When Palestine solidarity activists tried to disrupt a concert by an Israeli string quartet in Edinburgh, members of the audience were having none of it.
Archive for August, 2008
1.
Over at Engage David Hirsh writes,
I believe that there is a problem of institutional antisemitism in the UCU. By this I do not mean that significant numbers of people in the union hate Jews. But I do believe that ways of thinking, norms and practices have developed which allow the union to behave in an antisemitic way and to normalize antisemitic expression.
This is a guest post by Contentious Centrist
Remember this petition, initiated by some Israeli academics and addressed to the government of Israel?
An oft heard complaint from practitioners of the new, cool, environmentally responsible, GMO free antisemitism is that participants in the great Zionist conspiracy use their influence in the media to stifle criticism of Israel. This leads them to make much use of such phrases as “speaking out”, “refusing to be silenced” and suchlike.
Continue reading ‘Stifling Criticism - The Case of Evelyn Hecht-Galinski’
Welcome back, Harry’s Place. Thanks to Modernity for maintaining such detailed updates. Also, our friends at Engage have three important posts about the source of all this rot - the UCU. The email which they’ve reproduced from one Keith Hammond demonstrates both shocking politics and shocking disrespect for the basic rules of grammar.
if you are having problems logging onto HP, Modernity in the comments points out: “The DNS’s might take a bit of time to propagate the IP address, they are there. You might try the IP address directly, 64.13.233.3.”
Dishonest arguments by Palestine solidarity activists are legion. Arguments like this one:
In the hours that have elapsed since Harry’s Place was unceremoniously ripped from the internet, this blog and many others have declared their solidarity, mainly by expressing their disgust at the underhand methods adopted by the boycotters inside the UCU and by linking to this back-up site. Again, please go there and tell your friends and colleagues to do the same.
Readers of this blog may have noticed that Harry’s Place is down, apparently because of a complaint made by Jenna Delich, or someone associated with her, to their service provider. Please go here for more information. We’ll keep you posted with further developments.
President Tabaré Vázquez of Uruguay is on a state visit to Israel. Yesterday, he said:
Over at Harry’s Place a commenter called Tangoko, responding to a piece by Ben says,
In NI [Northern Ireland] it was impossible to meet the mutually exclusive demands of both groups in the same territory (for exclusive sovereignty) nor was it possible to partition again what had been partitioned. So they have to share sovereignty and power whether they like it or not. And believe me many do not.
The UCU, the British academic union, was born of a merger between the AUT and NATFHE. Lots of initials there, but let me add another set into the mix. If the union needs to reinvent itself again, how about KKK?
In the end, Israel handled it expertly. The two boats carrying a motley crew of Palestine activists - including Yvonne Ridley, a propagandist for Iran’s Press TV and Lauren Booth, Tony Blair’s embarrassing sister-in-law - docked in Gaza without fuss.
The German newspaper Die Tageszeitung recently quipped that Belgium was the “most successful ‘failed’ state.” Hard to believe, but many citizens of one of the European Union’s most prosperous countries don’t believe that Belgium - qua Belgium - has a future. And their angst has important implications for current thinking about resolving the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Philip O’Connor has an op-ed piece in yesterday’s Irish Times in which he replies to an earlier article by Seán Gannon which I linked to here. Most of his argument can be reduced to following statement; Gannon says that Israel is living up to its legal responsibilities in Gaza but that can’t be true because a lot of people and organisations say that it isn’t. I was rather under the impression that we had the Enlightenment so that we could figure out for ourselves whether this or that statement was true or not and wouldn’t have to take it on trust from some authority figure, but maybe I am just a hopeless idealist.
There is an article by Marko Attila Hoare at Harry’s Place here. I’d like to deal with some questions arising from its first paragraph.
Hezbollah’s secretary-general, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, has reportedly gloated over the Russian crushing of Georgia as a defeat for Israel. ‘[Israeli brigadier-general] Gal Hirsch, who was defeated in Lebanon, went to Georgia and they too lost because of him.’
