Of Banality and Burden
October 14, 2007
Hamid Dabashi on the Iranian president’s visit to Columbia. I must point out that while I think Dabashi is a scholar of the highest order, his analysis of power — the locus of its concentration, the modes of its operation — is deeply flawed. For him it is largely an intellectual exercise and hence he overlooks the obvious conflicts of interest. But more egregiously, he also sees no problem with repeating neocon propaganda (for which he faults Lee Bollinger) as he goes on to attribute to Ahmadinejad — yet again — the discredited propaganda about ‘wiping Israel off the map’.
Let’s, then, be clear at the beginning, Mr. President you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator . . . . I am only a professor, who is also a university president, and today I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for. I only wish I could do better. — President Lee C. Bollinger of Columbia University addressing his guest Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran (24 September 2007)
Take up the White Man’s burden–
Send forth the best ye breed–
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild–
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
– Rudyard Kipling, “White Man’s Burden” (1899)
The only reason that the world at large should care about the contankerous exchange between an irresponsible and sensationalist president of a beleaguered and increasingly illegitimate Islamic Republic and the racist president of an Ivy League university in the United States is that in the brief encounter between the two dwells the symptoms of a much more frightful malignancy now afflicting our globe–the fact and phenomenon of an Empire least equipped to rule the world and yet flaunting a vulgar audacity to issue pronouncements about its ills and afflictions–at once creating, promoting, and supporting undemocratic regimes in its domain of influence (from the Saudis to the Taliban) and yet unable to deal with their criminal consequences, while at the same time having the audacity to give itself the moral authority to be the arbiter of truth in the world, carrying the white man’s burden to set the course of history aright.
The forum to which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, was invited for a talk at Columbia University in New York, where I teach, is one of the inanest ideas of President Lee Bollinger–something called “World Leaders Forum,” to which he invites the most notorious warmongers around the globe (among the most innocuous and irrelevant leaders), so they will have yet another forum to reiterate their nonsense. The world suffers the terrorizing predicament that it does precisely because these so-called leaders have altogether too many forums on which to talk, and some of them the inordinate power and the necessary wherewithal to put to action the nonsense they thus speak. They should never be invited to any university, and if they are they are to be sat down and talked to and not to listen to–they have scarce anything important, new, or significant to say.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was invited to come to Columbia University and address our community on 24 September 2007. Neither I nor any one of my colleagues in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC), the principle home of Iranian Studies, knew, was consulted, or approved of this visit. In his opening statement, President Bollinger said, “This [Ahmadinejad's visit] is just one of many events on Iran that will run throughout this academic year, all to help us better understand this critical and complex nation in today’s geopolitics.” So far as my colleagues and I in MEALAC know, we are party to no such “project” in understanding Iran, outside our regular teaching and scholarly projects reading and writing on diverse aspects of Iranian history, politics, culture, arts, cinema, literature, and geopolitics none of which is of any immediate use to the US military or the neocon chicaneries trying “to understand” Iran. In fact, ever since Lee Bollinger has become our president, our department has been systematically sidestepped and undermined precisely because we do not cater to such self-promoting and megalomaniac projects.
Ahmadinejad’s September 2007 visit to Columbia was overwhelmingly dominated not by the inanities that he repeated in his talk, nor indeed by the horrors the Islamic Republic has perpetrated against its own citizens over the last three decades, but in fact by the rude and racist remarks that Lee Bollinger made when introducing him. In his own remarks, Ahmadinejad said nothing outside his regular nonsense–yet again effectively denying the suffering of millions of human beings and their descendents during and in the aftermath of the Jewish Holocaust, denying that there are even homosexuals in Iran, denying Iranian women are the second rate citizens in their own country. No amount of footnotes or linguistic, political, or cultural fine- tuning can excuse these inexcusable obscenities. No degree of solidarity with the Palestinian cause can ever translate into denying or belittling the monumental suffering of other human beings viciously murdered in their millions by the German Nazis in European concentration camps in the course of the Jewish Holocaust. No cultural explication of the difference between the varieties of homoeroticism in Iran and outside Iran can explain the fact that non-heterosexual practices in the Islamic Republic are severely repressed, denigrated, or even punished. No amount of cultural finagling can change the fact that Iranian women live in a legally sanctioned gender apartheid system. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the representative of a brutal theocracy that has systematically and consistently repressed, imprisoned, and even cold-bloodedly murdered those opposed to its very theocratic foundations. Having said all of this, I must immediately add that only Lee Bollinger’s mind-numbing racism when introducing Ahmadinejad could have made the demagogue look like the innocent bystander in a self- promotional circus.
A close reading of Bollinger’s statement when introducing Ahmadinejad is today the closest text analogue of what exactly happens when the legitimate criticism of the atrocities of the Islamic Republic quite imperceptively degenerates into the propaganda warfare against a soverign nation state, to be waged by the self-proclaimed moral authority of the United States, and from there further mutating into the oldest racist assumptions of the white man’s burden to civilize the world. Reading Bollinger’s statement is to witness a closely-knit packing of assertions of fact about the horrors of the Islamic Republic, combined with the most ridiculous clichés of the neocon propaganda machinery, wrapped in the missionary position of a white racist supremacist carrying the heavy burden of civilizing the world.
From the very first sentences of his speech, Bollinger went on a rampage against his guest: “It should never be thought that merely to listen to ideas we deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those ideas, or the weakness of our resolve to resist those ideas or our naiveté about the very real dangers inherent in such ideas. It is a critical premise of freedom of speech that we do not honor the dishonorable when we open the public forum to their voices. To hold otherwise would make vigorous debate impossible.” The man sitting in front of Lee Bollinger, the elected president of a soverign nation state, had not yet open his mouth and he was already branded deplorable and dishonorable. It makes no difference how abominable some of Ahmadinejad’s utterances may have been or how massively documented the human rights abuses of the Islamic Republic are. Ahmadinejad was sitting there as the elected official of a soverign nation state. Bollinger would not dare call any of the monarchs of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, or Morocco (all allies of the United States and all medieval potentates ruling undemocratically), or above them all call George W. Bush anything resembling what he did Ahmadinejad–and yet Bush is now chiefly responsible for the unconscionable poverty of millions of Americans, most of them children, as well as for an illegal invasion of a soverign nation- state that has caused the death of almost one million Iraqis, maiming of millions more, and turning four other million Iraqis into refugees. Bollinger would never dare calling Ehud Olmert anything remotely resembling what he did Ahmadinejad, and Olmert is chiefly responsible for destroying the entire infrastructure of a sovereign nation state (Lebanon), killing thousands of innocent civilians, and adding even more refugees to the already deplorable condition of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. This is to say nothing about the apartheid state of Israel continuing to maim and murder even more Palestinians and stealing even more of their homeland on a daily basis. If Ahmadinejad has uttered a nonsense about “wiping Israel off the face of the map,” Bush and Olmert have actually wiped the economic, moral, and political infrastructures of three nations (Iraqis, Lebanese, and Palestinians) off the face of the map–and yet Bollinger will roll the red carpet for them if they ever deigned to grace our campus.
Further prejudicing his audience, Bollinger solemnly declared, “to those among us who experience hurt and pain as a result of this day, I say on behalf of all of us we are sorry and wish to do what we can to alleviate it.” But even this was not enough: “To be clear on another matter,” Bollinger added, “this event has nothing whatsoever to do with any “rights” of the speaker but only with our rights to listen and speak. We do it for ourselves.” “Unfortunately,” Michael Ignatieff once famously said, “terrorists even have human rights too.” But not according to Lee Bollinger. The President of the Islamic Republic sitting in front of him had no such rights. This makes Bollinger indistinguishable from Ahmadinejad who presides over an Islamic Republic that denies its citizens such rights, if not on practical then certainly at theoretical level. The key question that someone should have asked Bollinger (but no one did) is that do we have those rights on our own campus at Columbia–can we criticize whomever we want (Israel for example) as we deem necessary, without immediate and enduring repercussions? Nothing short of the devil incarnate, the Christian Fundamentalist in Bollinger thought, was sitting in front of him: “It is consistent with the idea that one should know thine enemies, to have the intellectual and emotional courage to confront the mind of evil and to prepare ourselves to act with the right temperament.” What is the difference between that sentiment and the idea of an “Axis of Evil,” as promoted by George W. Bush? What is the point of inviting a head of state, no matter how much his ideas and practices are deplorable, to heap racist insult upon him and by extension the people that he may even misrepresent?
When Bollinger finished with his preamble and turned his attention directly to Ahmadinejad, we begin to witness the precise manner in which the legitimate criticism of the Islamic Republic invariably and ever so imperceptively degenerates into an illegitimate propaganda manifesto for the missionary position of the United States to save the world and for its client Jewish state of Israel to do its share in this civilizing mission. Bollinger began his jeremiad against Ahmadinejad with the senseless and unconscionable arrest of scholars like Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbakhsh, referred to reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch of the persecution and even execution of political activists, pointed out the wider range of the persecution of students and scholars opposing various policies of the Islamic Republic, identified Iranian women in particular, the Baha’is, as well as homosexuals, as the victims of Ahmadinejad’s policies, and then specifically pinpointed the letter that Akbar Ganji, a leading Iranian dissident, has written to the UN Secretary General, and had it signed by over 300 non-Iranian public intellectuals, writers and Nobel Laureates, expressing concern about civil liberties in Iran. To top it all then, Bollinger added, “Let’s, then, be clear at the beginning, Mr. President you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator.”
