Cracks in the Wall of Western Bigotry?

n France, the Jewish umbrella organization CRIF reports the annulment of a pro-‘BDS’ (boycott divestment and sanctions) ‘debate’ this week at the prestigious École Normale Superieure in Paris. This event, which appears to have been organised by the far left, was to have featured such exemplars of truth and enlightenment as Leila Shahid, the PLO/PA spokesperson in Paris (who also happens to be a descendant of the 1930s Nazi henchman Mufti Amin al Husseini) along with an Arab member of Israel’s Knesset who belongs to the radically anti-Israel Arab Balad party (yes, you read that last bit right, all those who believe Israel is an ‘apartheid’ state – what a sick joke, eh).

Amongst those who had protested at this ‘debate’ were philosophers Bernard-Henri Levi and Alain Finkielkraut, and Claude Cohen-Tanoudji, winner of the Nobel prize for physics. It appears that the ENS directrice, showing a rare intellectual courage, agreed that her institution should not be used for the promotion of bigotry and discrimination through the tactic of concealing aggressive activism under the camouflage of intellectual debate.

Meanwhile in London last night, a motion debated at the London School of Economics supporting an academic boycott of Israel was defeated with 55-60 per cent of the audience of around 700 voting against it. Jonathan Hoffmanwrites:

...much of the credit goes to the brilliant speaker against the motion, Professor Daniel Hochhauser, who took apart the odious John Chalcraft who tried to maintain the fiction that an academic boycott would be on institutions not people and spewed all the tired old slogans (‘Zionism has a stock of colonial stereotypes’).

(You can read more about Chalcraft here and here.)

Afterwards, however, it seems that the losing side showed a typically sporting attitude towards its opponents. The JC reports:

A senior LSE professor allegedly threatened to ‘slap’ the senior vice-president of the Board of Deputies following a debate at the university. The incident occurred after the LSE student union’s Israel Society and Palestine Society held a joint debate last night entitled: ‘This house believes in an academic boycott of Israel’.

As students left the auditorium, anthropology professor Martha Mundy, who was watching the debate, made the threat to Jonathan Arkush, after he praised Professor Kevin Featherstone, who had chaired the debate, as being ‘fair’. The university received complaints about Professor Mundy, who is co-convener of the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP), after she chaired a lecture by controversial speaker Abdul Bari Atwan last month at the university.

Poor Professor Mundy! You can imagine her fury. For truth and justice are beginning to fight back.