MELANIE PHILLIPS: FROM ENLIGHTENMENT TO DARKNESS AT “OXBRIDGE”
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/5764076/from-enlightenment-into-darkness-at-oxford-and-cambridge.thtml
From enlightenment into darkness at Oxford and Cambridge
Tuesday, 9th February 2010
From the blog of the Community Security Trust – the self-defence organisation of the British Jewish community:
Last night Danny Ayalon, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, spoke at the Oxford Union. A meeting that was frequently disrupted by members of the audience reached its low point when one person shouted “Kill the Jews†in Arabic, before being thrown out of the meeting.
… There is a detailed account of the meeting on The edge of where? blog, which has this revealing vignette about the attitude of at least one person in the audience:
Outside the debating chamber, all the while, protestors were shouting ‘free free Palestine from the river to the sea’. When Ayalon argued that this chant amounted to a call for Israel’s destruction, and asked where Israeli Jews would have to go for Palestine to be free ‘from the river to the sea’, the woman sitting next to me said ‘back to where they came from!’ I couldn’t resist and had to ask her where exactly it was that she expected Jews to go ‘back to’, to which she replied, ‘well you’re in England, you appear to be doing fine’. I didn’t think it worthwhile to point out that actually my grandparents ‘came from’ Poland and Czechoslovakia, and that the reason I am in England today is that in the 1930s they were not ‘doing fine’ in the countries they ‘came from’.
This follows the disinviting by Cambridge Israel Society of the Israeli historian Benny Morris, one-time darling of the left for his revisionist history of David Ben Gurion but now apparently a non-person because he tells the truth about the Arab threat to Israel. As the Jerusalem Post reported:
The Israel Society at Cambridge University has succumbed to pressure and canceled a talk by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev historian Benny Morris after protesters accused him of ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘racism.’ Morris was scheduled to speak to students at the university on Thursday, but following a campaign led by anti-Israel activist Ben White the Israel Society canceled the talk. Instead Morris was invited to speak at an event hosted by the university’s Department of Political and International Studies.
White, who graduated from the university in 2005 and authored the book Israeli Apartheid: A Beginners Guide, set up a protest page on Facebook in which he claimed that ‘on different occasions, Morris has expressed Islamophobic and racist sentiments towards Arabs and Muslims.’ He added: ‘We find it offensive and appalling that an official student society would want to invite such an individual.’
Needless to say, it is White’s charge of ‘Israeli apartheid’ that is offensive and appalling.
So the Oxford Union hosts murderous anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hatred, while at Cambridge an Israeli academic is hounded as a bigot for telling the truth — and Cambridge’s Jewish students cave in to the pressure.
Thus the cream of Britain’s intelligentsia amply illustrates Britain’s precipitous slide from enlightenment into darkness.
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