Now, where did that come from? Almost everything that Bollinger has said is true, in fact truisms. Even worse is true about the Islamic Republic, and nothing that Bollinger said is hidden to anyone in or out of Iran. For over a decade, a massive, grassroots, Reform Movement inside Iran has shaken the degenerate and corrupt foundation of the clerical rule to its foundations. Thousands have been killed, more have been imprisoned, many more forced into exile. Iranians in and out of their homeland, as well as anyone else slightly interested in their fate, have known these and some have fought valiantly to bring them to world attention. So what is the point of repeating them here by Bollinger–that Ahmadinejad is a “petty and cruel dictator”? It is a sign of sheer illiteracy in basic politics to confuse an elected President (no matter how outrageous his politics or how retrograde the republic he represents) with a “dictator,” who is an unelected monarch or potentate who rules whimsically and as he pleases. I am against Ahmadinejad and the system over which he presides, but he is an elected official, not a “dictator” in the technical sense of the term. The republic that he represents is a theocracy, but that theocracy works through a very complicated division of power in various official and unofficial, elected and unelected, democratic and despotic, centers of gravity, of which Bollinger seems to know next to nothing.
Just a few years after the CIA sponsored a vicious, malicious, and criminal coup to topple the democratically elected premiership of Mohammad Mussadiq in 1953, Columbia University, to its everlasting shame, gave the real Iranian dictator, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, an honorary degree. Ahmadinejad is a weak demagogue, today the elected president of a republic, tomorrow forgotten by the history of his own homeland. But as a signpost in the continued saga of millions of Iranians fighting over decades and centuries for the cause of democracy in their country he is infinitely (infinitely) superior to that degenerate Shah whose cruel monarchy was the predicate of this even more degenerate band of mullahs who have stolen the hopes and aspiration of an entire people. Did this people in their entirety have to wait for this upstart career opportunist to come and tell them that centuries of their struggles for freedom and democracy has been futile and useless? Not really. Bollinger may have secured an infamous place for himself today, but he has brought my university unsurpassed shame with his “either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated” remarks about the history and political struggles of a people I proudly call mine, and of which, judging by his pestiferous and illiterate statement he knows absolutely nothing.
The real point of Bollinger in presiding over this charade, however, gradually emerges after these futile and entirely useless references to all sorts of human rights abuses in Iran–abuses that Iranians themselves are both its immediate victims and at the forefront of fighting against them. Bollinger though raises them for an entirely different objective. He soon turns to Ahmadinejad’s inexcusable, scandalous, and simply outrageous remarks about the Holocaust. Bollinger’s scolding Ahmadinejad’s outrageous statements about the Jewish Holocaust, however, points to something entirety different. He wants to use it to drum up unconditional support for his beloved Israel.
Referring to an inane conference that Ahmadinejad’s government had organized on the Holocaust, Bollinger declared, “For the illiterate and ignorant, this is dangerous propaganda. When you come to a place like this, this makes you, quite simply, ridiculous. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.” Now who exactly is this “illiterate and ignorant” refers to? Iranians, right? All of them, the entire nation? This is by far the most shamelessly racist comment of Bollinger in a statement replete with racism, for here “the illiterate and ignorant” categorically refers to some 75 million Iranians in whose country this conference was organized (entirely against their will)–an attribution made to differ markedly from Ahmadinejad’s having “come here” to the United States, to Columbia University, where not just Ahmadinejad but in fact those 75 million people that he (whether we like it or not) represents are told to be “illiterate and ignorant.” “They do not exist,” the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir used to say about Palestinians. She denied the very existence of an entire nation. Would Bollinger ever dare to call Israelis in their entirety “illiterate and ignorant”?
Bollinger’s easy targeting of Ahmadinejad’s inanity about Holocaust soon moves into his comment about Israel and its right to exist. Here Bollinger is in his home territory defending the cause of the Jewish state not just against the stupidity of Ahmadinejad’s statements but against all other legitimate criticisms of the colonial settlement as well. “Columbia,” Bollinger solemnly declared, “has over 800 alumni currently living in Israel. As an institution we have deep ties with our colleagues there. I personally have spoken out in the most forceful terms against proposals to boycott Israeli scholars and universities, saying that such boycotts might as well include Columbia. More than 400 college and university presidents in this country have joined in that statement. My question, then, is: Do you plan on wiping us off the map, too?” Really? Now this is all fine and dandy for New York Zionist diehards to hear and applaud. But what about the rest of us? Where is the representation of the fact that scores of us at Columbia, faculty and students, are also signatories to statements boycotting the academic institution of the Jewish apartheid state? Where is the acknowledgment of the fact that even more of us have signed a petition calling on Columbia to divest from companies selling arms to the Jewish state? Where is the acknowledgement of the fact that Lee Bollinger killed our petition before we even had a chance to articulate it? He is of course entitled to be the born again Zionist that he is. But where is his responsibility in representing all of us at Columbia with views radically different from his? Is he only the president of diehard Zionists at Columbia, or the president of the rest of us as well?
By this point, Bollinger has moved completely into the neocon chicanery of the Bush administration and staged his nauseating show as if he could care less about human rights of Iranians at large, whom he considers categorically to be “ignorant and illiterate.” “According to reports by the Council on Foreign Relations,” he says, “it’s well documented that Iran is a state sponsor of terror that funds such violent group as the Lebanese Hezbollah, which Iran helped organize in the 1980s, the Palestinian Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.” Really? Hezbollah and Hamas are the legitimate grassroots organizations of two nations, Lebanon and Palestine, and no matter for what abusive reasons the Islamic Republic is pretending to side with them to further its own loss of legitimacy at home, they remain legitimate political organizations defending the sovereignty of their respective nations. Is this president of a university or the propaganda officer of American neocons? What exactly is the role of a university president–simply to reiterate the most worn out clichés of a belligerent and pestiferous culture of militarism and global domination?
“Your government,” Bollinger further added, “is now undermining American troops in Iraq by funding, arming, and providing safe transit to insurgent leaders like Muqtada al-Sadr and his forces.” Really? What are the Americans doing in Iraq in the first place, having caused the maiming and murdering of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and making millions more homeless, and then these Iraqis need to hear from Bollinger that the Islamic Republic is undermining the US presence in their homeland? If the Islamic Republic has no business doing anything in Iraq, and it does not, then what in sanity’s name is the US doing illegally and immorally occupying that soverign nation state–and where exactly is General Bollinger’s condemnation of that atrocious act of criminal imperialism?
“Why,” Bollinger asked forcefully from Ahmadinejad, “do you support well-documented terrorist organizations that continue to strike at peace and democracy in the Middle East, destroying lives and civil society in the region?” Evidence? “In a briefing before the National Press Club earlier this month,” President Bollinger stated, “General David Petraeus reported that arms supplies from Iran, including 240mm rockets and explosively formed projectiles, are contributing to ‘a sophistication of attacks that would by no means be possible without Iranian support.’” Is this the president of a university talking or a spokesman for the Bush administration’s shameless refusal to accept responsibility for the mayhem it has caused in Iraq? If the Islamic Republic is to be reprimanded for smuggling arms to Iraq to give to its allies, and it must, then what should be said and done about the United States and it amassing of the army of Attila the Hun in Iraq, or about the gargantuan military aid the US gives to Israel on an annual and regular basis (while millions of Americans live under the poverty line, and their homes, their schools, their medical care and livelihood and sheer dignity are in ruins)? Are we allowed to ask this question from Bollinger, and does he have the “intellectual courage” to answer them?
Finally, Bollinger took Ahmadinejad to task about the Iranian nuclear program. “You continue to defy this world body by claiming a right to develop peaceful nuclear power, but this hardly withstands scrutiny when you continue to issue military threats to neighbors.” And where is the reference to the massive Israeli nuclear stockpile in this splendid analysis of the geopolitics of the region? Does Bollinger himself have “the intellectual courage” that he thought Ahmadinejad lacked in answering these questions?
And the finale: “I am only a professor, who is also a university president, and today I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for. I only wish I could do better.” I have no doubt that Lee Bollinger’s speech in front of Ahmadinejad and thousands of our students on Columbia campus in September 2007, particularly this last line, will go down in history as one of the most racist documents at the height of American renewed claim to world hegemony, a document that we will have to go all the way back to the time of Rudyard Kipling and his infamous poem, “The White Man’s Burden” (1899), originally composed on the occasion of the US conquest of the Philippines and other adjacent areas. The fact that this speech was delivered at the same university where Edward Said used to teach, where Gayatri Spivak is now a University Professor, and where its current Vice President, Nicholas Dirks, has assembled by far the most distinguished array of postcolonial and subaltern theorists and scholars all go to show that the political import of these bureaucratic functionaries called “university presidents” is entirely severed from any organic link to the actual content of these institutions and has assumed a political reality sui generis, geared entirely to the apparatus of power in the United States. Is that also the reason that Bollinger can utter the most racist statements about an entire people and get away with it, without a single voice of dissent from my colleagues? Criticizing President George W. Bush on our campus is quite rampant and easy. Because on our campus criticizing Bush is a mere exercise in futility, for there the US president is an easy target and a mere abstraction. It does not cost anyone anything to criticize him. You even cash a certain amount of liberal credentials for doing so. But criticizing President Bollinger, who is no abstraction on our campus, is a whole different kettle of fish. It costs you things, particularly in these renewed days of academic and civil McCarthyism in the United States.
