Fighting the NATFHE boycott is no excuse for bad politics

My feelings about the ritual writing of letters to the Guardian on behalf of this or that side of a cause are pretty much like my feelings about signing petitions. As I've written before, they seem to me to me mainly about making the signatories feel better.

Though in the case of ritual group letters to the Guardian, I think they're about acquiring a sense of personal moral worthiness by being seen to be in the company of those of like political mind, especially if the like-minded include prestigious or celebrity signatories. Sometimes they're little more than gestures of collective solidarity between fellow supporters of a lost cause.

I've had two email circulars urging me to add my signature to a letter to the Guardian which has been written by the two most activist activists of Engage.

This letter opposes the latest proposed NATFHE boycott and blacklist which is due to be voted on over the weekend. It includes what I think are some very valid arguments as to why the NATFHE proposals are wrong. They include reference to how wrong it is to require academics to make ritual statements of their political stance.

I shan't include the text of the letter here, as the writers have asked the recipients not to publish it. They seem to think that pre-publishing the text might diminish its chances of being published by The Guardian.

I definitely won't be signing it.

Here's why. The draft letter includes these two statements:

We oppose the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and we oppose the daily violence that is necessary to sustain it; as we oppose campaigns to kill Israelis

Israeli universities are amongst the most open and anti-racist spaces in Israel and so are the wrong target.

For a start, this buys into the wholly objectionable business of finding it acceptable to be making ritual statements to demonstrate one’s political credentials to speak on the issue. The fundamental issue about opposing the NATFHE action is the need to oppose doing this as a core tenet of academic freedom.

In suggesting that Israeli universities are “the wrong target”, the letter implies that it is acceptable for other Israeli institutions to be targeted for discriminatory blacklisting and boycotting action of the type the writers of the letter say they oppose.

Now here's the weird thing. I said I had two email circulars asking me to endorse the letter. The first, not surprisingly, was from one of the Engage activists who wrote the letter. But the second is from the chairman of the UK Academic Friends of Israel.

As far as I know, it's certainly not a policy of AFI to oppose the Israeli occupation, given that the Israeli presence in the territories is at present primarily to do with the fact that Israel faces daily assaults from those territories, by terrorists condoned and supported by the Palestinian Authority and its Hamas government.

The letter makes no reference to this current context of terrorism, and to the fact that Palestinian terrorist attacks do not simply plan to kill Israelis, but anyone around who happens to get hit by their suicide bombers and rockets. And Hamas explicitly does not direct its eliminationist policies towards Israelis, but towards Jews, as I have repeatedly shown in previous posts.

This first statement I've quoted incorporates the view that Israeli self-defence in the face of those assaults is to be opposed.

Both the Engage originators of this letter are members of AUT, with which NATFHE is to merge very shortly after the vote.

Their letter refers approvingly to what they say is the current opposition of AUT to any boycott actions. This is at best disingenuous and at worst misleading. For as I've shown previously, AUT has just agreed a policy on boycotts which states that they can be imposed on the basis of "triggering" for which

triggers for actions leading to greylisting and boycott can only result from a request from a legitimate organisation within the state, or within the occupied territory or institution in question.  Legitimate organisations would include a trade union movement, a recognised higher education union or other representative organisation. Exceptionally, a decision to impose greylisting or boycotting might be taken following consultation with Education International in circumstances where legitimate organisations cannot be lawfully established within the state or institutions in question, or in circumstances where institutions or branches of institutions, are established in territories under unlawful occupation as defined by UN resolutions.

The whole basis for both last year's AUT boycott of Israeli universities and this year's NATFHE proposal was exactly such a call from dozens of Palestinian solidarity organizations and committees proposing identical resolutions. If the purpose of this AUT motion was anything other than to pave the way for such action, then, as Ian Hislop famously said, I'm a banana.

When I asked why Academic Friends of Israel was circulating its email list to ask people to endorse the Engage-originated letter, I was told that it was because Engage is leading the fight against the NATFHE motion. And there's apparently a letter being sent to the Guardian by some of the same academics who previously wrote a ritual letter in support of the AUT boycott, who are now writing in favour of this NATFHE action.

I believe that particular group of boycotters will include calls like these:

We call on academics visiting Israeli universities, and Israeli academics visiting foreign institutions, to make clear their objection to the continued Israeli occupation.

We call on academics visiting Israeli universities to make sure they also visit Palestinian universities and try to understand the realities of occupation.

