The Tide Is Turning

[maven]

.....It's a New Morning.

It just hit me last night, the tide of venom and despair released after Gaza has begun to wear itself out. The big noises have been made, the banners of the enemy are worn. Galloway's Aramada of the haters will sink in the sands of Egypt and drown in Egyptian bureaucracy with no chance of getting anywhere near the Rafah crossing.

Any more action by the sort of unwashed thugs who threw their shoes at our police officers or plan to boycott Kosher Delis (as if they had ever entered one in the first place) will only denigrate them further in the eys of the public.

The government in Israel is doing just fine. In the middle of what appears to be disorder to most of the planet the leading politicians remain focussed on the goal. We may not have done what I wanted in Gaza, but hey, maybe Olmert. Livini and Barak may be less hawkish than me.

We have Hamas scuttering around in the gutter, stripped of their military swagger and with nothing to offer the people they impoverished except the patently obvious lie that some sort of victory was achieved.

It all began to turn around for me when I read Howard Jacobson's fantastic article and watched him speaking out on YouTube against the boycott of Israeli Universities. With formidable minds like his, with an intelligence I could never reach, arriving on the scene to fight the campus riot, it's obvious that common sense will prevail, intellect will defeat the rhetoric of hate, and while all this will not go away, the revolution of the Islamised Left will lead to a revision of British policy that will change things for the better, if not from looney Labour then when the Conservatives come to power.

Muslims are three percent of the population and they have made a lot of noise and many demands. But as Melanie Phillips said recently there is a fightback beginning. It takes a lot to get the sleepy British intellegencia roused from their own absractions but new thinking is on the way.

Even though the windows of the classroom have been smashed the unruly pupils now face a the grim reality; The grownups are coming back!

So my :unsure: message is...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlD73v2ERrc

[maven]

Howard Jacobson: It's time to end the vilification of Israel

Heigh-ho, it's boycott time again. Just as surely as young men's fancies turn seasonably to love, and folk long to go on pilgrimages, so do the Zionophobic zealots of our universities start on hearing the boiling of their blood and decide to have another go at ostracising their fellow academics in Israel. This year it's the turn of the newly merged Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) to pass a resolution to proceed to a boycott of Israeli scholars. Not yet a done deal but as good as. A boycott in waiting. The three think-alike monkeys of academe cover their faces in excited anticipation: see no dissent, hear no dissent, speak no dissent.


By its nature a boycott is not a precise instrument, so no distinction is drawn between Israeli academics who actively support their government, those who speak vociferously against it, or those who just go quietly about their biomedical researches. "Passivity or neutrality is unacceptable," the resolution says. All are guilty by association with the heinous ideology of their country, that is to say, guilty by simple virtue of being Israelis.

I do not say "by simple virtue of being Jews". The last thing today's boycotters want, having learnt from their last failed attempt, is to pass for anti-Semites, and the last thing I want, when they tell me they are not anti-Semitic, is to contradict them. There is almost an obligation on Jews to be reassuring. No, no, of course it is not anti-Semitic to be a critic of Israel. Please be as critical as you like. But it is a false syllogism which goes Criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic; I am a critic of Israel; therefore I am not an anti-Semite. Zealotry acquaints us with strange bedfellows, and in their loathing of Israel some without a grain of anti-Semitism in their bodies lie down with others who are composed of almost nothing else.

It is, anyway, a red herring. I am tired, myself, of deciding who is and who isn't. Anti-Semitism, when all is said and done, is not the only crime on the block. You don't have to be an anti-Semite to be a blackguard. And you certainly don't have to be an anti-Semite to be a fool. Boycotters assure us of their innocence of anti-Semitism as though that settles once and for all the question of their intellectual and moral rectitude. Some have even stopped dressing like Palestinians (seen as marginally compromising of their impartiality the last time round) and started paying reverential visits to Auschwitz. Since we are demonstrably not Jew haters, these new recruits to Jewish anguish ask us to accept, since we are neither Nazi sympathisers nor Holocaust deniers, our credentials are in good order. But it isn't quite as simple as that.

Whether it's in the best of taste to like Jews better when they're in concentration camps than when they're in their own country I leave to less interested parties to decide. But this, I think, is obvious: you cannot proudly present one clean hand and not expect people to wonder what you're hiding in the other. A person cleared of anti-Semitism might still be guilty of something else. If anti-Semitism is repugnant to humanity, then it is no less repugnant to humanity to single out one country for your hatred, to hate it beyond reason and against evidence, to pluck it from the complex contextuality of history as though it authored its own misfortunes and misdeeds as the devil authored evil, to deny it any understanding (which is not the same as sympathy or succour), and - most odious of all - to seek to silence its voices.

For make no mistake, this is what an intellectual boycott means. We silence you. We will not let you speak. To rub it in - and this would be childish were it not villainous - the UCU resolution includes proposals to "organise a UK-wide campus tour for Palestinian academics/educational trade unionists". In other words, we will hear them, we will not hear you. Anyone familiar with the emotional politics of the campus will be able to imagine the rapturous applause awaiting these Palestinian educational trade unionists - given free rein to vent their grievances while the other side of the argument is gagged. Like the millions cheering Stalin while the gulags quietly filled. I am normally wary of such comparisons, but someone from one of our participating universities needs to explain how what is proposed differs in spirit from the practices of those all-censoring autocracies that made the last century an inferno.

continued:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/howard-jacobson-its-time-to-end-the-vilification-of-israel-452285.html