Anti-Semitism in British Universities

From Professor Michael Curtis, at the New English Review:

The most troubling manifestation was a conference titled Legitimacy, Responsibility, Exceptionalism, to held in 2015 at Southampton University, that was intended to question the legal and moral right of the state of Israel to exist. The organizers were all well-known critics, even haters, of Israel, and advocates of boycott of Israel, as were almost all the expected participants.

The main organizers were Oren Ben-Dor (Southampton University law school) a constant anti-Israeli critic, and George Bisharat (U of California, Hastings School of Law) who favors a one state solution and compares Israel presence to a rapist. Ben Dor, former Israeli, has criticized the Israeli actions in Lebanon in 2006 and in Gaza in winter 2009. He has supported boycotts of Israel, written about alleged “apartheid” of Israel, and the bias in the Israeli educational system. In a barely comprehensible article in 2012, Ben-Dor referred to ‘pathologies pertaining to Jewish thinking and being.”

Though 929 academics supported a petition for the conference to be held at Southampton, as the result of strong protests the University cancelled it on the grounds that it gave legitimacy to antisemitism. However, the conference with the same cast of characters is now to be held in March and April 2017 at University College, Cork, Ireland, part of the National University of Ireland.

The list of speakers, including die-hard critics of Israel speaks for itself. The presence as speakers of individuals such as Richard Falk, Ilan Pappe, Azmi Bishara, and Hatem Bazian suggests the objective of the conference. It is not to discuss the problems of the Middle East in any objective fashion. It is to emphasize the illegitimacy of the state of Israel. It is to link the alleged suffering of Palestinians to the foundation and nature of Israel, and in essence to argue for the nullification of Israel’ existence...

If you're on the left, you're not right.

The left's hatred of Israel is simply mind-boggling to me, but it's rife throughout the ideological space of leftists Britain, the U.S., and all over the world, as evidenced by the vote last week at the Security Council, which as 14 votes to delegitimize Israeli settlements, and one abstention (the U.S.).