Christians roasting on an open fire (but not at St James's, Piccadilly)

Sorry, I really shouldn't try to upstage the sublime Ed West...

For Israelis and Palestinians the quest to find a peaceful settlement in this tiny piece of land, only 1.2 Waleses in size, is a matter of life and death. For foreigners active in the conflict on one side or the other it is an obsession. 

I’ve always found it strange that people in the West are so fixated by the subject, especially now that the rest of the Middle East is filled with daily atrocities and injustices that dwarf anything in the Holy Land. 

In fact one of the few concrete benefits of the 2011 Arab uprisings is that there has been a marked decline in the number of people offering an opinion on Israel/Palestine. I know that 100,000 dead in Syria is a high price to pay for that, but I suppose we should look at the upsides. 

There are still a few, such as those people at St James’s in Piccadilly who, despite Christians in the Middle East suffering one or two more pressing problems, decided to construct a replica wall to protest against Israel. Of course the Israeli barrier is a serious problem for the Christians in Bethlehem, and people in Beit Jala now face losing their homes. But surely there is an issue of perspective this year at least? How would they show their solidarity with Egyptian Christians – by burning down the church?

Goose and gander: a somethingveryspecificist strikes

This should not be a day for point-scoring, but inevitably the point-scoring is in full swing. And I really was pulled up short when I realised what my last post had been.

For today neither the BBC nor anyone else in the left-liberal universe has the slightest difficulty in naming the beliefs held by a man who has slaughtered 90 innocent victims.

Even though there is, as I write, no evidence that any other person - let alone an organisation - sharing those beliefs helped or encouraged him to commit mass murder. Even though his action seems utterly irrational even considered as a means to the ends which are assumed to have motivated it. Even though the outrage would appear at this point to have at least as much in common with the classic spree killing as with the kind of organized religio-political mass murder campaign with which we are familiar.

So there's an absolutely blatant double standard here. Branding everyone in Norway or anywhere else who is worried about Muslim immigration as a potential mass murderer is out of order unless it's OK to do the same to Muslims every time an Islamist bomb goes off. So far from doing that, the BBC fights shy of even applying the label "Islamist" to terrorists, for fear of implicating Islam as such. No such fear of implying guilt by association is restraining it today, though:-

'The BBC's Richard Galpin, near the island which is currently cordoned off by police, says that Norway has had problems with neo-Nazi groups in the past but the assumption was that such groups had been largely eliminated and did not pose a significant threat.'

Once again: this is before we have a shred of evidence that any group was involved.

We ought to be getting some consistency and it ought to be a consistent moderate Somethingveryspecificism rather than any variety of Nothinginparticularism. By all means let's put the far Right under the spotlight, though without imputing bogus guilt by association: it remains true that the EDL hasn't organised any spree killings and Geert Wilders hasn't planted any bombs. But let's also insist that the BBC must boldly go into the journalistic no-go area it has created around the relationship of terrorism to Islamism and Islamism to Islam. Not because we should want to demonise Muslims but because when lives are at stake we need and are entitled to understand what the problem is.

Men are a waste of space, and the BBC has the stats to prove it

Two BBC stories from the same day, unconnected but offering an instructive contrast.

From the first:- 'Almost 100 women are killed by partners or ex-partners each year, figures show. 'And 21 men died from domestic abuse in England and Wales last year.'

Now, though the mention of male victims may strike you as something of an afterthought, I say the author deserves considerable credit for thinking of them at all. There's a lot of ideological capital invested in the perception of domestic violence as Exhibit A in the case against the patriarchy, and far too much media coverage has endorsed this view by presenting it without qualification as a male-on-female crime.

So three cheers for a Beeb reporter who has acknowledged that more than one case in six adds up to too many exceptions to the rule to be brushed under the carpet. Nevertheless the rule does get stated. The gender/sex breakdown is there to remind us, just in case we had any doubt, that most victims are female and most perpetrators male.

Now compare what we find in another story from the same day:-

'Since operations began in Afghanistan in 2001, 363 UK servicemen and women have died.'

The double plural actually makes this sentence misleading. For, as is revealed by following a couple of links, the gender/sex breakdown here is in fact 362 to 1. To make the comparison crystal clear, if we surveyed 363 domestic abuse fatalities we would expect to find over 60 male victims.