But by far the most atrocious aspect of Bollinger’s statement is that because of the slanted relation of power it flaunts it ipso facto shifts the center of gravity of contemporary Iranian political predicament away from Iran and Iranians themselves and places it in the self-righteous domain of a white man and his civilizing mission. It is precisely the same colonial attitude that is perpetrated in the statement written by Akbar Ganji and circulated for signatures among exclusively non-Iranian signatories. Not a single Iranian was allowed, even if he or she insisted, to sign that statement. Akbar Ganji’s deeply colonized mind, denying Iranians themselves the right and responsibility to have a say in their national destiny, tallies perfectly well with Bollinger’s deeply racist mind to presume that he is telling Iranians something they do not know. Perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of Lee Bollinger’s statement is the appearance of the name of Akbar Ganji in it, for in that single reference Lee Bollinger and Akbar Ganji appear as the two-sides of the same colonial coin that denies nations agency and assigns to white men the authority and audacity to civilize the world. Is it even conceivable for Gandhi to launch his movement to liberate India and systematically deny Indians a say in the affairs of their homeland, or for Mandela to write a statement on behalf of civil liberties in South Africa and disallow South Africans to sign it? This is precisely what Akbar Ganji has done, and that is precisely the reason why he is so easily incorporated into Bollinger’s racist assumption that he has to bear the heavy burden of liberating Iran and civilizing the world. To avoid that trap, it is long overdue that people like Akbar Ganji look at movements led by Gandhi and Mandela as example of their struggle, rather than come to the United States, go on a Shi’i pilgrimage of collecting white talismans of names he considers worthy of defending the cause of liberty in his homeland. The circus around Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia in September 2007 has now been packed and removed. Both Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and even more so Lee Bollinger are irrelevant footnotes in the long and noble struggle of people around the world for a pride of place. What remains are the measures of truth and agency we hold inviolable and sacred when it comes to nations and their prolonged struggle for dignity and freedom.
Craig Murray’s Inauguration Speech
October 7, 2007
Three years back when I arrived at the Glasgow University, I immediately became part of a campaign to elect the Israeli nuclear whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu as the rector of the University. The campaign was successful; the attempts to secure Vanunu’s release from continued imprisonment less so. There seems to have been a resurgence of attempts to bring politics back to the campuses, however. Bradford University students elected Imran Khan as their chancellor, and more recently students at Dundee University have elected the brilliant Craig Murray as their rector. Murray is one courageous soul, but far more than that, he is a real maverick: bold, intelligent, eloquent and impertinent. It is no surprise then that he should assume his new role in style. The full transcript of his inaugural speech follows this report from The Scotsman,
DUNDEE University was last night locked in a bizarre stand-off with its own rector after he used his first speech to students to accuse the institution of authoritarianism, comparing it to an “English polytechnic”.
Craig Murray, Britain’s former ambassador to Uzbekistan, was elected by students as rector in February this year, succeeding the TV presenter3 Lorraine Kelly.
But the controversial diplomat – who was forced out of his post three years ago after claiming the United States and Britain were involved in torture in Uzbekistan – has already fallen out with college heads following his maiden speech to students.
The 48-year-old claimed he had asked twice for information about cuts in academic provision which he said the university had blamed on “higher-than- expected pay awards, an unexpected increase in the cost of energy and increased building costs through a higher cost of steel.”
He said he asked for a cost breakdown at two successive university court meetings this year, but received no answers. Mr Murray also claimed the fact he had asked the question did not appear in the minutes.
“Dissent is deemed not to happen,” the rector told students.
Mr Murray went on: “Scottish universities are traditionally democratic self-governing communities, and the election of the rector is a vital reminder of this … my view is that the governance of this institution in recent years has been more akin to an old English polytechnic than a Scottish university.”
Mr Murray, who will serve as rector for three years, even accused the university of attempting to influence the election for rector against him, in favour of Andy Nicol, a former Scotland rugby captain.
He claimed former rectors Ms Kelly and the comedian Fred Macaulay chose to back Nicol “not without some encouragement from within the university hierarchy”.
The rector made his address after the traditional trip through the streets of the town in a carriage pulled by students.
Mr Murray, himself a Dundee University graduate, went on to argue in favour of a liberal education and against what he claimed was an increasing concentration on vocational qualifications.
He said: “Universities – including this one – have been much afflicted by a cult of right-wing managerialism, exemplified in the view that businessmen are the only people whose expertise is useful and transferable.”
Mr Murray, who lives in London, was yesterday supplying copies of his speech to journalists, claiming the press office at Dundee University had refused to provide it, place it in the library or put it online.
He said: “I’m sure the university would love to get rid of me but I am here to stay.”
A university spokesman said: “The speech isn’t factually correct and it does not represent the views of the university.”
The official said the university’s press office had not released copies of previous rectors’ speeches and only a portion of Ms Kelly’s had appeared on the university website, adding that any speech would only be kept in the library if it was published.
The position of rector in Scottish universities is steeped in tradition, dating back to papal edicts of the 15th century. The rector is chosen by the students and the holder is not part of the university’s administration.
The rector has a seat on the university court – its board of governors – and can vote on issues such as its budget and annual accounts. The holder of the post is also there to provide a voice for the students, although other student representatives also have a seat on court.
Celebrities or high-profile people with no previous ties to universities are often elected. Mordechai Vanunu, jailed for 18 years for leaking Israel’s nuclear secrets, is the rector of Glasgow University. However, he cannot attend court meetings as he is forbidden from leaving Israel.
And now Murray’s speech:
Vice-Chancellor, My Dear Friends,
It is most kind of you to come along here today as I receive the singular honour of being made Rector of my own University.
I arrive here following our tradition of an idiosyncratic pub crawl known as the Rectorial Drag. That sounds like an occasion for which I should be picking out a nice skirt and blouse – which as some of my former student colleagues here will tell you would not be the first time. The Rectorial Drag however is an occasion where the students pull their new Rector through the streets in a carriage, from City Hall to University, entering the pubs on the way. I can honestly say it is the first time I have ever been dragged to a pub. Dragged out, yes. Chucked out, frequently. Dragged in is a new one.
By chance it is thirty years almost to the day since I arrived, bewildered, into freshers’ week, clutching everything I owned in one cardboard box and a battered BOAC flight bag.
Little did I dream that thirty years later I would become Rector of the place. Certainly not – I expected to be much too busy being Prime Minister.
In that distant first week I attended the Rectorial Installation of Sir Clement Freud. He was a man of great wit and perspicacity, and his installation address was hilarious. Sadly, as we all know, decline and decay is the natural order of things, and with the passing years Sir Clement declined to the extent that he eventually became Rector of St Andrews.
These occasions traditionally involve a certain amount of knockabout humour, and I am sure that no offence will be taken. We look in fact with fond regard to our sister institution south of the Tay Estuary, marking with sadness the scent of her senile decline, as we might an elderly relative whom we care about but are grateful we don’t have to live with.
I believe that Clement Freud was the only one of my predecessors to have made that particular error. Stephen Fry was invited to stand at St Andrews but sensibly declined. They can always try again when he’s 70.
All of which brings me to note what a tremendously talented bunch my predecessors as Rector have been. Here I give the obligatory tip of the hat to Sir Peter Ustinov.
I am biased in the case of two of them, George Mackie
and Gordon Wilson, because I was the seconder of one and proposer of the other. That made my own election my third successful rectorial campaign, and I claim the record, to be beaten when I am re-elected in 2010.Getting elected is of course the difficult bit. My own election was fiercely contested and the result was close. I would like to pay a sincere tribute to Andy Nicol, a real gentleman, for his well-fought and constructive campaign, and for being such a good loser. Though, of course, as a former captain of the British Lions rugby team he did have a great deal of practice.
One excellent piece of electioneering by my opponent was securing the entire front page of the election day Dundee edition of the Daily Record. Most of the page was taken up by a picture of Andy and the headline screamed “I was born to lead Dundee Students”. The Daily Record is a paper which is at least consistent in its standard of accuracy.
The flaw in this great ploy, achieved with considerable effort, was of course that not many of our electorate are Daily Record readers. Some folk surmised that this mistake came about because Scottish Labour HQ were under the impression the election was at the University of Abertay.
Anyway, it was a good bit of electioneering, and made even better by the fact that in this special edition of the Daily Record, my two immediate predecessors, not without some encouragement from within the University hierarchy, chose to endorse the candidature of my opponent.
The Record told us “Outgoing Rector Lorraine Kelly and comedian Fred Macaulay threw their weight behind Nicol as the former Scotland captain urged the University’s Record readers to vote for him in the polls today.”
I believe the University’s Record readers both did.
I don’t regard former Rectors campaigning for a candidate – and thus perforce campaigning against a candidate – as quite the done thing. But it is still potentially effective electioneering. The only downside I see is that, should the ploy fail and someone else get elected, and were that person in the least bit vindictive, that person would then have a great platform in front of the entire University to get his own back. I do see that potential danger, don’t you?
Some of you will be relieved, and some disappointed, to hear that I do not intend to do this. I am very glad that my predecessor, Lorraine Kelly, was Rector of this University. Otherwise she might have gone her entire life without ever seeing the inside of an institute of higher education.
