Adloyada

The anti-Israel propagandists who faked the "Amina Arraf" Gay Girl blog

 

 

The worst and most irresponsible internet hoax for some considerable time-- the Amina Arraf hoax--has now been exposed.

The supposed "Gay Girl in Damascus blogger", who was supposed to have been arrested and abducted by the Syrian regime, has turned out to be an invention of a couple of extreme anti-Israel activists, Tom MacMaster and his partner Britta Froelicher.

MacMaster, who  is presently studying and working in Scotland, and is very active in Edinburgh University's Students for Justice in Palestine, has admitted having written every one of the posts supposedly written by an out lesbian in Damascus. This is a hoax which he has been running since 2007.

It's yet to emerge how he got hold of the photos of the young woman, Jelena Lecic, featured in the YouTube video above, whose image was appropriated by him and presented as that of Amina. The Guardian used those images, and went on using others of Jelena, even after she protested about her identity theft.

 Froelicher, according to today's Harry's Place post, has a deep interest in Syria.

She presented a paper to the British Society of Middle East Studies this year, in which she argued:

The external perception of Syria’s economy is relatively negative. Most scholars find that Syria is moving into a Russian-style ‘crony capitalism’, in which well-connected individuals have de-facto monopolies with the government’s blessing. [...] My research hypothesizes that the reasons for this course of development have little to do with culture and religion or that – as the ‘transition paradigm’ tried to claim – any particular form of development is ‘natural’. Rather, the negative external perceptions of Syria’s economy also impact the desire and ability of western governments to interact positively with Syria, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of mistrust and suspicion. Furthermore, security concerns deepen an existing conservatism towards reform internally.

Froelicher is an associate fellow at the University of St. Andrews. She is researching the topic  ”Economic Reform and the Syrian Textile Industry“. The University of St Andrews has been taking money from dubious Syrian sources for promoting research which happens to burnish the cultural credentials of Syria.

Some of the posts from "Amina Arraf" tried to paint the Syrian regime as not as repressive as the western publicity suggested. Maybe MacMaster was planning to resolve her apparent abduction with a sudden release with her proclaiming how kindly she'd been treated by Assad's regime.

He previously repeatedly denied to The Electronic Intifada that he was “Amina Arraf”. The Electronic Intifada, itself also a strongly anti-Israel blog, deserves credit for continuing to question and research the veracity of the Amina Arraf blog and MacMaster's and Froelich's connections to it, despite such categorical denials as this one: 

I am not the blogger in question. Whomever that person ‘really’ is, I have doubtless interacted with her at some point. I do not know further than that about her. When I first read the news story, I momentarily thought I had an idea who she was. As time has progressed that seems much less likely. I understand there are a number of unusual coincidences regarding the blogger and either me or my wife. Those are, as far as I am aware, simply unusual. I am not going to make more of that.

MacMaster deserves to be sanctioned for creating and promoting this particular bit of “hoaxing”– he’s shown himself to be a hardened liar and deceiver who shouldn’t be allowed to use a University IP.

Not only is he pretty well unrepentant about what he’s done, but he uses his admission of the hoax to try and get on a moral high horse about the supposed “liberal orientalism” of the people he deceived:

I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground. I do not believe that I have harmed anyone -- I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.

I only hope that people pay as much attention to the people of the Middle East and their struggles in thıs year of revolutions. The events there are beıng shaped by the people living them on a daily basis. I have only tried to illuminate them for a western audience.

This experience has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism.

Some of the posts from "Amina Arraf" tried to paint the Syrian regime as not as repressive as the western publicity suggested. Maybe MacMaster was planning to resolve her apparent abduction with a sudden release with her proclaiming how kindly she'd been treated by Assad's regime.

But the supposed beautiful lipstick lesbian had quite a turn of phrase when it came to characterizing the people of Israel and the actions of its governments and people. Quite something to know that every word of this supposedly authentic Syrian Arab voice came from Mr Tom MacMaster, sometime of Georgia USA, now of Scotland and Edinnburgh University's Students for Justice in Palestine.

 As soon as I post this, I know, the defenders of the Holy Nation will come and denounce me, will ask why it is that I do not see their cause as holy and my own people, my own heritage, my own history, as nothing more than the squawkings of baboons.

Don’t laugh; I am sure they will come. And they will again and again demonstrate their arrogance and their ignorance. When not claiming that their innate superiority in all things means that democracy is not for the likes of me (after all, how else to justify their state?) or that we are all needing just a firm, pale hand to guide us, they will show their ignorance of history.

