British Schools Calling For Boycott Against Israel
When over three hundred university teachers and lecturers sign a public declaration in the UK Guardian newspaper of an academic boycott against Israeli academics you know there is a deep sickness in the cloistered halls of British academia.
There is room to criticise Israel but, in the words of Booker Prize laureate, Howard Jacobson, when in literary terms “critical” describes a book as the worst ever written should never have been published in the first place, must be banned and all copies burnt, we need a new word for “critical.”
This is the standard and behaviour that these academics apply solely and exclusively against the Jewish state in an exercise of regressive immorality and poor judgment as they seek to punish one nation above all others in their fevered wrath.
They do so in support of a movement founded by a person who received his higher education in an Israeli seat of learning. Now these UK academics join him in barring any contact with Israeli academics.
How’s that for pure hypocrisy!
The hypocrisy goes deeper for, if these learned folk are acting in support of {Arab Muslims in Israel], it is strange that they do not apply the same policy against Egypt that maintains a more rigid chokehold over the [Arabs] of Gaza than Israel, or Jordan that keeps a million [so-called] “Palestinian” Arabs “stateless”.
How’s that for an apartheid state, UK lecturers?
No protest forthcoming from these “concerned” academics. It’s only against Israel that they apply their discriminatory double standards.
Jacobson made his remark when addressing the left-wing Engage group back in 2007. They are doing what the Guardian academics fail to do, that is to engage, and it is this that is the most disturbing aspect of the legion of British BDS academics.
For, when academia decides it no longer needs to engage or to open up to opposing thought, it is no longer academia. It becomes a profound act of dogma, and dogma has no place in the halls of enlightenment and open-minded debate.
No thought or consideration to the fact that approaches and concessions for peace from seven consecutive Israeli governments have all been violently rejected by PLO leaders that call for the total destruction of Israel. It is the Israeli academics they want to punish. No matter that these are the leading proponents of a two-state solution, these UK academics, in their blind unthinking academic violence, have decided to lash out at one influential group within Israeli society that works for a peaceful solution.
It is when the collective and the individual have decided they need no longer think, nor are they prepared to accept the enlightenment of others. They have reached a point where they have no reason to think, or to listen.
When academia adopts a closed mind, when it is no longer open to reason, not only is it no longer academia, it becomes dogma.
As such, as we have seen in history, it inflicts damage not only on the targeted victim, in this case Israeli academics, but it also inflicts damage on the society on which it feeds.
The co-signers will go out into British society to become the opinion and influence makers of the future and this regressive thinking that will become the standard going forward.
It is the closing of the academic mind in Britain and its result can have no positive or useful effect on the problem it purports to solve.
