British AUT getting 'down wiv the kidz'
Julie Burchill | 01.05.2005 18:13 | Anti-racism | Education | Social Struggles
If someone's a child abuser, even, some jerk will pop up and pipe 'Ooo, it's not their fault - it probably happened to them, too, when they were children! The abused abuse!' Which is patently untrue to anyone with even the flimsiest grasp on mathematics in general and fractions in particular; around three quarters of child abuse victims are girls, but three quarters of child abusers aren't women, are they? D'oh!
But you won't find many people trying to explain why a person is prejudiced. 'Oh, they're just ignorant!' is the best you'll get. And it may well be true. Which is why the sight of 'clever' people showing prejudice seems singularly grotesque. What's THEIR excuse?
I'm asking this right now because a couple of weeks ago, on April 22nd, Britain's Association of University Teachers - an organization representing over 48,000 professional swots - voted to ban all contact with two Israeli universities, and asked its executive committee to consider a boycott against a third, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Israel was accused of being 'a colonial apartheid state' worse than South Africa, a 'regime' worthy of 'removal', and its universities of repressing academic freedom. Needless to say, this show of spite received rapturous applause; well, Britain IS currently playing host to the biggest ever annual number of violent anti-Semitic attacks, both on people and on property, since the 1930s. Who can blame the teachers, so conscious of their uncoolness, for wanting to get 'down wiv the kidz'? They're too respectable to daub swastikas on a synagogue - but it sure feels good to band together and bully them Israeli academics!
Just imagine; for once, the swots aren't having their books ripped up in front of them by a gang of thugs - THEY'RE the ones doing the ripping. But if we learnt nothing else from the Shoah, you'd think we'd have learned that the seductive power of herd-mentality cruelty can suck in the most unlikely people; it sucked in the Germans, for instance, almost all of them, a nation thought by many to be the most cultured and civilized in Northern Europe. And now, sixty years after the rough-necked Brits showed the cultured Krauts the true meaning of civilization, we are going through our own dark night of the anti-Semitic soul.
In one way this turn of events is as unexpected as it is cruel - after all, in this country it tends to be academics who react to anything from mild censorship to book-burning with 'That's how Hitler started!' That they are now doing something Hitler would thoroughly approve of, and did - barring contact with Jews - seems to have escaped them. But in another way, it makes logical, horrible sense. It's not so long since English academia saw nothing wrong with having Jewish quotients as a matter of course, lest the 'best' universities be over-run by those unnaturally smart Heebs. Far from flying in the face of English academic freedom, maybe the latest haters are simply reverting to type.
I've always loved being English - but more and more these days, living through this latest, almost post-modern plague of anti-Semitism with a 'caring' face, I wish it was a club that I could resign from, as opposed to a flag I carry in my blood. Trust me, with all your trials and tribulations, you lot don't know how lucky you are. Because you will never, ever be ashamed of and embarrassed by your country the way I am increasingly ashamed of and embarrassed by mine.
You're too damn good-looking for your own good, you're humourless and you don't know the meaning of 'please' and 'thank you' - but you're not bullies, and you never will be. It makes me sad to think that just a few years ago, I thought that last thing about my people, too. I don't anymore.
Julie Burchill
Comments
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Just go away...
01.05.2005 19:41
X
not all of them are bigots
01.05.2005 21:22
lower middle class and pissed off
...
02.05.2005 00:29
So boycott Israeli goods, until the occupation is ended.
Hermes
Sue Blackwell is a racist
02.05.2005 06:59
MarWen Media, which is linked directly from Blackwell's Web site, advocates the views of Kevin Macdonald, an anti-Semitic pro-Nazi author, who has claimed Jews are responsible for a "breeding program" to conquer other "races."
Under the heading "Sue Blackwell's links on Israel and Palestine," Blackwell provides a link to the MarWen site, along with the following description: "MarWen Media offers the latest in groundbreaking documentaries, breaking through barriers and taboos that mainstream media – and even most alternative media do not venture." Blackwell writes that "the documentaries, mostly about Israel, Zionism, and Palestine, are by Wendy Campbell; see her other site, Exposing Israeli Apartheid."
