Tuesday, May 9, 2006
The National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE), the major union of British academics which the old AAUP (often in the news here for their short-lived and quickly turned-back boycott) has merged with, is rattling the sabres anew over a renewed boycott of Israeli academics. This time, however, the boycott will be arguably more pernicious, this time pitting individual against individual by recommended that individual British academics boycott their Israeli counterparts. Links here are via Norm.
Haaretz: New U.K. attempt to boycott Israeli universities, professors
The boycott motion, which was drafted by the southeast region of the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE), will be brought to a vote at its annual national conference, which will be held May 27-29. It comes about a year after the last boycott by British lecturers.
In April 2005, the British Association of University Teachers (AUT) decided to impose an academic boycott on Bar-Ilan and Haifa universities, but subsequently reversed the decision. The two lecturers organizations are slated to merge at the beginning of June.
Unlike the previous boycott, which targeted two specific institutions, the current motion relates to all lecturers and academic institutions in Israel. Now that the University of Haifa has threatened the AUT with a lawsuit, the NATFHE motion is more cautious: instead of recommending the lecturers union boycott Israeli institutions, it calls on the union to suggest its members carry out the boycott...
Also, John Pike at Engage:
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: They're at it again -- British Boycotts.
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these "scholars" are anti-Jewish, not "just" anti-Israel
and make no mistake, they may be scholars, but they are not gentlemen
As long as everyone keeps forcing me to say, I will keep saying it: Israel is the new South Africa.
isirota, no one's forcing you to say anything. they might be forcing you to say things if you lived in syria, say, or iran. but in israel, no one would bother trying to shut you up, they'd just laugh at you for the fool you are.
if these professors want to boycott israel because of the government's policies in the territories, maybe they should hold their next conference somewhere else in the middle east, like saudi arabia or yemen, to show support for governments they truly respect.
Whoa now, let's not fight amongst ourselves. I know isirota doesn't feel that way himself, it's just easy to feel fatigue with all the efforts to try to associate Israel with the old South Africa. That's why I try to post stuff like the item below once in awhile. It's not all bad news.