was, a number of those who were hounded subsequently turned out to have actually been Communists. By contrast, Israeli academics are to be persecuted for failing to denounce their own country – for seeking to defend its citizens against genocidal mass murder. A more appropriate comparison would surely be the show trials under Stalinism, or even closer to home, the forced conversion of the Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages.
But who can be surprised? This is a natural development from the implicit — and sometimes explicitly stated — assumption that courses through British intellectual circles in the ongoing hate-fest against Israel, that only those British Jews who denounce Israel’s policies can be considered to be British; anyone who supports Israel is guilty of “dual loyalty.” Since defending Israel is a thought-crime, which thus calls into question one’s membership of a nation, it follows that Israel’s academics must similarly find called into question their membership of the academy....
Read it all.
Posted by Robert at April 11, 2005 12:50 PM
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The same is happening to American academia. The federal government has to legislate mandatory standards that restrain these arrogant atheistic liberal weasels.
Posted by: angry_kafir![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/nav-commenters.gif)
at April 11, 2005 2:04 PM
AK~ Exactly. Good to see it being pointed out here. And if Mr. Spencer hasn't already analyzed it and posted it here, I shall always be happy to do so. The public needs to know what their kids are being indoctrinated in, and threats that pointing out these disastrous consequenced might 'drive the left to islam' are specious at best. These teachers are already there.
Posted by: Gary at April 11, 2005 2:27 PM
Consequences. That's what I get for having three conversation going at the same time...
The Leftist Academia’s propaganda machine. It's the perfect Anti-Science: Mention only the facts that back you up, ignore contradictory data, vilify anyone that questions you, stamp out calls for reform, repeat the lies again and again, and eventually you will win. ~ kj
Parents are getting fed up with PC on Middle-Eastern studies:
http://www.nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz200504110831.asp
at April 11, 2005 2:30 PM
My thoughts are that the "academics" are free to do as they please on their own time and own dime. I assume they or their institutions are largely publicly funded so it's perfectly reasonable for the government to show some courage and yank the chain so to speak. If they wish to set public policy, then run for elected office. If they haven't the courage to resign from their academic jobs and run for office, then shut up about matters that are not your field.
Posted by: johnb at April 11, 2005 6:34 PM
Speaking of 'dual loyalties', the ELEPHANT in this British parlour is the thing being 'religiously overlooked' here during their 'kick the Underdog Fest':
Islam.
It's only loyalty is to the Sharia Law of the Koran.
Not the U.K. Not education.
While these deluded 'teachers' are busy trying to get people to abandon their hope for a tiny, surrounded country, the GIANT traitor in their midst is cheering on their foolishness and blindness, and laughing all the way to the Restored Caliphate.
Cowards of world-historical proportions, trying to intimidate the weak, while those growing strong -in their lust for global theocracy- are wilfully ignored.
Where are Orwell, Swift and Thomas Paine (born in England) when you need them?
at April 11, 2005 9:59 PM
What are we witnessing in our universities? A secular return to the religious blood libels of the middle ages?
An insistence that Jews have no right to self determination?
Civilitas defined by the Romans as the apotheosis of the efforts of mankind to lift the human spirit has always been associated with the alumni of our universities.
Now we see throughout the west, the efforts to corrupt and destroy those aims, in the same manner that the Gospels of love were turned into the gospels of hate and the damning of the Jews as the Deicide-peoples.
"it is the exclusion from a long series of trades, it is the accusations of violation of the Host, of ritual murder, of poisoning of wells, and the horrible theory of bloody persecutions which accompany these accusations, it is the skilfully organized religious discussions with the verdict in favor of the Christian prepared in advance, it is the autos-da-fé of the Talmud, it is the Jews slaves of the princes and lords, mere merchandise without will or right of their own, whom one exchanges at the best rate, whom one sells to the highest bidder, it is the usurers impelled toward this activity by an economy which closes to them all other possibilities, reviled and execrated for this activity by the entirety of decent people. It will be a species of men definitively banished from society, exploiting for the greatest profit of the prince, exploited according to the good pleasure of the prince, money of exchange between the great, easy prey abandoned to the vile instincts of excited crowds, hypersensitized by a pious and sanguinary imagery, by an edifying and terrifying literature."
Today we are at last completely delivered from the idea of the 'deicide-people' and from the "Christian" hatred of the Jewish people. The religious anti-Semitism which long soiled Christendom has decidedly disappeared. And this is, as also for the idea of the holy war, one of the major achivement of the second Council of the Vatican.
"Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as repudiated or cursed by God, as if such views followed from the holy Scriptures. . . . The Church repudiates all persecutions against any man. Moreover, mindful of her common patrimony with the Jews, and motivated by the Gospel's spiritual love and by no political considerations, she deplores the hatred, persecutions, and displays of antiSemitism directed against the Jews at any time and from any source. . . . The Church rejects, as foreign to the mind of Christ, any discrimination against men or harassment of them because of their race, color, condition of life, or religion."
the return of Jews to Israel is built on the blood of six million Jews and the horrific historical persecutions in western europe and now faces the new racial antisemitism from the Academic secular left.
at April 12, 2005 4:17 AM
Chevalier de st george, your analysis is all wet, it is all wet because it is bogged down by ideology, the problem is numbers (votes) and money (Islamic black crack - oil), and possibly blackmail of political leaders.
There is irony here. British Hate Speech Laws,were enacted under pressure from Jews, and British Libel Laws were modified to appease Jews, because of
authors like David Irving. In essence the law states that one does not have to speak a lie or be guilty of libel, but only say or publish things that harm a protected class of citizens.
That same law was invoked when Paul Unger tried to publish House of Bush House of Saud In England, the Saudis threatened suit because it would harm the Saudis. Fortunately US laws haven't devolved that far, to date.
Hate speech and hate crime laws originally passed to protect the Jews from antisemites, have now been modified and expanded to protect the Muslims.
It seems that Muslim votes and Islamic "black crack" (oil) have overtaken and override Jewish influence in Britain, Europe and America.
I'll bet no Jew or Sharon has slept in the Lincoln Bedroom or can call on the Whitehouse at pleasure, but the Saudi Royals can and do.
They can even show up at Crawford, anytime they wish when Dubya is home.
at April 12, 2005 5:31 PM
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