Charles Moore attacks the Israel university boycotters

Saturday's Telegraph contained another gem from Charles Moore. His passionate, lucid attack on the Israel boycotters is essential reading.

It includes this:

The main universities of Israel are, in fact, everything that we in the West would recognise as proper universities. They have intellectual freedom. They do not require an ethnic or religious qualification for entry. They are not controlled by the government. They have world-class standards of research, often producing discoveries which benefit all humanity. In all this, they are virtually unique in the Middle East.

The silly dons are not alone. The National Union of Journalists, of which I am proud never to have been a member, has recently passed a comparable motion, brilliantly singling out the only country in the region with a free press for pariah treatment. Unison, which is a big, serious union, is being pressed to support a boycott of Israeli goods, products of the only country in the region with a free trade union movement.

And concludes thus:

As for Israel, many sins can be laid to its charge. But it is morally serious in a way that we are not, because it has to be. Forty years after its greatest victory, it has to work out each morning how it can survive.

Read it all, though.

Comments

[David Moss]

I agree, it is a marvellous article. I read it when it first appeared on the Telegraph's website in the early hours of Saturday morning. It slightly relieved the frustrated rage which overcame me after another disgusting performance by Jeremy Bowen on Newsnight a few hours before. Which side do the BBC, the universities and the NUJ think their bread is buttered on?