I for one know my own history. And I know my own country. I know that Jaulan was lost after the Syrians had agreed to cease fire. I know who started that war; it wasn’t us. I know that the Israelis hold Jaulan because they would steal our water and need a nice platform to keep Damascus in their gunsights. I know that there is no difference between what keeps them there and what took Saddam to Kuwait … I know of American sailors who died to keep the world from knowing … I know that their own generals admitted that all the ‘vicious wicked Syrian attacks’ were provoked by them, not us …

I know also of the ethnic cleansing that they undertook up there; 131,000 people made homeless so that Russian migrants might have a place to illegally live. 

And whatever happens in Palestine, no Syrian can forget that they stole our land and made our people homeless.

And we also know who here was guilty of collusion; we know who worked closest with the Soviets then to start the war, who it was who gave the orders to pull back troops from impregnable strongholds on the Jaulan, who it was who would surrender our patrimony without a shot;

The one who gave those orders, the order that, for what it’s worth, meant the death of my father’s older brother, now has a son. And that son is called the President.

Every Syrian knows that; every Syrian knows that Traitor of the Naksa’s second son is President and that another runs his squads of killers. Every Syrian knows that Bashar has never lifted a finger to redeem Jaulan.

So when the lying liars and propagandists, the makers of hasbara and singers of paeans to the so-called Chosen claims that “Bashar tricked us into killing people (if you can call mere Arabs humans and not two-legged dogs) so as to distract fromhis own crimes”, tell them to stuff it. They lie. 

 

Was the Detroit Bomber linked to other terrorists through UK university Islamic Societies?

I've no reason to think that British universities' Islamic Societies are in general anything other than a welcome resource for Muslim students and those interested in Islam to meet, study and socialise together, performing exactly the same function as the unversities' many Christian, Jewish and Buddhist societies. With the regrettable difference that many Student Islamic Societies spend a great deal of energy promoting boycott motions against Israel and sometimes campaigning against Jewish societies on the grounds that they are zionist.

During my daughter and son-in-law's time in Cambridge however, I know that the  university Jewish Society and the Islamic Society had successful dialogue meetings, and both groups are linked to continuing multifaith projects in Cambridge.

But there is some disturbing evidence that Islamist terrorists have succeeded in getting themselves voted into powerful positions in a small number of university Islamic Societies.

And the latest news about the Detroit Bomber having been President of the UCL Islamic Society during 2006-2007 raises questions about whether the extent to which would-be Islamist terrorists and supporters of Islamist terrorist organizations may have used those societies to spread their message and recruit followers.

It was after all in August 2006 that Waheed Zaman, the then President of the nearby London Metropolitan University's Islamic Society was arrested. He is closely linked to the convicted would be transatlantic plane bombers, all involved with the Al-Qaeda-linked Tablighi Jamaat extremist Islamist group.

Zaman, part of whose "martyrdom" video shown above was released by the police to the jury during one of the two trials he's so far been through on charges related to the aborted "soft drink" bombing conspiracy. So far, he's been found not guilty on the most serious charges of conspiring to cause an aircraft explosion, but in September 2009, the jury failed to reach a verdict on the charge of "conspiracy to murder involving liquid bombs". It's not yet clear whether he will face a further trial. 

The line of defence offered by Waheed and the other suspects whose martyrdom videos were shown at the trial was that it was all "just" a make-believe designed to be released as a publicity stunt to bring home to the British public their view of how disastrous British foreign policy was.

The trial verdicts, convicting just three of the eight men on trial on the lesser charge of conspiracy to murder, but acquitting them of conspiring to target aircraft, caused astonishment and dismay amongst the counter-terror authorities and civil servants who knew the vast weight of decisive evidence against them. Having recently been on jury service myself, I'm well aware of how reluctant many jurors are to convict anyone of anything, no matter how strong the evidence, unless they are presented with an action replay. That's because they tend to over-interpret the requirement that a guilty verdict must be based on certainty beyond reasonable doubt. They tend to assume that must mean  certainty beyond all possible doubt.

So what's the evidence for any links between Zaman and Detroit Bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab? Both have been linked to the East London Mosque. But Abdulmutallab is known to have visited it on just three occasions. It would be interesting to know which those were.