The other ex-Rector involved was Fred Macaulay, apparently a local comedian, though that is not obvious from reading his rectorial address. In the most striking passage, Fred tells us he does a great impression of Sean Connery, adding “Hey, I’m bald and Scottish, how hard can it be?”
Very hard, Fred, very hard. Sean Connery is bald, Scottish and immensely talented. Fred, however, is more like this egg: bald, Scottish and easily crushed. (Breaks egg).
I did say we should have some knockabout stuff, and seriously Fred was a hard-working and popular Rector. I am sure he’ll come up with some much better jokes about me.
Now this is going to be a very dull afternoon if I just ramble on like this and you just gawp at me. We need some atmospherics – feel free to laugh and cheer, or clap or shout “Rubbish” when you want to. Above all do heckle. Heckling is a fine tradition. The very word comes from Dundee.
Heckling is a process in the jute industry. To heckle is to comb out the jute prior to spinning. It was a tough, manual job and the heckling shops were murky with dust that choked the lungs. The hecklers were famous for their radicalism, probably a reaction to their terrible working conditions, and would turn up and yell at politicians. I think that’s quite right – present company accepted I don’t recall ever meeting a politician who did not ought to be shouted at. Thus the hecklers yelled, and the verb “To heckle” jumped from a textile process to a political barracking. Uniquely, as far as I know, what other student unions call election hustings, DUSA called election hecklings.
One appalling development in modern politics is the death of heckling.Nowadays politicians deliver their sound-bites to a pathetically complacent and complicit media, in front of a carefully selected and vetted audience of the faithful. Just try getting close enough to a politician to heckle them. I mean that literally – please do try. When someone does manage, like Walter Wolfgang, the eighty year old who shouted “Rubbish” at Jack Straw, they are likely to be manhandled and arrested under the laughably named Prevention of Terrorism Act.
Jack Straw, incidentally, is a man who should have “Rubbish” shouted at him from the moment he steps out of the shower in the morning until the moment he retires with his evening cocoa.
The peculiar criminalisation of heckling is part of the most extraordinary onslaught on our civil liberties. Here in Dundee a woman was arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act for walking on a cycle path. That is true – Google it. And last year we had the extraordinary incident of the Special Branch walking around Fresher’s Fayre. That is something which I promise you will not happen again. A university is no place for the thought police. We have no terrorists here; what our students are thinking is our students’ business. That is why they are here; to think.
The Rectorial Address is a great tradition, and I am standing here on the shoulders of giants. Those who have delivered their rectorial address at Scottish universities include figures like William Gladstone, Adam Smith, Andrew Carnegie and JM Barrie. These addresses were great occasions. They have their traditions and their protocols. They have on occasion been highly rumbustuous, and sometimes speeches have been fiery and partisan.
I have however been told that the recent style has been for speeches to be non-political and uncontroversial. So I gave a great deal of thought to a suitably bland title for this address, and I came up with:
“Why London Should Stop Worrying about Scottish Independence Because We Scots Can Still Rule England From Brussels.”
Nothing to argue with there, I think.The truth is, my whole life I have believed that there is no point in getting on your back legs and opening your mouth in public, unless you are really going to say something. It may not sound very radical, but the vast majority of speakers, particularly in modern politics, manage to sound off for ages without actually saying anything at all. Our Prime Minister – another former Scottish University Rector – did so in his big conference speech last week. That certainly ought not to happen inside universities, but I am afraid it does.
A university must be a place of stimulating intellectual debate across not only the myriad topics of academia, but on the issues of the day affecting society as a whole. The best minds must clash and spark, and students must be fully and intellectually engaged. A university must constitute a vast whirring machinery of the mind, reacting to and operating on the wider society of which it forms an integral part. It must be a place of the liveliest and best informed debate, where no subject is out of bounds, or over-respected, or immune from the heat of debate. A university must be a democratic discussion. If it is not that, it is not a university.
We must be unapologetic that a University is about much, much more than training to get a job. The over-emphasis of vocational training bedevils higher education. Of course your career is important; but you have the entire rest of your life to be a slave to it. You don’t have to start now. The student who concentrates purely on his future career leaves here equipped for only a small part of life. I learnt vastly more in discussions with people of other academic, social, cultural and ethnic backgrounds in bars and kitchens, and from private reading, than I ever did in the lecture theatre. In my formal university learning I acquired skills of logic, analysis, ordering and debate. A University Education must teach you to think, not just to stack widgets. And that is true across every one of our disciplines – as relevant to nurses and dentists as to lawyers.
Scotland has a great intellectual tradition based on this radical liberal concept. Scotland had a prototype of universal education two centuries before England, and had five universities for centuries when England only had two.
I would like now to quote from an essay by Lindsay Paterson, Professor of Educational Policy at the University of Edinburgh, published in 2020, Agenda for a New Scotland, Luath Press 2005. I am going to break a golden rule of speechmaking and read at length from Professor Paterson, because this states what I believe more eloquently than I can express it, and I believe this is a vastly important essay which everyone involved in Scottish universities should read. Professor Paterson’s aim is to sketch out the principles on which Scottish education should be based:
The first premise is to insist on the emancipatory potential of intellectual, serious, theoretical and difficult learning. If secondary schools and universities are not about that, then they are barely worth having. “Relevance” is something we learn with experience, and experience can only be experienced, not taught; we cannot judge relevance unless we have already grasped the principles of a system of understanding. In particular, therefore, vocational courses are not what initial education should be about. They are about training for specific jobs. Where they are not best done on the job itself, learning from the accumulated wisdom of more experienced colleagues (whatever the line of work), they presuppose a body of theoretical knowledge and understanding that ought to be engaged with first. Practice without theory is blind.
…Second, since the building of an efficient economic system ought never to be an end in itself, but only the means to such goals as building a fair, democratic and culturally enriching society, an equally important premise has to be that programmes of general liberal education are better at preparing people for life as decent citizens than any other kind of learning. That was something which the old radicals understood well. You could make citizens for the new era of mass democracy by equipping them with the cultural capacities which the aristocratic or bourgeois ruling class had acquired through their education. Citizenship was not something to be segregated into discrete programmes, but should permeate many types of study – literature, history, geography, politics, science, religion. The student who learns how to debate the meaning of a poem by Liz Lochead, or a novel by Alisdair Gray, or a film by Paul Lavery, or to weigh the evidence for and against wind farms or genetic modification, or to understand the reasons why Islam and Christianity have sometimes been in conflict is in fact well prepared for life as a citizen of Scotland.
Third, we need therefore a debate about cultural purposes. This is where new radical thinking is urgently needed. Although I have been arguing that we should recover the old idea that democratising access to a general, liberal education is the only programme that is truly radical, it would not be radical simply to adopt uncritically the content of pedagogical methods that would have constituted such a programme in earlier eras.
For example, the culture to which students should now be exposed is certainly not the unitary one of even half a century ago. In Scotland, we inherit ideas from Islam as well as from Christianity, literature by women as well as by men, working class political ideas as well as middle class ones, Scottish philosophical thought as well as Anglo-Saxon. We have to make selections from a potentially enormous set of curricular options. The guiding principles might be partly the intellectual capacities that we want to be the outcome for students. But it can’t be only that…There have to be moral, aesthetic and other judgements about the value of particular knowledge, unfashionable though that is at a time when values are supposed to be inherently relative and the curriculum is supposed to be only about developing competences …
What should we reasonably expect our graduates to know and be able to do, at an advanced level? Is it sufficient to say that their broad cultural and intellectual preparation has finished at school, or should we expect something more? At the moment, to be frank, we don’t even know whether and to what extent existing programmes of higher education are any kind of common basis for citizenship at all.
I am entirely with Professor Paterson, but it is fair to say that almost all the contributions I have heard from others within the governing bodies of the University have been tending to the opposite, with an increasingly narrow vocational focus. The need for students to get a job on leaving has always been there. The lack of grants and the tuition fees paid by some of our students add to the pressures. But my generation graduated into a labour market with three and a half million unemployed and few opportunities. But the idea that our university experience should be solely about finding a job would rightly have been laughed out of court. People are marvellous things, so much more than simply machines for economic production. Indeed, I would say that is the aspect of them that has the least to do with a university.
Professor Paterson sets his thoughts within a specifically Scottish tradition. That is appropriate today – we are a university open to the world and with a worldwide reputation, but we are also Scottish, as testifies the fact that I stand before you today in the uniquely Scottish position of Rector, elected by the students.
Becoming Rector here fulfils two of my great ambitions in life. The first was when I had a Highland Reel named after me, written by in my view Scotland’s best traditional music exponents the Battlefield Band. Sadly the great Jimmy Shand is no longer with us, but I like to imagine it at ceilidhs – “Our next set is a highland reel, with The Lang Heid followed by Lady Margaret Campbell of Glenlyon followed by Ambassador Craig Murray of Tashkent.” That will confuse them.
So my very own reel a great honour, and my first ambition. My second was to become Rector of the University of Dundee.
I might have to give up on the third, as I don’t suppose Kylie Minogue would be up for it.
You will have noted that my robe is rather plainer than many of the gorgeous ones around. That may surprise you in such an elevated office. The Rector is the second most senior officer of the University. In the University’s foundation document, the Charter, Article 4 says “There shall be a Chancellor of the University who shall be the head of the University”. Article 5 says “There shall be a Rector of the University who shall be elected by all the matriculated students”.
