Here is the article....However, this campaign is run by activists and students (whatever that means) as opposed to the Brits....Their campaign was run at the top levels of the Uni echelons...union etc etc....
The key salient point to rememeber is that no action has been taken against any other univeristy in the Middle East.
Why not? A little consistancy would be in order....if they were seriously serious.
(see the next article after the one just below)
Surely you can see the not so subtle difference? *********************************
May. 4, 2005 10:43 Activists protest Israeli university in W. Bank By JPOST.COM STAFF
On Wednesday students and activists gathered on the campus of Ariel University in the hills of Judea and Samaria to protest the government's decision this week to upgrade the college to "university" as its official status.
The demonstration, organized by Courage to Refuse, called upon the government to reverse its decision. According to the protestors statement, "In every reasonable and peace-seeking agreement, the city of Ariel, which is set in the heart of the West Bank, will not stay in Israeli hands. We believe that the establishment of an Israeli university in the West Bank is not only illegitimate, but also is in every aspect against Israel's interests."
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BOYCOTTING THE JEWS Gerald M. Steinberg Wall Street Journal, April 30, 2005
The phones began ringing late last Friday afternoon. The BBC, AFP, co-authors, my mother: everyone wanted to know if I was worried about the vote by British academics to boycott my university. As a Jew and an Israeli, my automatic answer to any question that contains the word "worry" is yes. On the long list, the boycott comes close behind the dangers of Palestinian terror, the Iranian bomb, Hezbollah's missiles, Osama bin Laden, reality TV, Israeli taxi drivers, and the waves of locusts migrating from North Africa.
In truth, the direct impact of unspecified academic sanctions adopted by the Association of University Teachers (AUT) against the faculty at Bar Ilan and Haifa universities is likely to be minimal. The few viscerally anti-Israel academics are probably not participating in any joint research projects in any case, to their loss. Two years ago, my colleague Prof. Miriam Shlesinger, an internationally prominent linguist, was ousted from the board of a journal in translation studies by an Egyptian-born editor based in the University of Manchester. And the politically correct anti-Israel atmosphere has probably led a few anonymous reviewers to reject research reports submitted to other academic journals-but this is hard to prove.
The real threat from the boycott, as its authors realize, is not from the direct academic impact, but rather from its broader political objectives. Although the official terminology refers to "occupation" and "settlements", and singles out two universities for their alleged complicity, the Israel-obsessed organizers of the AUT boycott-Susan Blackwell and Steven Rose, like their counterparts elsewhere-readily admit that this is simply a tactical decision. They have declared all Israelis who serve in the defense forces and support the government to be guilty. Bar Ilan and Haifa Universities were targeted after a blanket boycott resolution against all Israeli academics failed to get a majority two years ago. The union targeted Haifa because it said the university was threatening to fire an Israeli political science lecturer for supporting a student's research into allegations of killings by Israeli troops. Bar Ilan was sanctioned for its alleged links to the College of Judea and Samaria, located in the Jewish settlement of Ariel in the West Bank. A proposal to ban Hebrew University was referred to the union's executive committee. If examined closely, all the "charges" are inaccurate and transparently intended to serve a different goal--in Mr. Blackwell's words, to condemn the "illegitimate state of Israel" and to send a "message of support" to Palestinians…
…The boycott is only a small part of the broader political war against Israel's legitimacy as a sovereign Jewish state, and the effort to label Israel as the next "apartheid regime" is designed to put an end to Zionism. The use of the apartheid label does a gross injustice to those who suffered under the real thing, and is a form of modern anti-Semitism, this time turning the Jewish state into the devil. The absurdly exaggerated condemnation of Israel, and the systematic removal of the environment of terror in the rhetoric of "war crimes" and "ethnic cleansing" is the political counterpart of the ongoing terrorism and military assaults. Major battles of this political war have taken place in the U.N.the 1975 "Zionism is racism" resolution, for example, or the 2001 Durban conference on racism where that claim was repeated-on campuses such as Columbia University in New York, in the newsrooms of the BBC and CNN, and via the non-governmental superpowers such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch…
So perhaps I am being too clever in dismissing the AUT's effort to launch a boycott of my university. For decades, the propaganda war has always accompanied and served to justify the shooting war. If the anti-Israel forces on campuses and in NGOs are gaining strength in Britain, Europe and the U.S., this will undermine the current efforts to expand the cease-fire and conflict management activities in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Ramallah and Gaza. And this is the real tragedy of the AUT boycott decision-while talking about peace, its backers are actually contributing to war and hatred.