Much more significant is the certainty that as Presidents of their own universities' Islamic Society, they would inevitably regularly have been involved with meetings and networking through the Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS) and its London regional group in particular. Despite its overall establishment-style self-projection, FOSIS has a track record of supporting the recognition of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, which campaigns for the replacement of democracies with a Caliphate to be established worldwide, including in the UK, and it is also closely associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, whose Gaza offshoot is the Hamas terrorist group. The wider university links between Waheed Zaman's group and other Islamist-dominated Student Islamic Societies are documented here.

The UCL Islamic Society seems to have had particularly strong involvement in FOSIS. Two of FOSIS' current national executive members, the Head of Finance and the Head of Media, are current or former UCL Islamic Society activists whose period of involvement overlaps with that of Abdulmutallab, including the time when he was President.

None of this establishes a clear direct relationship between Zaman and Abdulmuttallab beyond the fact that they are almost certain to have been fellow participants in national Student Islamic Society meetings and to have had links with the East London Mosque. After all, Abdulmutallab was a keen Arsenal supporter, but that's no reason to suppose that he was using Arsenal matches to promote Islamist extremism. It's clear however that both men are linked to Al Qaeda. Indeed, Abdulmuttalab and his failed plane bombing attempt has been claimed by an Al Qaeda website as its own operation. And there are reports that Al Qaeda has been moving its main centre from the Afghan-Pakistan borders and Iraq to Yemen.

I hope that both the British and US anti-terror authorities are involved in jointly investigating these student Islamist extremist networks more thoroughly. Unfortunately, one can't assume any such thing. Just a couple of days ago, the UK's Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, was reassuring about the fact that Abdulmuttallab was on a UK watch list for terror, had been refused re-entry to Britain, and, he was confident, the US authorities would have been informed of this. However, it turns out that they weren't.

Fraser Nelson posted a few days ago on how draconian current UK libel laws stand in the way of investigating and publishing information about Islamist extremist supporters and their activities. There was for example a New York Times block on a link to UK ISPs to an article which spelled out the links between the soft-drinks transatlantic bombers and the additional suspects like Zaman. So far, I've seen almost no press investigation of Abdulmuttallab's time as President of UCL's Islamic Society. And that's a matter for concern.

SOAS Student Union votes to ban Israel lectures, backed by SOAS UCU leaders

The Students' Union at London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), one of the UK's highest ranked university centres for the study of the Middle East, Africa and Asia, has voted to demand the cancellation of a lecture series organised to mark the centenary of Tel-Aviv.

The series has been organized by SOAS' Professor Colin Shindler, the UK's first professor of Israeli Studies, who has also been a friend of mine for over twenty years.

The students of SOAS include a very large number of from Arab and other Middle Eastern countries and others who are passionately supportive of the Palestinian cause. But SOAS during most of the recent history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict has also been a place where those students and those from its Hebrew and Israeli Studies centre attend lectures on the Middle East conflict and the history and culture of zionism and discuss the issues in a spirit of scholarship and free enquiry.

Ironically, the Students' Union website carries a constitution proclaiming its commitment to free speech and its absolute commitment to opposing discrimination. That was voted in in 2006, after a previous history of attempts by some student groups to intimidate Jewish students in the name of anti-zionism. Throughout that history, the SOAS directorate firmly opposed such action and subsequently adopted a "Freedom of Expression" code which all who are members of the School are expected to sign up to.

But this latest action has been taken by the Students' Union in the name of boycotting Israeli academics in response to the current Gaza conflict, because they are amongst those who have been invited to lecture in Colin Shindler's Tel-Aviv centenary series.

Here's an even greater irony. The series started last term (and resumed for the current term on Monday night, despite the Student Union banning vote). Amongst the speakers were the Palestinian Authority ambassador, who was formerly a well-respected academic at Bethlehem University, as well as an anti-zionist Israeli academic.

Here's Colin Shindler's statement, issued before the vote was taken, demonstrating his impeccably and consistently sustained record of peace activism on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

Our lecture series ‘Tel Aviv at 100: 1909-2009’ began last term and followed the normal pattern of lectures that we organise around a theme each year.

Professor Joachim Shlöer of Southampton University started the series when he spoke about his academic studies on the history of Tel Aviv. The Palestinian Ambassador, Professor Manuel Hassassian, formerly of Bethlehem University gave a paper on ‘Tel Aviv and Ramallah: The Next 100 Years’. Professor Reuven Snir, an anti-Zionist Israeli Professor from Haifa University spoke about Arabic literature in Israel. This term, academics from Tel Aviv University were due to speak on the same theme on non-contentious subjects such as architecture and music. The first lecture this evening is by Professor Anita Shapira, on of Israel’s leading historians on the early history of Tel Aviv.