Only after these great honorary offices, from Article 6 onwards, does the Charter go on to list the hired help, starting with the Principal. That is not an accidental running order – for one thing, the Queen by definition does not make mistakes, and for another the order is precisely the same in all the Scottish universities which have Rectors, and is clearly set out as such in successive Universities (Scotland) Acts. But it is an order that this University appears to have mislaid in recent practice. I shall be restoring the influence and the dignity of the position to its rightful place, not for me, but for the reason I am wearing this unembroidered gown – this is based on an undergraduate gown, to indicate that my role is to fight for the interest of the students.
I should be plain that everyone in the University has the welfare of the students at heart – it is simply useful to have someone who has it as their primary concern amid other pressures. One of the problems universitys face is that for funding purposes a prime driver of academic departments is the need to publish a large volume of well reviewed books to produce brownie points. This has led to appalling distortions. You can be a great university academic without ever publishing major research, if you are up with your subject, and communicate knowledge, wisdom and love of the spirit of learning to your students. Cutting edge research provides a key edge to our best teaching, and is a great advantage of many parts of this university. But it is not the sole arbiter of merit, and it is in danger of being so.
My own view – and remember, I have said that a university must be a forum for debate. You don’t have to agree with me at all. What you have to do is listen, respect and then engage, from your own perspective and experience.
Nevertheless, my own view is that the University has put too little emphasis on the quality of undergraduate teaching. If you look at The Times’ detailed table of university rankings, you will find that our students arrive with a score representing their school qualifications placing us 23rd highest in the UK. We have the 23rd highest qualified people coming in the doors. But our completion rate – those actually achieving their degree – is the 105th best in the country.
You can look up the table yourself. So we have some of the best students arrive, but do poorly on getting them through their degree. Of course, there are statistical anomalies, and the figures vary widely from course to course. But the figures do not lie on overall trend, however you try to spin them, and the truth is that we are not good at value added. Doing better by our undergraduates in this respect will be a major goal of my time as Rector.
Another goal will be to improve the governance of the University. Let me try to illustrate my point visually. These are the minutes of University Court for 91-92. These are the minutes for last academic year. The difference is startling. These are not freak years – you can look at the bound minutes yourselves, and the series gets slimmer and slimmer, with a real step change down around 2001.
That certainly reflects my experience of returning to University Court in 2007 after leaving it in 1984. Minutes are fewer, shorter. The whole Court does not lunch together beforehand now, but rather the Administration cabals with trusties. Decisions are taken outwith Court and without consultation. As Rector, I do not expect to hear of the cutting of a vital student service like the free Ninewells minibus, simply by receiving an email like any member of staff telling me it has already been cut. If the University continue to treat the Rector – and Court – like that, I will continue to embarrass them like this.
The sparsity of the Court minutes is a genuine reflection of the amount of information given to court and the extent Court really takes the decisions. At my first two Court meetings this year I complained that we were being asked to take decisions on cutting academic provision, without having any but the scarcest financial information before us.
We were told, for example, that factors in the University being short of money included higher than expected pay awards, an unexpected increase in the cost of energy and increased building costs through a higher cost of steel. I asked for this to be quantified. How much were wage costs estimated, and what was the outturn? How much were energy costs estimated, and what was the outturn? How much had contactors increased the contract by for the higher cost of steel? None of this could be deduced from any of the information given to Court.
Not only did I raise this at two successive Court meetings, without to this day receiving a substantive reply, but the fact that I had asked the question did not appear on either occasion in the minutes. One reason why these volumes are so slim. Dissent is deemed not to happen.
I started some time ago, and I am grateful to you for your patience, by emphasising the need for a University to be a place of free and open debate. Scottish Universities are traditionally democratic self-governing communities, and the election of the Rector is a vital reminder of this. I keep repeating that nobody is obliged to agree with my view, but you should know it. And my view is that the governance of this institution in recent years has been more akin to an old English Polytechnic than a Scottish University.
Let me make plain to you that I believe that under Sir Alan Langlands, this University has blossomed under dynamic and effective leadership which has seen a tremendous expansion, continued cutting edge academic achievement and the introduction of wonderful new facilities, including this one. This has become a truly world-class institution. But I completely reject any notion that the traditional forms of academic community and decision making cannot deliver such results.
Indeed, a wider input can make things better, and too narrow a system of direction can lead to error. I have already mentioned my concern at lack of priority on undergraduate teaching. Another example is this building.
It is a lovely new asset, but it could have been designed twenty years ago. Huge atrium. Central air conditioning. People and Planet conducted a survey of all the UK’s universities to rate them for how green they are. We were near the bottom of the list – and you can google that equally true. Look at this building with new eyes. What can you see of the modern innovations in building design which work to offset a building’s carbon footprint? What do you think the carbon footprint of this building is? You see what I mean about the need to involve more people. Making this University greener is another of my major aims – because I believe that is in the true interests of the students.
Universities – including this one – have been much afflicted by the cult of right-wing managerialism, exemplified in the view that businessmen are the only people whose expertise is useful and transferable. This goes hand in hand with the obscene view that a business model applies to every form of social interaction and thus social institution. The Scottish Funding Council is packed with businessmen, as is our own University Court. It is worth noting, by the way, that Scottish businessmen are not nowadays renowned for their interest in the cutting edge, as Scottish businesses are in the bottom quartile of OECD tables on percentage of costs spent on research and development.
Now many of those on our Court are excellent people, but they do seem to have a similar perspective on many issues. Wisdom does exist elsewhere in Scotland. In an institution which embraces a great College of Art, it might be good to see a working artist on the Court, more from the professions, journalism, the law, the clergy, the theatre, the arts, the police. A schoolteacher, perhaps. A bit more creative spark. And representatives of all the staff, not only the academics.
Let us reinvigorate the idea of the Scottish democratic community in its universities. We have a great chance now, we a radical government in Edinburgh determined to emphasise all that is best and distinctive in Scottish tradition.
I have a firm proposal to make. I call for the institution of the Scottish tradition of Rectors in all Scottish Universities, not just the ancient ones. I shall be lobbying the Scottish government to take forward this proposal.
UCU, and the Academic Shock and Awe
October 1, 2007
I have for some time been conflicted about my decision not to join the UCU (or its predecessors). I am generally sceptical of rigidly heirarchical structures, and the leadership of unions generally is notoriously corrupt. The handling of the strike last year was so quite pathetic, and if I were an undergrad, I would have turned against the teachers like so many of them did, despite initial support from the equally ineffectual NUS. No attempt was made to reach out to the students and bring them on board (although I was not associated with any union, when I explained to them the rationales for the strike, I found them invariably sympathetic). The unions pretend to democratic ideals, but in fact remain rigidly top down. So here we have the latest: only months after the excutives of NUJ reversed the wishes of the majority of its member for a boycott of Israeli goods, the UCU’s leadership does the same. But as if this unprincipled action were not enough, it has even cancelled the tour of Palestinian academics who intended to meet their colleagues at campuses around the country to argue for the necessity of a boycott.
In a microcosm, what happened with the NUJ and UCU is symbolic of everything that is wrong with Western style democracy. So long as the opinion of the electorate reflects the interest of the elites, they are allowed a voice. Should it ever come in conflict, as it did in this instance, it can be simply ignored.
Here is the letter sent to the head of UCU Sally Hunt by the President of Federation of Union of Palestinian Universities’ Professors & Employees.
Open Letter to Ms. Sally Hunt, General Secretary of the University and College Union
PFUUPE | | September 29, 2007
Dear Ms. Hunt,
We have received with dismay, although not entirely with surprise, your letter of September 28, 2007 to members of the delegation of Palestinian academic trade union members informing them of the decision by the University and College Union’s leadership to cancel their speaking tour to the UK to discuss the academic boycott of Israel with their colleagues at universities there. We wish to state clearly that we believe that our British colleagues have been deprived of an opportunity to better inform themselves about an issue which is of concern to conscientious academics and intellectuals the world over. Moreover, we are disappointed to see that the leadership of a prominent organization of academics such as yours has not defended the right of its members to engage in debate on this matter. Open debate and discussion are the foundations of academic freedom, and thus we cannot understand why the door to open consideration of controversial ideas has been so abruptly closed.We shall continue to pursue other avenues to make our case heard in the academic community in the UK, and shall not be deterred by the cancellation of the invitation extended to us by the UCU. While we do not have the resources of the Israel lobby in the UK, we do think that fair-minded British academics will be willing to listen to our case and give it thoughtful consideration. Truth is stronger than power, and we trust in the integrity of British academics to know that instinctively.
We do not think that your members are unaware of the significant role played by the UCU’s predecessor, the AUT, in upholding academics’ commitment to justice. During the struggle against the odious apartheid regime in South Africa, British academics were at the forefront of the academic and other boycotts of the racist state. We do not see why considering ways of fighting Israeli oppression of Palestinians should be subject to different considerations.
We appreciate the sentiments expressed in your letter about “finding a way of opening a dialogue with the Palestinian academic community on building solidarity.” The best form of solidarity with Palestinians, whether they are academics or ordinary people, is direct action aimed at bringing an end to the occupation and the regime of apartheid in Palestine. Isolating Israel in the international arena through various forms of boycott and sanctions and forcing it to obey international law and respect Palestinian rights is one of the strategies open to international civil society, including members of the academy. We are confident that our British colleagues will begin to realize that true solidarity with Palestinian academics requires a political commitment to bringing about an end to oppression and injustice.