We believe that British academics should think carefully before developing research links and exchanges with Israelis: ascertaining whether they are part of the military machine or work to sustain the occupation; whether they are prepared to address and criticise infringements of Palestinian rights and willing/able to work with Palestinians.

The need to oppose calls like that seems to me to be no reason to support another set of bad politics, especially a politics which seeks to locate the cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict solely in the Israeli occupation, and to ignore the history of Arab and Palestinian rejectionism and terrorism which long predates the occupation.

I can't really understand why AFI is not seeking instead to ally with other organizations which support academic freedom and oppose any sort of political testing, boycotting and blacklisting. At the very least, it could be seeking to enlist academics who wish to sign up to opposing any blacklisting or boycotting of academics and universities on political grounds.

The most recent AUT conference has just signed up this formerly reasonably moderate union to affiliating to the Stop the War coalition, with its call for immediate withdrawal of British troops from Iraq and support for the Iraqi "resistance". So there can be little doubt that the imminent merger of the two unions is going to reinforce the support for various forms of boycott and blacklisting action against Israel and Israelis.

There is a lot of anger about the currently proposed NATFHE blacklisting of Israeli universities and academics who don't agree to make ritual statements condemning Israel. And that's not just from people who can be seen as tireless supporters of Israel.

Yesterday, I was listening to BBC Radio 4's "PM" programme, which gave this issue some fairly balanced and reasonable coverage. What struck me was that the presenters, not usually particularly sympathetic to Israel, seemed completely bemused as to why Israel universities should be being singled out for this action, when the universities of other countries with far worse records in ongoing internal and external conflicts were not.

Since the AUT has now signed up to a policy where the legitimate trigger for boycott action is a call of the type I've referred to above, and NATFHE is already a member of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, these unions are well beyond mere rationalism like this in their policies on boycotts.

And given that both unions are currently campaigning to gain much deserved pay increases for their members, it is truly tragic that their energies here seem to be being spent on discrediting themselves in this way.

Comments

[Ripper]

The people from ENGAGE are well meaning but they are buying into the whole "its the occuaption" nonsense when to the Palestinains "occupation" means the entire areas from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean.

[Eli Tabori]

Why the neo-Nazis salute Iran’s President
Allister Heath

http://www.spectator.co.uk/printer-friendly/22549/why-the-neonazis-salute-irans-president.thtml
Hjalmar Schacht, the Nazi economics minister, had many unusual interests but one was especially telling. He was fascinated with the theory, famously enunciated by King Darius the Great, that the Persians were of Aryan lineage, and argued that this made them the Nazis’ natural allies. So when in 1935 Shah Reza Pahlavi renamed his country Iran, which means Land of the Aryans in Farsi, he helped seal a pivotal alliance.

Seventy years later a shared anti-Semitism has spawned a new entente between Germany’s now thankfully small band of neo-Nazis and Tehran. Nazi thugs have promised to march in support of Iran at the Iran–Mexico World Cup match in Nuremberg on 11 June. In return, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad chose an interview with the German media at the weekend to question once more the reality of the Holocaust, and to say that if it did really happen, the Jews should be removed from Israel to Europe.

Given Ahmadinejad’s view that Israel must be ‘wiped off the map’, it is no surprise that he is being feted as a hero by Nazis, racists and even white supremacists. But it is not only the Jews who need fear Ahmadinejad; a sinister crackdown on all of Iran’s religious minorities is gathering pace. Non-Shia Muslims have long been treated as second-class citizens by the Islamic Republic, discriminated against in education, government jobs and services, banned from serving in the military, and their public religious expression severely restricted; now they are positively under siege. It is a story that has gone unreported in Britain but which confirms the monstrous nature of a regime that could soon have access to nuclear technology.

Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, head of the Guardian Council, recently described non-Muslims as ‘sinful animals’ and ‘corrupt’. After criticising him, the only Zoroastrian member of parliament (there are 22,000 Zoroastrians in Iran) was charged with the ‘dissemination of false information, slander and insult’.

Paradoxically, compared with minority Muslims and Baha’is, Iran’s 30,000 Jews have so far got off relatively lightly — they have only had to put up with a new barrage of propaganda and incitement to hatred rather than direct violence or mass arrests, as was the case a few years ago. The education of Jewish children is also becoming trickier, and it is even harder to distribute religious texts.