It is therefore terribly unfortunate that these lectures, planned months ago, have coincided with the terrible events in Gaza.

Any call for cancelling this series will be seen as not based on opposition to the centenary, but on the participation of Israeli academics. A resurrection of the attempt to boycott academics simply because they are Israeli regardless of their opinion about the tragedy in Gaza. SOAS as an institution and the British government have always strongly opposed and condemned such a boycott.

Academic institutions rightly do not suppress different narratives and different opinions. Its ethos is that the violence of the street should not be brought into the classroom. On a personal level, it is something that I hold to dearly and even if I am in a minority of one, I will adhere to this and not bow to any intimidation.

I have never called for the cancellation of a lecture at SOAS even if the views expressed were not to my liking – such as the participation of a Hezbollah representative in a recent conference or the talk, given by the hijacker, Leila Khaled in the past.

In the ten years that I have been at SOAS, I have always worked hard for my students, regardless of their opinions and background. I will continue to do this.

I hope that colleagues will not discriminate against students whose opinions on the Israel-Palestine conflict they do not agree with.

These are difficult times for all of us. I am grateful to the many colleagues – whether they share my views or not – who have contacted me. Let us hope that the killing ceases this week and we can attempt to rebuild the bridges between us.

Last night, I was at SOAS to hear presentations by Colin Shindler and Dr Emmanuele Ottolenghi on Israel and the Gaza War. The lecture theatre was packed. The presentations were excellent. The post presentation questions and discussions were courteous and attentively listened to. Amongst the SOAS student respondees at the end was a woman in Islamic dress who said she deplored the Student Union vote, and strongly supported free speech. And there was also the ardent pro-Palestinian activist who demanded to know why the Palestinian perspective had not been included. But then, as Colin Shindler pointed out, this was a special event presentation on Israel and the Gaza War. And the activist had spoken as if there was one single Palestinian perspective, although the presentations had discussed the ample evidence of the strongly divergent politics of different Palestinian parties, particularly Fatah and Hamas. 

Clearly, the issue is not just about attempting to ban Israeli academics, though that's appalling enough. It's a clear cut attempt to boycott any public academic presentation about Israel, however unrelated to the Gaza conflict, or even the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And it's also about an attempt to impose a one-story Palestinian account, despite the academic evidence of a divergent, complex politics amongst Palestinians and their allies.

So much for the SOAS Students' Union. Sources at SOAS also tell me that Colin Shindler has been put under a great deal of pressure to cancel the series by leaders of the SOAS branch of UCU, the academic staff union, of which he is a member. Will SOAS UCU now act in favour of or against free speech?

One in the eye for UCU and the boycott-Israel campaigners

Would the largest ever programme of co-operation and exchanges between British and Israeli academics have come into existence were it not for the UK government's opposition to the UCU's and its predecessor unions' last three years of tolerating and encouraging campaigns to condemn and boycott Israeli academics? Was it simply a by-product of Gordon Brown being in Israel today, marking the first official visit to the country by a serving UK Prime Minister?

Somehow, I don't think so. 

I think the UK government's action was given extra impetus when UCU at its last conference in April finally passed a motion imposing a back-door boycott,encouraging UK academics to subject Israeli colleagues to required ritual denunciations of their country as a prerequisite for agreeing to academic co-operation of any sort.

The official line, from the British Council, is that it is nothing to do with the boycott issue:

Julia Smith, deputy director of the British Council, told The Jerusalem Post Sunday, "This program is not something related to the boycott. The British Council and British government are opposed to an academic boycott of Israel. Boycott calls have come from a small minority of the academic community in Britain.

"BIRAX will hopefully be a long-running program to strengthen the existing ties between Britain and Israel," she said.

You get a rather different view from Professor David Newman of  Israel's Ben Gurion University, who has been on a sabbatical in England during the current year:

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Prof. David Newman, who has been active in fighting boycott efforts during his sabbatical in England this year, told the Post that the program "has a great deal to do with the boycott."

"Because of the ongoing discussion of boycotts, the British government decided that the most appropriate response was to strengthen research ties," he said. Newman added that he had been involved in planning the program since its beginning.

And here's a still more revealing comment in the same article from an anonymous source "close to the boycott issue":

A source close to the boycott issue told the Post that the choice of targeting junior academics was not coincidental.