Sincerely,
Dr. Amjad Barham
The President of Federation of Union of Palestinian Universities’ Professors & Employees
The decision has also been condemned by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP).
BRICUP (British Committee for the Universities of Palestine) today condemned the decision of the University and College Union (UCU) to cancel the tour of UK campuses by Palestinian academics. UCU was specifically instructed to organise this tour by the UCU Congress last May. The tour was intended to raise debate within the union about an academic boycott of Israeli universities. The UCU leadership under General Secretary Sally Hunt is hiding behind ‘legal advice’ which they have not disclosed to their members in order to sabotage a decision with which they disagree.
In May 2007 in Bournemouth, UCU Annual Congress voted by 158 to 99 in favour of a resolution which instructed the National Executive Committee to
circulate the full text of the Palestinian boycott call to all branches/LAs for information and discussion; encourage members to consider the moral implications of existing and proposed links with Israeli academic institutions;
organise a UK-wide campus tour for Palestinian academic/educational trade unionists; issue guidance to members on appropriate forms of action.
actively encourage and support branches to create direct links with Palestinian educational institutions and to help set up nationally sponsored programmes for teacher exchanges, sabbatical placements, and researchThe UCU senior office holders led by General Secretary Sally Hunt argued fiercely against this motion. The motion’s effect was to initiate a year-long debate about boycotting Israeli universities. Having lost the argument they are now finding other means to subvert the democratic vote of the union’s highest decision-making body.
This use of the law to interfere with democratic freedoms is a deeply worrying tendency – witness the 2005 Serious and Organized Crimes Act preventing protests around Parliament and Downing Street, and the decision last week to ban the march in Central London planned by the Stop the War Coalition.
BRICUP has the deepest doubts about the validity of the ‘legal advice’ which UCU is claiming as the reason for its cancellation of the tour by Palestinians, and the effective banning of discussion of the boycott topic in union branches. BRICUP demands answers to the following questions:
- who provided the legal advice?
- what was the verbatim advice received? It needs to be published so that it can be open to critical scrutiny
- was any previous advice sought from other sources, and if so what was its content?
According to BRICUP co-chair Professor Jonathan Rosenhead “It is all too common for governments and other bodies to go to a lawyer who will give them the advice they want to hear. This is how the then Attorney General Lord Goldsmith got the advice that the invasion of Iraq was ‘legal’”.
Further information: Mike Cushman 07736 705294
www.bricup.org.uk
info@bricup.org.uk
As for how this reversal was brought about, Sharif Elmusa’s article on the Israel lobby’s “Academic Shock and Awe” campaign sheds some important light.
The Israeli emperor now wears only the clothes of apartheid. Many people are noticing and are speaking up. Some have taken steps to boycott this, perhaps the last, apartheid state. The wave includes a wide range of participants, from academic and labour unions to writers, artists, church and student groups and others. Together they speak of boycott, divestment and sanctions. Some of those in the forefront of the campaign are Jewish, including the art critic Peter Berger, Steven Rose at the Open University, and Israeli historian Ilan Pappe. Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, who labelled the Israeli system as worse than his country’s former apartheid regime, endorsed divestment. What drew the ire of Israel and the Israel lobby the most, however, is a resolution by the British University and College Union (UCU) at its congress 30 May. The UCU resolution encourages its members to “consider the moral implications of existing and proposed links with Israel academic institutions,” and to forge closer relations with Palestinian universities.
The Israel lobby has reacted to the UCU’s move in Britain with an academic “shock and awe” operation. What I am referring to is the one-page advertisement in The New York Times 8 August, paid for by the American Jewish Committee (AJC). The AJC assembled for the ad the signatures of more than 300 American college and university presidents endorsing a statement by Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, that pronounces an identity of interests between US and Israeli universities: “for we do not intend to draw distinctions between our mission and that of the universities you [the UCU] are seeking to punish.” It then menacingly takes the logical step: “Add Columbia to the boycott list.” This way the battle is shifted to the enemy’s turf: if you boycott Israeli universities, we will boycott you — a British eye (and a Palestinian one as collateral damage) for an Israeli eye.
The ad places Bollinger’s statement inside a frame at the centre of the page, flanked by presidential names on all sides. The design, together with the first person form Bollinger uses in the statement, intensify the power of the message and give it a sense of urgency. The text is short, terse and declarative. It does not indicate the reasons that led the UCU to pass the resolution after a long and open exchange, making those who backed it sound like extremist airheads. Contestation is the lifeblood of democracy and intellectual advancement, but the big guns do not seem to feel they owe anyone a rational counter-argument. Worse, they do not mention the Palestinians at all; unlike the UCU that frames its resolution in the light of “Israel’s 40-year occupation [which] has seriously damaged the fabric of Palestinian society,” the “denial of educational rights for Palestinians,” and “the complicity of Israeli academia in the occupation.” So while the ad is visually framed, it deliberately and callously lacks context. And while it evokes high-minded principles, it takes, behind the reader’s back, the side of the powerful against the wronged. Who then deserves to be called “shoddy intellectually and politically biased,” the UCU, as Bollinger alleges, or he and his colleagues?
The UCU debated the motion over a period of two years. Its resolution in fact was a call for further debate on the boycott, a key point omitted by Bollinger. The union tackled questions like: Why single out Israel when there are so many other bad states in the world? What is the role of Israeli academics in their state’s practices? Does a boycott impinge on the human rights of those subject to the boycott? In contrast, the 300 academic CEOs, like autocratic rulers, have circumvented discussion of the issue on their campuses. That the Israel lobby felt it must respond with such force and without deliberation, in fact, belies moral weakness instead of strength. Like any totalitarian system, the lobby fears that any cracks engendered by free conversation would lead to the crumbling of the edifice of falsehoods it has constructed about Israel and the Palestinians. Rigid structures collapse suddenly.
At stake for the academy is not just the question of the boycott; it is also matter of who has “voice”. Organised British educators are saying that they, too, not just the heads of their institutions, can take initiative in shaping relations with others. They, not the heads, after all are the teachers, trainers, researchers and collaborators. Will members of faculty and students at American universities — even those opposed to the boycott — demand that the issue be tabled for deliberation and that all concerned get a chance to freely express their opinion? Or will they accept the decree of their presidents in silence?
British academics that objected to the resolution felt at least obligated to express, in a message to the UCU, their sympathy with the Palestinian plight and the chronic stranglehold Israel has over their educational development. It is doubtful that many of the signatories of the US ad are even aware of this dark side of Israel’s conduct. How much does, for example, Susan Hockfield, president of MIT, my alma mater, and a neuroscientist, know about the issue? Shouldn’t she have consulted, before signing such an important policy position, members of her own faculty, among them Noam Chomsky? Had she talked to him or other region scholars she would have learned a great deal about Israel’s systematic dispossession of the Palestinians; about the numerous and extended closures of Palestinian universities; about the thousands of students who were imprisoned and banished into exile; about the ban in the last couple of years against academics with dual nationalities from entering into the West Bank and Gaza to resume teaching. She could have been informed of this, and much more. Fortunately, it is not too late for Hockfield to educate herself. She can venture into the West Bank and Gaza and discover the truth first hand. If pressed for time, she can visit websites such as those of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel ( www.pacbi.org ) and the UCU ( www.ucu.org.uk ).
Still, lack of knowledge alone does not sufficiently explain the mobilisation of 300 academic presidents. Bollinger himself must understand something about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He handled several fabricated charges by pro-Israeli media and activists against Palestinian and other Arab professors at Columbia, including the late Edward Said, Joseph Massad and George Saliba. We can only conclude, especially since the cost of the ad was defrayed by the AJC, that Bollinger and at least some of his colleagues fell under the influence of the Israeli lobby. In The London Review of Books, Spring 2007, Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt — who have written a book on the lobby due for release this month — cite the testimony of several highly knowledgeable Washingtonians on the lobby’s reach. One of them, former Senator Ernest Hollings, said on leaving office that “you can’t have an Israeli policy other than what AIPAC (the American Israel Political Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby group in Washington) gives you around here.” Could the 300 presidents forge no other policy on the UCU’s resolution other than what American Jewish lobbyists dictate to them?
Their stance carries a moral burden. By siding with power, and by trying to abort the boycott effort, they abet in depriving the Palestinians of the only viable non- violent course of resistance to the Israeli occupation of their land. The international boycott of white South Africa’s apartheid system eventually led to the collapse of that system. Equally salient, but often forgotten, is that the boycott strengthened the hand of Nelson Mandela and others in the African National Congress who advocated peaceful means for achieving majority rule. Otherwise, there would have been much more bloodshed, and perhaps no reconciliation between blacks and whites. The US government was one of the very last to join the boycott against South Africa, after a prolonged pursuit of hypocritical “constructive engagement”. (Israel never joined and maintained its strong historic links with apartheid South Africa.) When the boycott took hold, however, American academics and others were rightly proud to take part and to engage in civil disobedience in front of South Africa’s diplomatic missions and offices. What is the difference between South Africa and Israel? The Israel lobby? Perhaps. But in the end, Bollinger and his peers must accept responsibility for their unilateral, politically biased attempt to pre-empt debate. The start of the new academic year is a good time for concerned faculty and students to demand a voice.
* The writer is an associate professor of political science at the American University in Cairo.
