The silencing of Professor Alderman

The 2010 Belfast Festival, held under the auspices of Queen’s University Belfast, convened a panel discussion last night on the topic ‘Conflict in the Middle East’. Last September, the Festival’s director, Graeme Farrow, invited Professor Geoffrey Alderman, a British Jewish commentator and defender of Israel, to take part in this panel, an invitation he accepted. To Alderman’s astonishment, last Friday afternoon he received an email from Farrow informing him that ‘a mistake’ had been made in inviting him,  and that although he could join the audience the event was to go ahead without his panel participation.

The other members of this panel were Professors Avi Shlaim of St Anthony’s College, Oxford and Beverley Milton Edwards, of Queens University, Belfast. Shlaim, an Israeli by birth who hasn’t lived in Israel for years, has made a career out of demonising Israel. Milton Edwards is a founder of Conflicts Forum, which shills for Hamas under the pretext of ‘dialogue’. It would appear that one or both of them objected to Alderman’s presence.

CifWatch wrote yesterday:

The festival’s director, Graeme Farrow, reportedly told Alderman that he had made ‘a mistake in agreeing to extend an invitation to you Geoffrey without consulting the academics in question’.

As the Jewish Chronicle reported:

Professor Alderman, who has gone to Belfast, has rejected an offer to participate in the debate as a member of the audience. He said he was ‘appalled at the way I have been treated’.

After a meeting with Mr Farrow early this afternoon, Professor Alderman said he had given the organisers three options: to allow him to join the panel and if his fellow-panelists were to object, ‘they could stay away’: to let him to take part while sitting on a separate table: or simply to call off the event.

But an hour before its scheduled start, the event appeared set to go ahead without his participation. Professor Alderman, who is due to return to London tomorrow, described that as ‘outrageous’.

Professor Alderman is now sitting in the hotel in Belfast while the meeting proceeds at the University.  ‘Outrageous’ is a profound understatement to describe both the treatment Alderman received, as well as the hostile atmosphere towards Israel and her supporters consistently on display within such ‘elite’ circles.

Thus the delegitimisation, bullying and ostracism of the Jewish state morphs seamlessly into the delegitimisation, bullying and ostracism of Jews anywhere who support it. The Jewish state alone is not to be allowed to defend its existence; its Jewish supporters alone are not to be allowed to speak in defence of its right to do so.

Monstrous. And the tragedy is that Jews themselves are party to it.