Some of Iran’s 300,000 Christians have been unluckier. Ali Kaboli, a carpenter from Gorgan, was arrested by the secret police on 2 May. Kaboli had previously been threatened for holding Christian meetings in his home, had survived an arson attack and had long been kept under close surveillance. His ‘crime’ is to have converted to Christianity from Islam —albeit 33 years ago — and to have tried to share his faith with others. Since his arrest, many of those who worshipped in his house have also been questioned.

It could have been worse. Six months ago Ghorban Dordi Tourani, 53, another convert to Christianity, was found stabbed to death in front of his home in Gonbad-e-Kabus, a few hours after being arrested. But Kaboli could share the fate of Hamid Pourmand, a lay pastor in the Assemblies of God Church and an Iranian army colonel, now serving a three-year sentence in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison for supposedly concealing his faith from his military superiors. After intense international lobbying, Tourani was acquitted of apostasy, an offence punishable by death.

Pressure is just as intense on the country’s tens of thousands of Sufi Muslims, who are hated by the extremist Shia clerics, as are the small Ahl-e-Haqq minority. A court in Qom last month sentenced 52 Sufis — and their two lawyers — to one year in jail, 74 lashes, and fines on various trumped-up charges. Some 1,000 Sufis were arrested in February after clashes over the closure of a prayer house. On 21 May, in a development which bodes ill for the community, one of the country’s top Sufis, Ahmad Shariati, was summoned before judges. Meanwhile Sunni Muslims, of whom there are six million in Iran, have long complained of detentions, torture of their clerics and a ban on teaching in state schools; disgracefully, they still have no mosque in Tehran.

While the regime loathes Israel, rounding up Jews would be the best way to trigger international outrage, so a surrogate enemy has been found: the Baha’i religion, which was founded in 19th-century Iran. Their ancestors converted from Islam, so they are deemed apostates; and because the Baha’i faith has its headquarters in Israel, they are wrongly accused of being Zionist or US spies. Unlike Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians — who are at least given some constitutional protection because their religions are recognised — Iran’s 300,000 Baha’is are officially ‘unprotected infidels’ or a ‘misguided sect’ and hence the lowest of the low.

The gravest incident for many years took place on 19 May in Shiraz, when 56 young Baha’is were arrested. They were teaching poor children as part of a Unicef programme. Three of the youngsters remain in jail; those released have had to hand over property deeds or their work licences to secure bail. None of those arrested has yet been formally charged but when they eventually are, fabricated allegations will be the order of the day.

In the past 14 months 125 Baha’is across Iran have been arrested and held for up to a month, often incommunicado and in secret locations, as the authorities step up their campaign. Vile lies are propagated by the state-controlled media, with one article this year fabricating a tale of gatherings that the (in fact strictly teetotal and non-violent) Baha’is would hold on the eve of the solemn Shia mourning festival of Ashura, where they would supposedly drink alcohol, dance and sacrifice a Muslim child, in a despicable libel reminiscent of the anti-Semitic forgery, the Protocol of the Elders of Zion.

Ordinary Baha’is are also increasingly being sent hate-filled text messages and can no longer go to university. Typically, Roya Habibi, of Kermanshah, now out on bail, was charged with ‘teaching the Baha’ism sect and acting in an insulting manner towards all that is holy in Islam’. Six months ago Dhabihu’llah Mahrami, a Baha’i prisoner of conscience, died in his cell in Yazd in mysterious circumstances. Two months earlier a judge had warned him: ‘Even if you are released from prison, we will get rid of you in a [car] accident.’ When, in March, the UN special rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights on Freedom of Religion or Belief released a secret letter from the Iranian high command ordering police and Revolutionary Guards to ‘identify’ and ‘monitor’ members of the Baha’i community, she said the existence of such a letter made her ‘highly concerned’.

Given the intensifying persecution of minorities in Iran, including Christians and Muslims, it beggars belief that Tehran retains so many apologists in the West who are prepared constantly to downplay its crimes. Comparisons with the 1930s can be overdone, but in the case of Iran, the regime is inviting them by its actions.

Allister Heath is associate editor of The Spectator and deputy editor of the Business.

[Eli Tabori]

The Communist connection to NATFE's Boycott

1. Tom Hickey, member of the Socialist Workers Party SWP was the one who
proposed the motion.

2. Delegates also voted to pass a motion noting Respect’s success in the
local elections. The motion said that Respect provided an “anti-racist,
anti-fascist left alternative culture to New Labour and the BNP”.
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/print_article.php?article_id=8944

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[el tom]

ggr. stupid Stalinist Workers' Party.

islamofascist colluders, as ever. anti-fascist my bum.

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