So a breakdown is de rigueur when it suggests that murdering your partner is very much a man thing, but to be avoided where it might give the impression that getting killed for your country is even more of a man thing. I'm sure there's no deliberate indoctrination going on here. That happened a long way up the line. At this point it's just the working out of an unconscious worldview, the fruits of the coming true of Gramsci's dream of cultural hegemony. I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that both pieces were written by men.

No definitive evidence for a correlation between gender and nitpicking blogging was available at the time of going to press.

The rules for them and the rules for us

A senior Islamic cleric is about to pay Britain a visit, so the BBC marks the event by polling British Muslims on whether their faith has been shaken by the scale of Islamist terrorism. You can just see it, can't you?

Double standards and self-deception: Barack Obama on the Ground Zero mosque

A brief questionnaire...

1. Should the construction of a mosque at Ground Zero be

(a) allowed in the name of religious freedom

or

(b) prevented on the grounds that it is grossly offensive to those bereaved by 9/11?

2. Should the Catholic convent at Auschwitz have been

(a) closed down on the grounds that it was grossly offensive to Jewish Holocaust survivors

or

(b) allowed to stay in the name of religious freedom?


Would I be wrong in thinking that a broad swathe of liberal opinion would reflexively choose answer (a) to both questions?

True, not a few conservatives would offer a (b) in both cases. That, however, would arguably be less inconsistent since the parallel is not an exact one. The Nazis did not claim Auschwitz as a Christian project; indeed they were very happy to murder Christians there, not least one who perished 69 years ago today. 9/11, on the other hand, was of course the work of men who saw themselves as Muslims acting in the name of Islam - and the fact that they sacrificed their lives for this conviction might seem like reasonably strong evidence that they held it sincerely.

Barack Obama, however, supporting the Ground Zero mosque, thinks he he knows their minds better than they did:-

'"Al-Qaeda's cause is not Islam," he said, "it is a gross distortion of Islam"'

Apart from anything else, this is simply a cowardly way to argue for religious freedom. 'Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to tell people what they don't want to hear' says the banner at Harry's Place (and whilst I'd rather not hear the gross dishonesty of pieces like this, I certainly don't want them banned). Religious freedom is a costly good. The cost would be a small one if it could be assumed a priori that all religions are just different ways of articulating a belief in motherhood and apple pie. They aren't.

And who made Obama an authority on what is Islamic and what is not? Undoubtedly many Muslims would agree with him about Al-Qaeda, and that is naturally very much to be applauded. But who will adjudicate between them and the many Muslims who take the opposite view?

9/11 was not the work of callow converts. Nearly all the perpetrators were born and bred in Saudi Arabia. So is Saudi Arabia a genuinely Islamic society or isn't it? Was the Islam these men absorbed from families and mosques real or bogus? If it was real, when and why did they stop being real Muslims? When they started drawing particular practical conclusions from the doctrine of jihad? That was a very bad thing to do and, to repeat, makes them very bad Muslims in the eyes of very many Muslims, but how did it turn them into non-Muslims, Mr President?

If his choice of a place of worship in Chicago is anything to go by, I'd say Barack Obama is a less than perfect Christian. If my church started putting material from Hamas into the parish magazine I'd protest, and if that didn't work I'd walk. What this doesn't do, though, is make Obama a non-Christian. Far worse people than him have been bad, but real, Christians.

It is widely believed among Muslims that 9/11 was not the work of Muslims at all, and that no Jews were killed because they'd all been warned to stay off work. Others believe that 9/11 was fitting punishment for America's crimes against Muslims. Are these non-Islamic beliefs? If they are, can Mr Obama assure us that none of these non-Muslims will be plausible enough to insinuate their way into the Ground Zero mosque?

Places of worship can be powerful symbols of reconciliation. The reconstructed Frauenkirche in Dresden is topped with a cross made in Britain by the son of an airman who took part in the bombing of Dresden. Reconciliation doesn't happen to order, though. If I was a Muslim wanting to build a mosque at Ground Zero, I'd wait to be invited.

Summonsed by Bell: spinning against Israel in the name of Britain's Christians

'For the latest comments on Israel from Christian Aid see:

http://www.christiantoday.com/article/christian.aid.fears.for.ngos.in.israel/25917.htm

'Does Mr Grumpy have anything to say about this?'

- asks commenter David.

Well, David, due to the way the portfolios have been divvied up here I'm afraid you'll have to make do with the Nick Clegg to Grumpy's Cameron. Rest assured, though, that my remarks have been cleared by the big boss.