"By choosing starting academics, when the unions start discussing a boycott there will be more people who have had some contact with Israel and will have some knowledge. We've discovered that 80 percent of those who attend the union meetings don't know anything about Israel or the issue. So it's sort of a value added element to the program," he said.

There is also the wider issue of why this happens to be the first time a UK Prime Minister has paid an official visit to Israel, despite over 20 years of British rule via the former League of Nations Mandate.

The last few months have seen the new key ruling pollticians of Germany, France and England rushing to be identified with policies more sympathetic to Israel than in recent years, in contrast to their predecessors' widespread criticism of what they condemned as "disproportionate action" by Israel during the 2006 war with Hezbollah.

What seems to be happening here is a jostling for primacy within an enlarged European Union, whose dynamic, with the accession of so many former Soviet satellites, whose governments continue to wish to shake off the reflex anti-imperialist/ anti-zionist rhetoric of their past, is showing signs of  shifting away from its left-wing socialist focus of former near-partisan support of the Palestinians. Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and now Gordon Brown all seem to be keen to make more gestures of sympathy towards Israel, including high-profile official visits, than most EU leaders have done in recent years.

And, behind the scenes, the dynamic of the diplomatic struggle to head off Iran from developing nuclear weapons and so avoid Israel taking a pre-emptive strike may well be a further reason why all these visits have happened over so few months. The Telegraph reports that Brown will make a strongly anti-Iranian statement when he addresses the Israeli Knesset tomorrow, as does The Independent.

This is what Ha'aretz reports of Gordon Brown's account of that process, giving a view that he hasn't yet articulated in the UK Parliament, as far as I'm aware:

...the new European leadership - Germany's Angela Merkel, France's Nicolas Sarkozy, Italy's Silvio Berlusconi and himself - is interested in bolstering the collaboration with the United States in affecting change in the global agenda, including that of the Middle East. 

Whatever happens to Gordon Brown over the next few months, and even up to the likely coming to power of David Cameron under a new Tory administration, it looks unlikely that any change of Prime Minister or government will change this course.

Were Israel to launch a pre-emptive attack on Iran, where would the EU stand? No doubt the sudden rush of prime ministerial meetings has provided the opportunity to leave a few messages which would not be sayable in the public realm.

Meanwhile, back in Euston, UCU and its SWP-dominated executive will be continuing to devote hours of their energy and a great deal of their members' money to supporting and hosting the Stop the War Campaign, fighting for their pro-Cuba campaign and of course appearing on platforms and in demonstrations supporting the Palestine Solidarity Campaign with its central plank of boycotting all Israeli goods, facilities and services, including Israel's universities, theatres and films and the people who work in them.

Tonight's BBC Radio 4 radio news reports have centred solely on the new financial aid being set up for the Palestinian Authority, although this is little more than a further episode of a long established relationship. The BBC news website takes up Brown's pro-Israel  comments, seen on the ITN news ciip above, from his visit to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Memorial Museum, but remains silent on the new academic co-operation initiative.

And The Guardian goes even further, focusing only on Brown's visit to Ramallah, and amplifying everything he said that was supportive to the Palestinian cause, whilst remaining silent on his condemnation of Palestinian terrorism and on the enthusiastically supportive pro-Israel statements reported in Ha'aretz and the rest of the Israeli press. There is not tonight one UK media mention of the academic agreement, which delivers a socking response to UCU and the pro-boycott campaigners, despite the high profile coverage these campaigns have previously received in the UK media.

UPDATE: The Independent now covers it here. The Guardian on Monday morning still doesn't refer to the exchange and includes an amazing subhead "Echoes of the Holocaust as Ahmadinejad singled out" which presents President Ahmadinejad as a victim. That's a particularly resonant use of "singling out," because it refers both to what happened to Jews in Nazi Europe and is the main focus of the criticism of the UCU and the anti-Israel boycotters, who campaign only for the boycott of Israel, whilst remaining silent on the actions of other states with arguably much more serious records of oppression, suppression of academic freedom and the like.

Question for the Guardian: "Singling out" usually implies a collective of offenders from which just one is selected. How many other heads of state are currently regularly making speeches asking for other countries to be wiped off the map?

UCU's anti-Israel motion: not a boycott, but something much worse

As long time readers of Adloyada will know, this blog was started back in 2005 largely to campaign against the then proposed merger of AUT, the union representing the prestigious universities, and NATFHE, the much larger union representing the community colleges and the second rank universities.

