Backfiring Boycott - Deadline for Submissions!!

As this blog has previously noted, the boycott has actually rather perversely caused or at least encouraged the absolute opposite of what was intended, namely a strengthening of ties between British and Israeli universities.

And the story goes on, the pattern continues... BBA's inbox is periodically augmented by messages 'helpfully' reminding me that I'm meant to be submitting research proposals (lest I'd forget?), a list which often festers until I have time - indeed even energy or the very will, given conditions by the swamp - to trawl through links to the various funding schemes presently inviting applications from academics. The last instalment includes a link to the Britain-Israel Research and Academic Exchange Partnership, a funding scheme to support collaborative work between Israeli and British academics which the boycott movement's nefarious activities quite directly, rather marvelously, brought about.

Unfortunately, time is short, in case any eligible readers of this blog might be interested in applying - the deadline is: 2nd March 22:00 GMT. The details are here.

Just think, in addition to the chance of doing research with leading academics based in Israel,** such an application could well have the added bonus of driving the boycotters just that little bit more bonkers!
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** and, of course, the boycott - and, more particularly, much of the anti-boycott riposte it has so vexatiously necessitated (e.g.) - merely serves to remind us just how many Israeli academics meet this highest of standards (as we, meanwhile, seem to have distinguished ourselves, above all, for our barmy boycott brigade and the devastatingly depressing way in which we, British academics, have allowed them to cause such a load of old bonkers in Dear Old Blighty!)

"Envy and Resentment"

Belatedly, I put my hand on a rather mangled hard-copy of the week-end before last's Jerusalem Post and saw this, which I can't seem to find in the on-line edition. In case you have trouble seeing the paper through the reader provided, it's a very short news-in-brief item, the gist of which is that a periodical of Tel Aviv University's law dept (Theoretical Inquiries in Law) has been ranked top of all law periodicals published outside the US in a recent review. Under the perverse aura cast in this era of boycotts, it's satisfying to note that the review process considered over 200 periodicals published outside the US, including a good number submitted from Boycotting Britannia, and that this relatively young Israeli journal should lead the pack.

Boycott that, you noodles!

I held off publishing partly because I couldn't come up with a title I liked, opting to leave it as the last word of the then post - "noodles" - which seemed somehow too kind. I'd wanted to develop the post along the lines of how this story of the TAU journal outshining all, including the Boycotting Brits, brought to mind an aspect of what I can't help thinking must motivate the BDS bonkers brigade. But then I got too depressed by the task of articulating it and, as usual, gave up on the post, distracted by the horrors perpetually peppering my present - more like plaguing if not persecuting it, but don't get me started...

Anyway, the title came to me just now, as I was reading The Dude on BHL. At least that, for the task of articulation remains apparently too depressing for BBA in these "dark times" and besides, in essence, isn't it just really obvious -- that age-old characteristic of that age-old hatred -- so let the title suffice, since BBA's capacities are currently being diverted (indeed, spent) in the struggle simply to survive the swamp, such that BHL via The Dude or whatever will have to do in the circumstances...

Madness and UCU

In my last post I alluded to the madness with which I am having to contend, working here as BBA.

No sooner published, what did I encounter? Yet more madness: UCU claiming that a boycott is not a boycott. No, it's solidarity. No, really.

Not only am I stuck in a time warp, it seems the moment has been frozen in the absurd, where even academics can't make the most essential and, you'd have thought, basic of distinctions between demonization and scapegoating, on the one hand; and legitimate criticism, on the other. And not only that, in doing so, they then even want to make us think that a boycott is not a boycott. And that the sort of hate-fest on display in the hydra comments is debate. The swamp is overtaken with absurdity, on top of every thing else.

Someone, please, tell me this is not the profession I've chosen...

BDS (Disambiguation)

I just caught myself perfecting my last post - pointless, I know, but I can't seem to help myself, this incident not being an isolated one (in the unlikely event that anyone's noticed, I hope it's not too annoying!). Reading the post again, it occurred to me that some of you might not know what BDS stands for - those with the great luck not to work in academia at the present moment, thereby spared such coerced intimacy with this whole bonkers boycott (I had in mind certain friends & family members in this fortunate position...). So I thought I'd check to see what Google brought up, in case an additional link would be required to avoid confusion. It turns out my investigations merit their own post as what I found is something of a new definition and, with it, a bit of a chuckle - so here I am, sharing some cheer.

The acronym had previously caused me to laugh, at some earlier point in my encounter with the boycotters and their mode of argument (if it can be called that), the nature of which set off one of those sick associations:** but for a missing 'M' at the end, the acronym seems really rather apt in terms of capturing the (intellectual?) whipping these people seem to enjoy so!