So, yes, meet William Bell, Christian Aid's "Advocacy Officer for Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory". The man, in other words, who, with the blessing of my church (and forty others large and small), has a full-time job spinning against the Jewish state. David, I hardly know what to say (apart from everything I've been saying here for the past five years).

I'd just like to know what makes William Bell tick. Perhaps he will stumble on this and enlighten me. Does he ever turn on the radio in the morning and think "Gosh, those poor people in Tibet/Burma/Zimbabwe/Darfur... They could really do with a bit of advocacy. I'll have a word with the boss and see if I can talk him into broadening my job description."?


Or does he wake up every morning saying to himself, "What a dream of a job mine is. For if I wasn't able to speak out against the Most Evil State in the World, who else would?"?

And if that's the way it is, if it isn't about Jews, what is it about?

This particular effort from Mr Bell reveals quite a lot about the way he operates. Like any good lobbyist he can take any story and spin it on his clients' favour. Here the starting point is Israel's admission to the OECD. I'd say this accolade for the country's thriving economy was something to celebrate, on the whole. But for Mr Bell the Israeli glass is half empty at the very best. Not a proper democracy, he mutters. Unlike all those proper democracies for which the rest of the Middle East is famed. Again, I'd say it's little short of a miracle that Israel has stayed democratic through 60 years of staving off threats to its existence. No credit given by Mr Bell, though: "civil society [...] under threat [...] repression [...] intimidation [...] undermine human rights defenders [...]". Etc etc.

Does Christian Aid ever condemn Sudan, or any of the world's despotisms, in anything like these forthright terms?

I tried googling "Christian Aid Sudan repression". The first hit was the paid-for Christian Aid Week link. The second was an item on Ethiopia with a passing reference to Christian Aid. The third was a press release from the Disasters Emergency Committee, of which Christian Aid is of course a prominent member. It was issued in 2004. Of criticism of the Sudanese government there is not one word.

A little further down the list came Christian Aid's Sudan page. Still no word of criticism of the government. Maybe it's on the linked "Our work on conflict" page? Oh dear. We learn that they deliver urgent aid in Darfur, however:-

'But our experience has also told us that our response to conflict needs to be even more far-reaching than the delivery of humanitarian assistance, however important that may be.'

That's the lead in to a section headed "Speaking out". So this must be where they've put the hard-hitting criticism of the Sudanese regime, right? Wrong. Six paragraphs: one on Colombia, one general, four on... need I continue?

After this you won't be too surprised to learn that there is no Christian Aid Advocacy Officer for Sudan. And with that, back to William Bell.

What is it that has triggered Mr Bell's doom-laden pronouncements on the state of Israeli democracy? Simply this: there are moves afoot in the Knesset to limit the political activities of NGOs like, well, Christian Aid. Not, be it noted, that any laws have been passed; that it's even being talked about is enough.

NGOs in Israel enjoy freedoms which would be inconceivable under any dictatorship. That, of course, is one major reason why the BBC website tells us more about Israeli human rights abuses, real or otherwise, than those of any of the world's dictatorships (than all of the world's dictatorships put together, is the impression I often get). Every time anyone in B'Tselem blows their nose a BBC stringer is on hand with tape recorder running.

Israel is also remarkably tolerant of international NGOs coming to the country to pursue anti-Israel political agendas. Sometimes somebody is refused admission and headlines are made, but these are exceptions that prove the rule. I've written a lot about the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel, a Christian Aid partner and in effect a training programme for anti-Israel propagandists. Their volunteers may face some hurdles in getting into Israel, but get in they do.

So whilst a retreat from this openness would certainly be cause for concern, it would also be comprehensible. It would be directly related to the way Israel's openness has been abused by NGOs like Christian Aid, the way they take the soft option of giving democratic Israel a hard time whilst mutely bending the knee to tyrants.

Here's a reminder of how much open scrutiny of their human rights Israel's enemies tolerate. Simple but effective: if you're going to do something unpleasant, make sure no journalists are watching. True, you might not be able to suppress the story completely. But there won't be any tear-jerking eyewitness accounts or any of those pictures that speak a thousand words. Obviously it also helps that because you're Hamas you can rely on the Beeb to insert a sideswipe at Israel by way of "balance".

So where was Christian Aid when Hamas were bulldozing poor people's shacks?

From just across the border comes another recent story, taking us back to that booming economy that's won Israel a seat at the OECD. A reminder of who's benefitting and who isn't - and why.