I'd been a member of both unions in my time, and could recall with horror the malign and deadend way in which NATFHE was dominated and manipulated by an inbuilt caucus of Trotskyist, Communist and other hard left hacks, whose rule ensured that it was also hopelessly ineffective in its core role of negotiating the pay of its members. A sample of the typical ravings of its former General Secretary, Paul Mackney, the architect of the merger, can be enjoyed in the clip above.

To this day, the pay of community college lecturers remains the lowest of the full time state teaching unions, below that of primary school teachers.

It had a time honoured tradition of passing motions supporting Cuba, China and whatever far left dictatorship its committee apparatchiks wanted to cosy up to (to say nothing of "fraternal visits".

So I knew that if a merger went through, not only would the new union be signed up to supporting the Stop the War Campaign (which NATFHE housed, provided financial support for, and allowed its General Secretary to campaign for), but similar hard left positions-- including a boycott of Israeli academics, which an array of fringe radical academics from some prestigious universities had failed to get approved within AUT in 2005. I played a part in that one; I was a member of the special delegates' conference that threw out the motion.

However, I never managed to get a broader campaign going; the organized Jewish community outsourced its efforts to getting the Engage group leading a campaign which centred round opposing the AUT boycott while leaving the merger to go ahead. Engage, being itself a soft Trotskyist controlled group, in fact supported the merger, even though the most simple arithmetic and a cursory reading of the constitution of the merged union made it clear that NATFHE majorities and NATFHE style caucusing and manipulation were inevitably going to ensure that a boycott type motion would be agreed.

And now, UCU has passed a motion which is widely being called a boycott by the Israeli press, the Jewish Chronicle and blogs like Harry's Place.

I don’t think the motion is in fact a boycott, and i think it’s a political mistake to call it one.

Neither is it McCarthyism--calling it that is part of the mindset of reluctance to ascribe its true origins to the history of the totalitarian left.

What it represents is something much worse–mandatory thought policing and requirements for ritual denunciations and chantings of required political mantras on pain of exclusion.

This is of course the method used by left totalitarian regimes from which UCU, dominated as it is by apparatchiks of the SWP, draws its methods.

It is also seriously misleading to label it simply anti-semitic. There are plenty of loyal Israelis who are not Jews, but who would be outraged by the requirement to denounce their government and agree with UCU’s ritual mantras. There are also some British non-Jewish members of UCU who are made to feel profoundly alienated and threatened by this and other displays of UCU’s intimidationism.

Apart from possible legal action– which may or may not come to pass– one of the most interesting political answers may be to campaign for the adoption of legislation to force unions to ballot members on political actions like these, including a requirement that a majority of the registered membership (not just a majority of those who actually vote in a ballot) must have voted for it.
It would stop union gesture politics like this (including UCU’s financial and logistical support of the Stop the War campaign) in their tracks.

Of course, a requirement like that could only be seen to be legitimate if there were also a requirement on all of us to vote in national and local elections. I’ve been thinking about that as an issue for some time. This denouement with UCU (which was absolutely inevitable once AUT and NATFHE merged) has made me feel that the requirement to vote should be seen as one of the requirements of our democracy. After all, the overwhelming majority of people in this country accept that there may be times when we are required to enlist and fight for our country when it is under attack. A requirement to vote is of the same order, and of course it still offers the possibility of spoiling your ballot paper if you don’t like any of the choices on offer.

But opting out of either taking part in choosing the government and policies of your local area and your country, or your union, if you choose to belong to one, shouldn’t be an option.

Another view, which involves abandoning UCU to the Trotskyists of SWP, and then contemplating even abandoning UK academia altogether, is taken by Shalom Lappin in a beautifully argued post here.

My view, though, goes back to the very first post I put up on the subject. It's all about democracy.

UCU union movers for and against the Israeli academic boycott

Basically, the line up is this:

The elected General Secretary of the UK universities' union, Sally Hunt, is against the proposed boycott of Israeli academic institutions. As she rightly says, the huge membership of the union as a whole doesn't support it.

Quite right, but of course neither did the entire membership support such other crackpot policies as helping to support the Stop the War Campaign and affiliating to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign as the predecessor union NATFHE was signed up to for years. Such considerations have never stood in the way of either of this union's predecessors before when it comes to hard-left inspired motions about international politics.

