**Video courtesy of Hollyyyyy on YouTube**
We think the NYT did an important job of addressing these disturbing and incredibly hypocritical trends among Britain’s unions to single out the Jewish State for censure regarding a decades old conflict fraught with complexity.
As the Times points out, Israeli journalists and academics are some of the state’s harshest critics as are Israel’s vibrant, creative, loving and humane citizens. Being a critic, however, means just that. Engaging and criticizing not slandering and de-legitimizing.
We want to solve this conflict more than anyone else in the world. We want to have a normal life without fear of missiles, rockets, suicide bombs, regional wars, and nuclear annihilation. We want to have peace with our neighbors as we have done with Egypt and Jordan and tried with the Palestinians in 2000, and will continue to try. But how can we feel secure when Iran’s leader continually calls for our destruction, Hamas continually call for our destruction, Hezbollah continues to call for our destruction, and the British Unions turn around and boycott us.
From the New York Times Editorial Board:
June 3, 2007
Editorial
Malicious Boycotts
The University and College Union, a newly formed British union of college teachers, shamefully called last week for a boycott on contacts and exchanges with Israeli academic institutions. That follows on the shameful call in April by the National Union of Journalists in Britain to boycott Israeli goods.
It is hard to imagine two organizations that should be less given to such nonsense. Who would respect the judgment of a scholar who selects or rejects colleagues on political grounds? Who would trust the dispatches of a reporter who has been openly engaged against one side of a conflict? The unions argue that they have an obligation to demonstrate labor-union solidarity with the oppressed, as they did in opposing apartheid. That is absurd.
First, Israeli journalists and academics are among the most dedicated critics of their own society. Second, the lack of similar “solidarity” by these unions with any other oppressed or suffering people in the world, and there are plenty, reduces these gestures to an exercise in hypocrisy, or worse.
It is good to see that most respected British journalists, scholars and students — including the preponderance of British editorial writers and the heads of Oxford, Cambridge and 20 other top universities — as well as representatives of all major political parties condemned these malicious gestures.
Critical thinking and well-thought-out criticism are intrinsic to good scholarship and good journalism. These boycotts represent neither. Posturing like this only alienates the very forces in Israeli society that should be encouraged and offends the calling and honor of journalism and academia.
That Israeli academics and journalists are ironically often among the most vehement critics of Israeli policy is irrelevant. These British boycotts have absolutely nothing to do with Israel, but everything to do with what this represents about their own mindsets. The British journalists are for the most part victims of their own propaganda. Their biased and inaccurate reporting combined with an ever increasing Muslim population that is overtaking Britain, have created an atmosphere wherein the “left” within themselves have fallen into the inenviable position of becoming apologists for cultures of violence, human rights abuses on the part of the Palestinians that specifically targets women and children, and the establishment of a society that is devoid of any legitimate rule of law.
Unless this mindset is curtailed and cut off at the knees, it will only continue to promulgate among their own societies. Like the Israeli journalists and academics they are presently victimizing, it will be British journalists and academics whose heads will be the first to roll. One need only consider Mr. Johnston’s fate, who by all accounts is “a friend of the Palestinian people”, who is now ironically being “forced” to publicly state precisely what the BBC has been explictly and implictly stating in regards to the Palestinians all these years.
I would like to see a discussion of the following subject:
Jews allege that Palestinians are the only people on the planet to elect a government whose openly announced objective is genocide ?
Is that statment true or false ?
Israel has made every effort to develop a comprehensice peace plan with the Palestinians. the Hamas government does not recognize Israel’s right to exist. There is no doubt that Hamas wants the total desrtruction of Israel. The statement is therefore true.No other country has elected a government on a policy of genocide No other government other than Hitler and the Nazis, that is.