It's only a privileged minority of the human race that can afford to turn up its noses at a thousand dollars a month for picking coriander, even if it comes at the slight risk of falling victim to a rocket attack. It's good money in Thailand and it's good money in Gaza. It's certainly more than enough to ensure you won't need to look to Christian Aid to provide your next meal.

And it's money that used to flow into the Gazan economy. Until?

'But until the start of the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, in 2000 when Israel tightened the border, thousands of Gazans used to travel daily through Erez to work on Israeli farms.'

Those smooth euphemisms for the campaign of mass murder directed at Israel's civilian population. Of course Israel turned off the flow of potential suicide bombers. What country on earth would not have done so? And now the Thais are doing the jobs Israelis won't do while Gaza has 40% unemployment. It's called shooting yourself in the foot - or it is if you think that the foot and the finger on the trigger have the same owner. If, that is, you count Hamas as the legitimate democratic representatives of the people of Gaza. What do you say, Mr Bell?

Who says there are no good guys in the Middle East?

Certainly not the BBC. Here's their woman in Damascus feeling the pain of Iraqi Baathists exiled in Syria.

'"There are hundreds of thousands of supporters of the former regime among these refugees. What should we do... jail them all?" asks Samir al-Taqi, an analyst with a pro-government Syrian think tank.'

Pity all the anti-government think tanks were unavailable for comment.

'Mr Taqi argues that what is radicalising many Baathists further is the failure of the Iraqi government to involve them in the political process.'

Yes indeed, whereas the willingness to reach out to its opponents is the secret of Baathism's enduring popular appeal. Look at the al-Assad dynasty - they haven't lost an election in 47 years.

It's funny, I thought the progressive complaint was always that the post-war denazification of Germany was much too lax. By this reasoning it shouldn't have been attempted at all.

Seriously, though. I'm not saying that it was very clever to make an enemy out of every ordinary Joe who joined Saddam's party to get a job. But compare and contrast the understanding and sympathy we are being prompted to show towards these ordinary Joes with the apoplectic reactions to those other ordinary Joes, not so far away, who want homes even if they're built on land which, in the eyes of the rest of the world, doesn't belong to their country.

Is this the ultimate epitaph for Blair's Britain?

'In late 2005 the government appointed Mr Blair's former private secretary, Francis Campbell, as ambassador to the Holy See after the post was advertised.

'It was the first time a British ambassador had been recruited from open competition. One hundred and twenty people applied for the job, according to the Foreign Office.'

(from)

Yes indeed. Equality for us, open competition for them. Sooner or later you realize that the more some things change the more they stay the same.

'The [119] creatures outside [(clutching the utterly futile CVs they had sweated over)] looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.'

Two takes on moral responsibility: part 2

Can you believe that Simon Tisdall of the Guardian has written a piece about the plight of Christians in much of the Muslim world? Don't worry, normal service has been resumed by the time the article reaches its conclusion: it's all the West's fault.

No need for a long post since Mr Eugenides is in sparkling form on this one. A small touch of irony from self can be found nestling among the comments.

Artisitic licence

I've posted a comment over at Biased BBC.

Which group now constitutes a large and growing segment of the prison population: conservative Catholics, or radical Islamists?

And which group is more likely to be told by the BBC it must put up with being fictionalized as a bunch of crooks?

Barbarians at the gates

They don't just want to abolish Israel. They don't just to impose censorship on the academic community. They want a world where you won't even be able to play music unless you sign up to their politics (and - if you have the misfortune to be a Jew from Israel - do public penance for living in the most evil country on the planet).

I don't suppose any of these political onanists, these self-important tossers (angry? You bet.) has ever thought for a moment of disrupting a concert by Chinese musicians. Or Russian musicians. Or North Korean musicians. Or Burmese musicians. Or Serbian musicians. Or Sudanese musicians. Or Iranian musicians. Or Cuban musicians. Or Zimbabwean musicians. But of course, of course, of course nobody must in their wildest dreams imagine that they are in any shape or form, in the slightest of slight degrees, anti-Semitic. Goodness me, no. Nobody is these days, are they?

(via)

Palestinians 314, Darfuris 0: War on Want's victimhood league table

Here's a comment I've left on a post from Engage:-

'WoW is George Galloway's former outfit, of course, so there are no surprises here. If you do a search for 'Palestine' on their website you'll currently get 314 hits. Hits for 'Darfur': 0. Yes, honestly, zero. If you don't believe me, try it.'

- which you can do with minimum effort by clicking here and here.

No time to post, but...

Norm has a good piece on 'collective punishment'.