However, there is a motion up calling for any boycott motion to be put to the entire membership for a vote before it is ratified. It comes from a tiny college in Canterbury, where a leading moderate former NATFHE president is an influential figure. Would that motion get passed? Again, such is the outcome of the vote to the new UCU executive, packed as it is with hard left activists and members of the SWP that I find it difficult to believe that the new "Congress" (interestingly Stalinist term for a union conference) with its new and so far successful hard left caucus will support it.

Finally, here's the motion itself, put up by Brighton University and supported by one other large third rank university branch. Plus there's a host of supporting motions of various levels of intensity--one or two seeking to change the wording or leave out one of the more inflammatory paragraphs here or there.

30 - Composite: Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions (University of Brighton, Grand Parade; University of East London, Docklands)

Congress notes that Israel's 40-year occupation has seriously damaged the fabric of Palestinian society through annexation, illegal settlement, collective punishment and restriction of movement.

Congress deplores the denial of educational rights for Palestinians by invasions, closures, checkpoints, curfews, and shootings and arrests of teachers, lecturers and students.

Congress condemns the complicity of Israeli academia in the occupation, which has provoked a call from Palestinian trade unions for a comprehensive and consistent international boycott of all Israeli academic institutions.

Congress believes that in these circumstances passivity or neutrality is unacceptable and criticism of Israel cannot be construed as anti-semitic.

Congress instructs the NEC to

circulate the full text of the Palestinian boycott call to all branches/LAs for information and discussion;
encourage members to consider the moral implications of existing and proposed links with Israeli academic institutions;
organise a UK-wide campus tour for Palestinian academic/educational trade unionists;
issue guidance to members on appropriate forms of action.

My reading of the track record is still that the motion for the boycott will pass, and the one to put it out to the whole membership will be lost.

Once again, it would be wonderful to be proved wrong.

Either way, we'll know by 7pm tonight.

The deconstruction of an academic superstar

Last September I went to hear Professors Jacqueline Rose and Judith Butler give this co-presentation of their views of the way in which (according to them) the Holocaust governs Israeli politicians' and the Israeli Jewish policies towards the Palestinians.

They held it in one of the biggest auditoriums in the University of London, and they needed to. Hundreds lined up to hear these two academic superstars speak. I was riveted by the sight of rows of other feminist superstar professors in their immaculate designer clothes on the platform, as well as the more predictable legions of traditional academic radicals in their lumberjack shirts and jeans. Professors Steven and Hilary Rose glowered away in the background, for although they share with Jacqueline Rose and Judith Butler an ardently anti-zionist politics, they seem to see all this high falutin discourse analysis as a distraction from their central aim of campaigning for the boycott of all things Israeli. Given that the title of the presentation was Holocaustal Premises: Political Implications
of the Traumatic Frame
, that was understandable.

Digging into the Gaza beach forensics

So now there are two opposing forensic accounts of who was directly responsible for last Friday's killings on the Gaza beach.

On the one hand, the official Israeli enquiry, led by an IDF major-general, concludes that the explosions which killed the family could not have come directly from Israeli artillery operating at that time because:

"We have records of every shell fired and we can say that all shells hit their targets," he said.  "We investigated the possibility that a shell went astray.  We checked all bombardment during the past month and there were no stray shells.  Now I can reject with certainty the suggestion that IDF fire was to blame for this damage.  In light of the findings I can?t say certainly what did cause the damage.  That's the thing that we are continuing to review, and I hope that in the near future we will succeed in reaching some sort of definite conclusion." 

"The incident occurred 150 meters north of a machine we call 'The Casino'," he continued. "This is based on intelligence research, on information we received from the Palestinians themselves, basically according to videos and professional documentation of the matter.  According to images from one of the instruments that photographs strips of the beach, we are able to say that the incident occurred between 16:57 and 17:10.  The ambulances can also be clearly seen by our cameras, and they come at 17:15.  This brings us to the conclusion that the incident happened not before 16:57 and not after 17:10.  From here we examined the bombardment conducted by the IDF that day, and I can unequivocally refute that any IDF munitions fired during that period of time was the cause of the incident previously described."

Additional evidence cited asserted that:

One IAF strike on the Gaza Strip that day....occurred 2.5 kilometers from the scene of the explosion and two other strikes took place hours earlier. Ruling out Navy fire, Klifi said that "every 76-mm. shell fired from the navy boats can be accounted for since they all hit their targets successfully." In fact, Klifi said, "the ones that fell closest to the location of the incident were fired four hours earlier."

and additionally, IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz said:

Artillery shelling, he added, could also not have been responsible for the explosion. A piece of shrapnel taken from one of the wounded being treated in an Israeli hospital and cross-checked with 155-mm shells used by the IDF proved that the explosion was not caused by Israeli artillery fire. "The fragment taken out of the wounded showed absolutely that it is not connected to any [type of] Israeli ammunition used that day," Halutz said.