Combining anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, Holocaust denial and vilification of Israel, Campbell writes: "It is no accident that Israeli 'security' is now the centerpiece of US foreign policy. How are the highly placed "friends of Israel" able to bamboozle so much of the world?"
She peddles Holocaust denial, saying, "It's a staggering fact that in numerous 'free, Western democracies' (such as Germany, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, and others) it's a crime to question the official Jewish death toll figures or the gas chamber story in the events now called The Holocaust. Penalties include fines and actual imprisonment! Holocaust heretic Ernst Zundel was deported from the US to Canada where he spent two years in solitary confinement. Now he sits in a German prison. Who's next?"
MarWen Media offers a videotaped interview with Kevin MacDonald, accompanied by the following description: "Prof. Kevin MacDonald is the author of three groundbreaking books on Judaism, the most recent being The Culture of Critique. In it, MacDonald concludes that Jewish intellectual movements including Freudian psychology, Marxism (including other radical, Leftist politics), the Frankfurt School of Social Research, the New York intellectuals and others, including right-wing NeoConservatism, have all been designed to advance specifically Jewish interests – often at the expense of non-Jewish interests. MacDonald's incisive analyses offer an alternative view of western history and has the potential to change the course of major events still unfolding."
MacDonald is a pseudo-intellectual white supremacist,who claims that Jews have been practicing a "breeding" program "masked" as a Jewish religious code, in a sinister bid to subjugate the world, and holds that Jews are responsible for an impending "race war" in the US.
Blackwell, who was described by columnist David Aaronovitch as a "former Christian fundamentalist," has said on her Web page that "I do not include links to sites which promote either racism or terrorism. This has always been my policy and applies to all my 200+ Web pages, not just this one."
Her Web site is reported to be under a House of Commons Committee investigation for a previous link to a Web site blaming Jews for the 9/11 attacks.
shlomo
Self-publicity
02.05.2005 08:46
Y
...
02.05.2005 13:34
Perhaps the owner or Marwen Media does have these beliefs, but that is not obvious from the website, and I don't think Sue Blackwell can be considered strange for having a link to what seems like a perfectly normal website about the Palestinian campaign. I doubt she has done any research into who owns it, it is after all, one of 200 links on her site!!!
Second, she includes this on her page, under 'Nazi Alert'
"Some notorious far-right individuals and organisations are jumping onto the Palestinian bandwagon in an attempt to hijack the cause of the Palestinian people for their own anti-semitic ends. Recent examples are:
Revisionist "historian" (read Holocaust-denier) David Irving featured the nomination of Rachel Corrie for the Nobel Peace Prize on his website. The link was widely circulated on the Internet.
Martin Webster, national organiser of the National Front in the 1970s, featured the case of Tom Hurndall in the latest edition of his "Electronic Watch on Zion" newsletter.
Israel Shamir, whose writings are widely admired in some pro-Palestinian circles, circulated a message from Webster on his "shamireaders" e-list. Yours Truly got a copy of this via a complicated e-mail chain, and pointed out to the friend who forwarded it that this man was a Nazi. (I wrongly said he was now a leading light in the BNP - apparently he never joined anything else after being kicked out of the NF in the 1980s, I was mixing him up with John Tyndall). My message got forwarded back to Shamir, who in turn sent it - complete with my work contact details - to Webster, who was swift to e-mail me to correct my inaccuracies about his political affiliations and sent me a long account of how the BNP wasn't racist enough for him. Shamir has refused to apologise for forwarding my details to a known nazi, and describes his e-list as "the meeting point of the left and the right against Zionism". There is even a review by Shamir of Mel Gibson's 'Passion of the Christ' in "Heritage and Destiny - The Racial Voice of White Nationalism"! It is possible that they printed it without his permission .... The Al-Awda Unity e-list has, thankfully, voted to remove Shamir from the list because of his links with fascists and anti-semites."
So, she obviously doesn't have much time for these sort of people. You're just resorting to name calling and slander, because you're argument for supporting the oppression of the Palestinian people is slipping into the mud, and now everybody, including now the AUT, can see the crime that is being committed.
Hermes