A woman's right to choose

Laban saves me the trouble of writing an update on this post.

Ken the Unrepentant

I promised more on Mayor Ken, and I just know you've been waiting with bated breath.

Well, we're still on the Oliver Feingold case, about which I blogged here and here. Pandora of the Independent suggested that he had wasted a substantial amount of public money (£198,000, to be precise) by his failure to apologize for comparing a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard.

Ken's reaction in full:-

'Sir: Pandora (31 October) fails to mention that I won my High Court appeal because the judge found that I had not brought the office of Mayor into disrepute and the decision to suspend me was wrong. Mr Justice Collins found that the Adjudication Panel for England had misdirected itself. The sole reason therefore that there is now a cost to the public purse is that the Adjudication Panel launched an action against me that was proved totally without merit. Your complaint about cost should therefore be directed against the Adjudication Panel.'

(from)

Which is being interpreted, f*** off. So the mayoral lips still refuse to form the magic word 'sorry', and Oliver Feingold is still like a concentration guard. If you're Jewish and offended, f*** off. If you think that, whatever the letter of the law may say, Ken's unrepentant tailoring of personal abuse to the ethnicity of the abusee brings him and much of what he professes to stand for into disrepute, f*** off.

That 'sorry' might have enabled me to regard Ken's commissioning of a report on Islamophobia as something more than a piece of cynical vote-grabbing. Though it would still have been difficult, given that one of the report's authors is Inayat Bunglawala of the MCB. Mr Bunglawala, of course, could do a lot to counter Islamophobia by simply keeping his trap shut.

I'd still like to see Ken quizzed on the contrast between his fate and that of Councillor Miles of Wellingborough, but nobody other than yours truly seems to have picked up on it. Doesn't anybody do any research these days?

As I wrote last year, if Ken had been mayor of Berlin he'd long since have become the ex-mayor. Not because Germany is under the thumb of the Lobby, but because the country which produced concentration camp guards has managed to learn a thing or two from its history. Unlike Ken.

Grauniad in 'Steele backs Bush' shock

Seriously. George W says it's high time Kosovo got its independence, and Jonathan S is right behind him.

To which Grumpy's immediate reaction is 'yes, that's all very well, but what's to stop an independent Kosovo going from 90% Albanian to 100% Albanian before you can say "ethnic cleansing"?' What's Jonathan's answer? I wish I could tell you, but since he doesn't address this aspect of the problem at all I'm in the dark. Veteran Steele-watcher though I am (see my old blog) I confess to being just a little surprised. I don't get the impression that giving the majority its head is always his preferred solution to ethnic conflicts of this kind. Certainly not, for instance, when the minority are Northern Ireland's Catholics or Iraq's Sunni Arabs.

Must have been a tricky call for the Man of Steel. He must have been sorely tempted to side with Putin, if only for old times' sake. But there's no room for sentimentality here. Never let it be said that al-Grauniad is less Muslim-friendly than Bush! Tactics, comrades, tactics!

Totally sickening

Latest news from the Most Evil Country In The World.



Socialist Workers Party spokesperson Deirdre Spart, Professor of Moral Gymnastics at the University of Bognor Regis, said 'we in the SWP and Respect are totally committed to the struggle against this sickening homophobia which is so typical of fascist Israel, and we'll be out in force at next year's Pride march in Gaza'.

On the poisoning of the wells: the Accompaniment Programme comes to church (part 1)

On Pentecost Sunday the two members of my church who have participated in the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel gave a presentation on church (I've already posted my reaction to their written statements). Let's not beat about the bush: I wasn't expecting a balanced account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and I didn't get one. Indeed these two idealistic people seem to have convinced themselves that presenting one-sided propaganda is a positive moral imperative for them - but more of that later.

I'll begin by dealing relatively briefly with three fairly predictable manifestations of propaganda, before going on to a more detailed examination of one which took me aback.

1. The security barrier

Photographs of the barrier looking ugly and menacing (though not quite as ugly as the scene of a suicide bombing), maps showing how far it strays from the Green Line, descriptions of the hardships it inflicts on Palestinian farmers. Not a word about its life-saving function from the Israeli perspective. Or only very indirectly: figures for Israeli and Palestinian fatalities in 2006 were compared in order to make the point that Israeli use of force is disproportionate - not, of course, to make the point that the barrier has been remarkably successful in reducing what would otherwise have been a far higher toll of Israeli civilian lives. Lest we forget, the last suicide bomber to make a successful entry into Israel crossed the barrier-free border with Jordan.