The army, Klifi said, has also accounted for five of the six shells that were fired in the area Friday evening before the beach explosion.

None of them exploded nearby, he said, adding that the one shell that was not accounted for was fired before the five others and more than 10 minutes before the blast.

On the other hand, the contradictory forensic report comes from Mark Garlasco, who is the senior military analyst and battle damage assessment expert for Human Rights Watch.

Human Rights Watch researchers currently in Gaza interviewed victims, witnesses, Palestinian security officers and doctors who treated the wounded after the incident. They also visited the site of the explosion, where they found a large piece of unoxidized jagged shrapnel, stamped “155mm,” which would be consistent with an artillery shell fired by the IDF’s M-109 Self-Propelled Artillery. 

Human Rights Watch spoke to the Palestinian explosive ordnance disposal unit who investigated three craters on the beach, including the one where the civilians were killed. According to General Salah Abu `Azzo, head of the Palestinian unit, they also gathered and removed shrapnel fragments consistent with 155mm artillery shells. 

Eyewitnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch described between five and six explosions on the beach between 4:30 p.m. to 5 p.m., the time frame when the IDF fired artillery onto the beach and when the seven civilians were killed. Two survivors said they heard the sound of an incoming projectile and saw a blur of motion in the sky before the explosion that killed the seven civilians. Residents of northern Gaza are familiar with the sounds of regular artillery fire. 

Doctors also confirmed to Human Rights Watch researchers that the injuries from the attack, which were primarily to the head and torso, are consistent with the heavy shrapnel of artillery shells used by the IDF. Doctors said the shrapnel they removed from Palestinian patients in Gaza was of a type that comes from an artillery shell. 

According to readings from a Global Positioning Satellite taken by Human Rights Watch, the crater where the victims were killed was within the vicinity of the other artillery craters created by the IDF’s June 9 artillery attack and was the same shape and size. One crater was 100 meters away from the fatal crater, and the rest were 250 to 300 meters away. 

Some Israeli officials have suggested the explosion may have been caused by a mine placed by Palestinian militants, rather than one of their artillery shells, despite the fact that they cannot account for the final landing place of one of their six shells. 

However, according to on-site investigations by Human Rights Watch, the size of the craters and the type of injuries to the victims are not consistent with the theory that a mine caused the explosion. The craters are too large to be made by bounding mines, the only type of landmines capable of producing head and torso injuries of the type suffered by the victims on June 9. Additionally, Palestinian armed groups are not known to have, or to have used, bounding mines; the Palestinian government bomb squad said it has never uncovered a bounding mine in any explosive incident.

AUT disowns NATFHE boycott: is a merger struggle on?

OK, so here's the good news first.

The AUT, the union which represents the academics in the most prestigious universities, has disowned the NATFHE boycott motion, and urged its members not to implement it. And it says it will press for the boycott to be dropped when the merger takes place on Thursday this week.

Here's the text of the AUT's press release:

Surprise, surprise: NATFHE passes boycott motion

NATFHE Council has voted to boycott and blacklist Israeli universities and academics by a majority of 106 votes to 71.

Paul Mackney, general secretary of NATFHE, had already contemptously dismissed the thousands of emails and petition signatures against the proposed NATFHE boycott and blacklist of Israeli universities and academics in a speech to one of the NATFHE conference meetings on Saturday:

"I have received literally thousands of emails seeking to 'educate' me on the foolishness of our stance in support of the rights of Palestinians," Paul Mackney, the secretary general of the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE), said at the association's annual national conference Saturday. "Many emails berate threats to deny academic freedom for Israeli professors but fail to mention that academic freedom in Palestine is a hollow joke. Even where staff and students are allowed freedom of movement to attend university, the material basis for a functioning academic life barely exists."

Mackney said that more Palestinians than Israelis have been killed since September 2000, the unemployment rate is higher among Palestinians and 185 Palestinian schools have been shelled or fired at, compared to one Israeli school.

Mackney also rejected charges that an academic boycott of Israel is anti-Semitic. "Criticizing the Israeli government does not make me anti-Semitic, any more than criticizing Bush and Blair makes me anti-Anglo-Saxon," he said.