Britain - Lecturers overturn Israel boycott

Good! Maybe people in this country are starting to stand up to these people.

The BBC in their usual bias, mis-represent what the boycott was about.

UK academics have voted to overturn a boycott of two Israeli universities accused of complying with anti-Palestinian polices.

That's not what the AUT accused them of. The original AUT webpage containing the accusation has been removed but here is the Google cache copy.

That on May 15, 2002 Dr. Ilan Pappe, senior lecturer in Political Science at Haifa University, was sent a letter notifying him that he faced trial and possible dismissal from his position. The charge was that he had violated 'the duties of an academic member of staff', that he had 'slandered departments and members in the humanities faculty, damaged their professional reputation and endangered the possible promotion of some of them.'

That these accusations related to Dr. Pappe's efforts to defend a 55 year old graduate student, Teddy Katz, whose Master's thesis was under attack by an Israeli veteran's organization because it documented a massacre of 200 unarmed civilians by the Haganah (the pre-state army of Israel) at a village called Tantura, near Haifa.

That the recriminations are still continuing and Dr. Pappe's job is still being threatened.

And as The Times (UK) notes:

The sponsors of the boycott maintain that Haifa University is threatening to sack a lecturer for supporting a student's thesis on an alleged Israeli massacre in 1948, and that Bar Ilan has links with a college based in a settlement in the West Bank. They say the academic boycott is a protest against discrimination, as valid as the widely supported ban by British universities on links with South African institutions during the apartheid years.

Such a claim is as laughable as it is inaccurate. Whereas many South African academics supported outside pressure on their government and almost all black students complained of discrimination, in Israel neither is true. In both universities, Jews and Arabs study together, and in Haifa especially there is a substantial number of Arab lecturers and students. Moreover, if Palestinian students themselves are not calling for a boycott, what is the point of such tokenism by the AUT?

The point is to be anti-Israeli.

UPDATE

Melanie Phillips notes more BBC bias and the Palestinians praise for the universities the AUT were against.
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