Clearly the barrier is not the best thing since sliced bread. I would like nothing better than to see simultaneous commitments by Palestinian militant groups to stop sending suicide bombers into Israel and by the Israeli government to pull down the barrier. What was said about the barrier was not wrong, but it was only half of the story. And to the extent that the half of the story which concerns Israeli civilian lives is considered too unimportant to mention, I feel I am being told something not very attractive about what the self-styled peace movement understands by 'peace'.

2. Whose racism?

We heard about racist Jews in Israel, but not that Hamas is an organization with an overtly anti-Semitic ideology.

It's not as if EAPPI haven't had direct experience of the bigotry of some Palestinians. Last year, when the 'Mohammed cartoons' affair blew up, their Danish volunteers had to be sent home for their own safety, and even now, although there are several Norwegian and Swedish accompaniers, there are no Danes. But the only bigotry we heard about in church was Jewish bigotry.

3. Whose refugees?

We were told about the Palestinians expelled from Israel in 1948, but not about the similar number of Jews ethnically cleansed from the rest of the Middle East. Still less was a significant difference between the two cases pointed out: whereas today there are over a million Arabs living in Israel - those who chose to stay put in 1948 and were not expelled, plus their descendants - the Arab nations are by now virtually judenfrei. A loaded word, that last one, and not to be used lightly, but surely a salutary one for those who feel free to liken the Israelis to the Nazis. And perhaps especially salutary for Germans who feel free to liken the Israelis to the Nazis - to whom I commend this link.

Since so many on the Left acclaim Hezbollah as a resistance movement, it should be recalled that the small Jewish community which hung on in Lebanon until the 1980s was then helped on its way by a spate of kidnappings and murders conducted by that very same Hezbollah.


And what was it that took me by surprise? Find out in Part 2...

Of brass monkeys and boycotts

Two scenes from the annual conference of the University and College Union...

1. UK profs reject plan to spy on students

The government thinks academics should keep an eye open for students who may be drifting towards terrorist groups. Nothing doing, says conference.

'Critics said the plan unfairly singled out Muslims for surveillance and threatened free speech and academic freedom.'

Even if a lecturer catches a student watching bomb-making videos in the college library the three brass monkeys approach is mandatory...

'"Lecturers want to teach students," said Sally Hunt, general secretary of the union. "If they wanted to police them, they would have joined the force."'

So presumably if Ms Hunt was being assaulted by a student she wouldn't expect any lecturers to come to her assistance.

What's more...

'"You want them to be radical. That's the whole point: universities are where you encourage people to think outside the box."'

... says union spokesman Dan Ashley, in whose case our presumption must be that the more students sign up with the British National Party the happier he is. Or is that by any chance the wrong kind of radicalism?

What's particularly inane about this soundbite is that 'thinking outside the box' is not only a mindless managementspeak cliché, and as such an instance of not thinking outside the box, but also the precise opposite of the reality of most student radicalism. For a student radical such as I was some time towards the end of the Wars of the Roses, it's about finding a small, snug box where all the thinking has been done for you and where you can shelter from the terrifyingly large and open-ended box which is the university. I don't believe for a moment that the appeal of Islamist groups today is any different; the difference lies in their ability to act as ideological conveyor belts leading towards the groups where you really do learn about making bombs.


2. Boycott motion passes at UCU conference

'UCU conference just passed a motion to support the campaign for an academic boycott of Israel.'

Clearly, no danger at all that this will threaten free speech and academic freedom, or that Jewish students will feel unfairly singled out by the singling out of the Jewish state for demonisation.

Thank goodness the students are wiser than their teachers...

'Responding to today's University and College Union (UCU) boycott vote, NUS National President Gemma Tumelty said:

'“NUS does not support the principles behind an academic boycott of Israel. Such a boycott undermines the Israeli academics who support Palestinian rights, and hinders the building of bridges between Israelis and Palestinians. Retaining dialogue on all sides will be crucial in obtaining a lasting peace in the Middle East '

(from - and there's lots more at the Engage site)

Wrong kind of killers

Lately some people don't have as much to say as they usually do about Palestinians suffering violent deaths. And, whilst it would be nice to think that they may yet break the mould, as of today's date it looks as if you can add the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel to the list of those whose solidarity with victims of violence is conditional on the perpetrators being Jewish.

As a member of the World Council of Churches my church lends its name to this nonsense. Not good.