A Double Standard on Academic Freedom in the Middle East
September 17, 2007
Today’s excellent guest editorial comes from Prof. George Bisharat of Hastings College. (Thanks IMEU)
Two hundred thousand Palestinian children began school in the Gaza Strip this month without a full complement of textbooks. Why? Because Israel, which maintains a stranglehold over this small strip of land along the Mediterranean even after withdrawing its settlers from there in 2005, considers paper, ink and binding materials not to be “fundamental humanitarian needs.”
Israel, attempting to throttle the democratically elected Hamas government, generally permits only food, medicine and fuel to enter Gaza, and allows virtually no Palestinian exports to leave. Lately, it held up delivery of materials needed for printing textbooks. As a result, Gaza students began the year facing a 30 percent shortage of texts.
No full-page advertisements in major American newspapers have publicized Israel’s violations of Palestinian children’s right to an education. No editors, syndicated columnists or presidents of major universities in this country have denounced this callous measure. Our politicians have demanded no remedial action. Instead, they continue, verbally and materially, to support Israel in its near-total blockade of 1.5 million Palestinians, kids and all.
Israel’s trampling of Palestinian students’ right to education – the key to a lifetime of opportunity – has rarely evoked official protest from American leaders. The Israeli army has closed Palestinian universities for years at a time. Israeli military authorities have barred Palestinian occupational therapy students from traveling from Gaza to the West Bank to obtain vital clinical training.
Hundreds of Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks can turn a routine trip to a local school into a harrowing ordeal. Israeli gunfire has even killed Palestinian schoolchildren sitting in their classrooms. None of these offenses has merited so much as a congressional resolution, let alone more serious efforts to curb Israeli behavior, such as government-imposed sanctions.
In response to this policy double standard – complete indulgence of Israel on the one hand, and indifference to violations of Palestinian rights on the other hand – a movement has emerged for a citizens’ boycott of Israel. Churches, unions and professional associations in the United States, Canada, Europe and South Africa have urged a variety of nonviolent measures to compel Israel’s compliance with international law.
American Presbyterians have studied divesting church funds from firms that profit from continuing Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. Unison, the United Kingdom’s 1.3 million-member union of public servants, voted in June to boycott Israeli goods. In May, a British union of professors opened a yearlong debate over a possible boycott of Israeli academic institutions.
The latter action provoked particularly indignant protest by Israel’s U.S. supporters as an offense against “academic freedom.” Yet many Israeli academic institutions either benefit from or participate in Israeli government actions that violate Palestinian rights.
Tel Aviv University sits in part over land belonging to Sheikh Muwannis, a Palestinian village whose residents were expelled by Jewish militias or fled in fear in March 1948. These and other Palestinian refugees have been denied their right to return to their homes or to receive compensation for their seized properties.
Hebrew University in Jerusalem uses more than 800 acres of land illegally expropriated from Palestinian private owners in the West Bank after the 1967 war. Bar-Ilan University has established a branch in an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank.
The threatened boycott would target Israeli institutions, not individuals. Thus, formal research and other agreements with Israeli universities would be suspended. But invitations to Israeli professors to join conferences or to publish in foreign journals would continue.
Nonetheless, it is likely that the boycott would impose limitations on freedom for some Israeli academics. Is this fair?
Boycotts are always somewhat blunt tools, and they inevitably impose costs on some who are undeserving of them. That was true of the boycott of apartheid South Africa, which applied to all academics – as well as athletes, businesspeople, artists and others. At the time, the international community weighed the cost to academic freedom against the advancement of justice and equal rights for black South Africans, and the choice was clear.
Two hundred thousand Palestinian schoolchildren are wondering how the world will respond faced with a similar choice today.
George Bisharat, a professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, writes frequently on the Middle East. His e-mail is bisharat@uchastings.edu.
On the one hand this, on the other hand that
September 6, 2007
Norman Finkelstein has chosen to resign, and the cowardly adminsitraiton of DePaul University has tried to expiate its guilt by acknowledging his academic excellence. But check out how it is reported by this cretinous hack (Donald MacLeod of the Guardian). If the ‘one the one hand this, on the other hand that’ approach were not bad enough, he actually goes on to quote Alan Dershowitz! — the man whose academic fraud was exposed in a live debate on TV by Norman Finkelstein. And notice how it is Finkelstein who is ‘controversial’, not the man who plagiarized two whole chapters from Joan Peter’s hoax. I also noticed the interesting use of quotation marks: Finkelstein is presented as a critic of ‘the holocaust ”industry”‘, rather than ’the ”holocaust industry”‘, implying that he somehow is skeptical of the holocaust, rather than of the organizations which have been using it for ideological and financial gain. Either this MacLeod has not read anything Finkelstein has written, or he intends to mispresent and smear the author. And yeah, is it not nice when someone quotes ‘Little Green Footballs’ as proof of his fair-and-balancedness? But I demand consistency. If someone is going to quote Little Green Footballs for ‘balance’ evertime someone says something controversial like ‘human rights should be universal’, they should also quote the Flat Earth Society every time someone suggests the earth is round.
The Bridge To Jim Crow
September 1, 2007
Here we have Israel’s fifth columnistst building a bridge back to the Jim Crow era in order to keep the US aligned squarely behind the Zionist state in a potential confrontation with its Arab adversaries. Given the general xenophobia, and the anti-Arab sentiment built on years of negative media coverage and the residual Orientalist cliches, US ziocons have a vast reservoir of resentment to built on. In 1996 Michael Hoenlein, the president of the Conference of of the Presidents of Major Jewish American Organizations boasted that he personally drafted what ultimately became Clinton’s Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Law whose targets were invariably Arab-Muslim immigrants and which made it legal to use secret evidence in court. Most charged under the law were unable to defend themselves of course because they would never find out what the evidence against them was.
In the following story, there are no worthy victims. The woman in question actually set principles aside to try to save her career, by rushing to denounce a word. Even her past associoations with the ziocons did not do her any good. ‘Four of her nephews and cousins have served in the United States military in Iraq’, the article points out. In that case, for once, the Ziocons chose the right target. Let them subject all Uncle Toms who have their ‘nephews and cousins’ butchering people in foreign lands to similar torment.
Last Feb. 12, you may recall, New York education officials announced plans to open a minischool in September that would teach half its classes in Arabic and include study of Arab culture. The principal was to be a veteran teacher who was also a Muslim immigrant from Yemen, Debbie Almontaser.
The critical response began pouring in the very next day.
“I hope it burns to the ground just like the towers did with all the students inside including school officials as well,” wrote an unidentified blogger on the Web site Modern Tribalist, a hub of anti-immigrant sentiment. A contributor identified as Dave responded, “Now Muslims will be able to learn how to become terrorists without leaving New York City.”
Not to be outdone, the conservative Web site Political Dishonesty carried this commentary on Feb. 14:
“Just think, instead of jocks, cheerleaders and nerds, there’s going to be the Taliban hanging out on the history hall, Al Qaeda hanging out by the gym, and Palestinians hanging out in the science labs. Hamas and Hezbollah studies will be the prerequisite classes for an Iranian physics. Maybe in gym they’ll learn how to wire their bomb vests and they’ll convert the football field to a terrorist training camp.”
Thus commenced the smear campaign against the Khalil Gibran International Academy and, specifically, Debbie Almontaser. For the next six months, from blogs to talk shows to cable networks to the right-wing press, the hysteria and hatred never ceased. Regrettably, it worked.
Ms. Almontaser resigned as principal earlier this month. Nominally, she quit to quell the controversy about her remarks to The New York Post insufficiently denouncing the term “intifada” on a T-shirt made by a local Arab-American organization. That episode, however, merely provided the pretext for her ouster, for the triumph of a concerted exercise in character assassination.
After initially consenting to an interview for this column, Ms. Almontaser backed out, saying she did not want to “do anything that would jeopardize the school,” which is still set to open next month in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn. One of her longtime colleagues, however, spoke candidly about her emotions.
“She feels that she’s been violated, personally and professionally,” said Louis Cristillo, a research professor at Teachers College at Columbia University who has studied the experiences of Muslim children in the New York public schools. “To be painted as somebody who’s un-American, questioning her patriotism, is extremely hurtful for her. She’s really shocked at how devastatingly effective the defamation was.”
For anyone who bothered to look for it, Ms. Almontaser left a clear, public record of interfaith activism and outreach across the boundaries of race, ethnicity and religion. Her efforts, especially after the Sept. 11 attacks, earned her honors, grants and fellowships. She has collaborated so often with Jewish organizations that an Arab-American newspaper, Aramica, castigated her earlier this summer for being too close to a “Zionist organization,” meaning the Anti-Defamation League.
Ms. Almontaser has twice been profiled on Voice of America as an accomplished Muslim American. Her son, Yousif, spent several months on rescue efforts at ground zero as a member of the Army National Guard. Four of her nephews and cousins have served in the United States military in Iraq.
None of these details were exactly hidden under a rock. But her critics ignored them. In syndicated columns by Daniel Pipes, in articles and editorials in The New York Post and The New York Sun, on such Web sites as PipeLineNews and Militant Islam Monitor, both concerned with radical Islam, the Gibran school was repeatedly characterized as a “madrassa,” an Arabic term plainly meant to evoke images of indoctrination into terrorism and holy war.
Bella Rabinowitz, writing on March 9 in PipeLineNews, called Gibran “an Islamist public school whose curriculum shares the same ideology as the Sept. 11 terrorists.” Alicia Colon wrote in The Sun on May 1, “How delighted Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda must have been to hear the news” that New York “is bowing down in homage to accommodate and perhaps groom future radicals.”
Just as the school was caricatured, so was Ms. Almontaser. Although she has used the first name Debbie since childhood, her critics relentlessly identified her by her legal name Dhabah, the better to render her alien. Some articles would add the phrase “a k a Debbie,” treating her chosen name as a sort of criminal alias.
What all the attacks lacked was a single solid example of Ms. Almontaser having espoused Islamic extremism, much less jihad, during her 15 years as an educator. They have described her as a “9/11 denier” on the basis of one statement that “I don’t recognize the people who committed the attacks as either Arabs or Muslims.”
Yet, as Larry Cohler-Esses noted in an incisive article in New York Jewish Week, these foes conveniently overlooked what Ms. Almontaser went on to say in the same interview: “Those people who did it have stolen my identity as an Arab and stolen my religion.”
What Ms. Almontaser has done — as a private citizen, not in her classroom — is assail the Bush administration for its domestic surveillance and for its Middle East policies. She has said that desperation and oppression contribute to terrorism. You can disagree with her positions and still not believe they should be the basis for destroying her career.
“There’s zero correspondence between the caricature and the actual person,” said Rabbi Andy Bachman of Beth Elohim, a Reform Jewish congregation in Park Slope, who was on the Gibran school’s advisory board. “The words that were used to describe her, the fears that were evoked, are absolutely unrelated to her and her life’s work. Not in any way, shape or form.”
Another rabbi who has worked with Ms. Almontaser on interfaith efforts, Michael Feinberg of the Greater New York Labor-Religion Coalition, said: “It’s all about insinuation and innuendo and this formula of Arab equals Muslim equals terrorist. The viciousness and the vileness of this case surpass anything I’ve seen before.”
That vileness also did no favors to the responsible critics of the Gibran school, whether they were parents worried about school overcrowding or scholars like Diane Ravitch and Richard Kahlenberg, who believe that public schools should reinforce a common American culture rather than promote ethnic identity. Their worthy voices got lost in all the bile.
For now at least, Ms. Almontaser remains employed by the Department of Education. What she requires, though, is something harder to obtain than another job. As another victim of a different smear campaign put it once: “Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?”
In Defense of Academic Freedom
August 31, 2007
The DePaul Academic Freedom Committee has been active since DePaul University’s disgraceful decision to deny Prof. Norman Finkelstein and Mehrene Larudee tenure based on external pressure from the Israel lobby. The committee has organized various protests, representations to the University administration, sit ins and hunger strikes. In October, the committee has put together an event with a stellar cast of scholars and intellectuals who will be speaking in defense of academic freedom.
12 October 2007 – 2:00pm – 7:00 pm
Rockefeller Chapel, University of ChicagoFeaturing:
- Dr. Akeel Bilgrami, Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy and Director of The Heyman Center, Columbia University
- Dr. Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus), Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Dr. Tony Judt, University Professor and Director of the Remarque Institute, New York University
- Dr. John Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago
- Dr. Neve Gordon, Professor, Department of Politics and Government, Ben-Gurion University
Hosted by:
Tariq Ali, Editor of the New Left Review and Verso Books
Admission is free ($5 suggested donation) and open to the public
Presented by DePaul Academic Freedom Committee, Diskord Journal (University of Chicago) and Verso Books
Rockefeller Chapel is located on the
University of Chicago’s campus:
5850 S. Woodlawn Ave.
Chicago, IL 60637
For more information, please email us at: info@academicfreedomchicago.org
The Lobby Makes the Case for Boycott
August 17, 2007
Is it not amusing that the same people who have been stifling free speech of academics even mildly critical of the US should cry ‘censorship’ when British academics propose a highly nuanced boycott of Israel? Only months after the disgraced charlatan Alan Dershowitz who has been accused of plagiarism both on the Left and the Right, leading a campaign to deny tenure to Norman Finkelstein, we have a new campaign by the Israel Lobby to destroy the career of another academic, Nadia Abu El-Haj, who was unwise enough to write research critical of Israel.
Perhaps the lobby forgets that the days where this kind of intimidation would work are numbered. If they feel empowered enough to deny others their academic freedom, then they forfeit the right to bandy it about as a defence. As George Bisharat argues in the following, the boycott campaign continues apace:
When does a citizen-led boycott of a state become morally justified?
That question is raised by an expanding academic, cultural and economic boycott of Israel. The movement joins churches, unions, professional societies and other groups based in the United States, Canada, Europe and South Africa. It has elicited dramatic reactions from Israel’s supporters. U.S. labor leaders have condemned British unions, representing millions of workers, for supporting the Israel boycott. American academics have been frantically gathering signatures against the boycott, and have mounted a prominent advertising campaign in American newspapers – unwittingly elevating the controversy further in the public eye.
Israel’s defenders have protested that Israel is not the worst human-rights offender in the world, and singling it out is hypocrisy, or even anti-Semitism. Rhetorically, this shifts focus from Israel’s human rights record to the imagined motives of its critics.
But “the worst first” has never been the rule for whom to boycott. Had it been, the Pol Pot regime, not apartheid South Africa, would have been targeted in the past. It was not – Cambodia’s ties to the West were insufficient to make any embargo effective. Boycotting North Korea today would be similarly futile. Should every other quest for justice be put on hold as a result?
In contrast, the boycott of South Africa had grip. The opprobrium suffered by white South Africans unquestionably helped persuade them to yield to the just demands of the black majority. Israel, too, assiduously guards its public image. A dense web of economic and cultural relations also ties it to the West. That – and its irrefutably documented human-rights violations – render it ripe for boycott.
What state actions should trigger a boycott? Expelling or intimidating into flight a country’s majority population, then denying them internationally recognized rights to return to their homes? Israel has done that.
Seizing, without compensation, the properties of hundreds of thousands of refugees? Israel has done that.
Systematically torturing detainees, many held without trial? Israel has done that.
Assassinating its opponents, including those living in territories it occupies? Israel has done that.
Demolishing thousands of homes belonging to one national group, and settling its own people in another nation’s land? Israel has done that. No country with such a record, whether first or 50th worst in the world, can credibly protest a boycott.
Apartheid South Africa provides another useful standard. How does Israel’s behavior toward Palestinians compare to former South Africa’s treatment of blacks? It is similar or worse, say a number of South Africans, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, U.N. special rapporteur in the occupied territories John Dugard, and African National Congress member and government minister Ronnie Kasrils. The latter observed recently that apartheid South Africa never used fighter jets to attack ANC activists, and judged Israel’s violent control of Palestinians as “10 times worse.” Dual laws for Jewish settlers and Palestinians, segregated roads and housing, and restrictions on Palestinians’ freedom of movement strongly recall apartheid South Africa. If boycotting apartheid South Africa was appropriate, it is equally fair to boycott Israel on a similar record.
Israel has been singled out, but not as its defenders complain. Instead, Israel has been enveloped in a cocoon of impunity. Our government has vetoed 41 U.N. Security Council resolutions condemning Israeli actions – half of the total U.S. vetoes since the birth of the United Nations – thus enabling Israel’s continuing abuses. The Bush administration has announced an increase in military aid to Israel to $30 billion for the coming decade.
Other military occupations and human-rights abusers have faced considerably rougher treatment. Just recall Iraq’s 1990 takeover of Kuwait. Perhaps the United Nations should have long ago issued Israel the ultimatum it gave Iraq – and enforced it. Israel’s occupation of Arab lands has now exceeded 40 years.
Iran, Sudan and Syria have all been targeted for federal and state-level sanctions. Even the City of Beverly Hills is contemplating Iran divestment actions, following the lead of Los Angeles, which approved Iran divestment legislation in June. Yet the Islamic Republic of Iran has never attacked its neighbors nor occupied their territories. It is merely suspected of aspiring to the same nuclear weapons Israel already possesses.
Politicians worldwide, and American ones especially, have failed us. Our leaders, from the executive branch to Congress, have dithered, or cheered Israel on, as it devoured the land base for a Palestinian state. Their collective irresponsibility dooms both Palestinians and Israelis to a future of strife and insecurity, and undermines our global stature. If politicians cannot lead the way, then citizens must. That is why boycotting Israel has become both necessary and justified.
George Bisharat is a professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, and writes frequently on law and politics in the Middle East.
Carlin on Education and the Owners of America
August 8, 2007
Why pick on Israel? Because its actions are wrong
July 18, 2007
Here Steven Rose responds to Joan Smith, columnist for the Independent and parter of notorious ‘Israel-firster’ Denis MacShane, who had written an article that echo the arguments of the UK Israel lobby’s campaign against the Academic boycottt. “Academic freedom, it appears, applies to Israelis but not to Palestinians”, Rose observes.
The University and College Union annual congress last week voted by a two-thirds majority to organise a campus tour for Palestinian academic trade unionists to explain why they had called for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel, and to encourage UCU members to consider the moral implications of links with Israeli universities. Not surprisingly, this overwhelming vote met with a roar of hostility from what we have learned to call the Israel lobby.
Our government, long accustomed to sitting on its hands when any serious attempt to censure Israel is made, predictably joined the chorus. More surprisingly, the Independent’s editorialist and its columnist Joan Smith followed along. The boycott, we are told, damages academic freedom, picks on Israel, and encourages anti-Semitism on British campuses.