The Google search brought more mirth for it turns out that BDS actually stands for quite a few things, in addition to Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (against Israel, of course, silently included in the acronym, without need even to specify a country beginning with the letter "I" - since this type of thinking has become so commonplace that one can now just automatically assume Israel is the target of such actions - duh!). Here you'll find all the possibilities for BDS.

This is what amused me:

Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) is a political term ... to describe a perceived tendency by some American liberals to blame President George W. Bush for virtually every ill in the world. Another noted facet of BDS-like behavior is that it may appear to be a merely reflexive opposition to any position advocated by Bush for no other reason than that Bush happens to be advocating it.

Krauthammer, a former psychiatrist who earned his M.D. from Harvard Medical School, defined BDS as "the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency — nay — the very existence of George W. Bush"

While I hope it's patent that I'm no Bush fan myself, I rather enjoyed the obvious parallels between the varieties of derangement on display in both these phenomena denominated BDS. In the above formulation, substitute "Israel" for "Bush" (and often they are, insanely, as we know, what with W&M et al) and the paranormal in these two version of BDS seem one & the same, indistinguishable -- and just plain mad. Engaging in a bit of cross-fertilization here, I propose that henceforth, for our purposes, BDS should be disambiguated to mean Boycott Derangement Syndrome, for that just about gets to the essence of this boycott movement!

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** The link is to the para in square brackets on how sick humour seems to have become a prime coping strategy through all this madness.

"Dying for a Degree" at a College threatened by the Boycott

When the academic boycotters rationalize their racist campaign on the basis that it's necessary to protest against interference with the right to education (e.g.), they obviously don't have in mind the sort of interference experienced - day in, day out, year after year - by students at places like Sapir College in Israel's south, under attack from the rockets being fired from Gaza, now culminating, as a result of the latest barrage, in the inevitable: the fatality of a student on campus. The boycotters seem incapable of assimilating this Israeli experience for it's always predetermined as that of the bad guys involved in colonialism & apartheid, and all manner of other preposterous rhetorical exaggeration by which this conflict is described in popular discourse - by definition, if these are the terms by which the situation is conceived, suffering will always be one-sided; as will be blame for that suffering.

Meanwhile, today, a student at the College explains more clearly for us what is really going on outside the fantasy world imagined by the boycotters, a perspective which we can be sure will go unrepresented over here in Boycotting Britannia, since people here only seem to perceive a certain kind of suffering, only that which can be countenanced in the prevailing simplistic (and nauseatingly self-serving) narrative given to the conflict.

I wonder if the students who campaign up and down my campus for the education rights of their Palestinian counterparts might also spare a thought for the students who, like them, are just trying to study for a degree, albeit in Israel whose scapegoated pariah status today means getting an education under fire, effectively in a war zone, without any likelihood of being shown international solidarity - quite the contrary, for this gets them boycotts and divestment instead! Were our solidarity actions to be devised on the basis of a less selective conception of this conflict, no doubt we'd manage to come up with better ideas than this shameful one-sided, pathetic posturing encapsulated in the boycott movement; we'd settle upon actions of real solidarity, which actually seek peace rather than sorely retard it, as do those pushed for by the BDS crowd. But will these bonkers boycotters even pause to consider this, without immediately and automatically dismissing it as the work of some Ziocon propaganda outfit? Why, oh why, in this era in which the "Livingstone formulation" reigns supreme, do I still have the naivety ask?!

In the words of the Sapir student, Omri Keinan, describing the conditions in which he is trying to acquire his college degree:

What you will find if you come to Sapir is reinforced police presence, red signs that include instructions for cases of emergency, and loudspeakers that on occasion sound a hair-raising alarm that gives us less than 10 seconds to seek cover in the face of incoming rockets.

At Sapir College you will not find students sitting on the grass. They are scared to be left without shelter should rockets land. But you will find great fear here.

Sacrificing our life

It happens almost every day: A “Color Red” alert, Qassam rockets landing, and all this followed by tears, mass panic, and concerned phone calls from home. It happens to us during classes, it happens during breaks, and it happens during difficult exams.

We have already sustained property damage to the college before, but this time we are dealing with the worst possible scenario – the death of a student. To my regret, despite our army and the reinforced security deployment at school,** I do not have the confidence to say that tomorrow’s Qassam rocket will not hit me or any one of my friends at the college.

Can you comprehend that this is how students in Israel go about their studies? Do we need to sacrifice our lives for the sake of an academic degree?

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** Most of the college's classrooms are not fortified, and on order from the Israel Defense Forces Home Front Command, some 40 classrooms and a third of the laboratories are not in use, because they are vulnerable to rockets and too far from a protected area. [source]

The Bank(rupt)sy of 'Solidarity'

When I first heard, a couple of weeks ago, that the British graffiti artist Banksy was off to Bethlehem to paint a section of the wall, I thought: how typical. Here's an artist whose country is presently involved in not one but two occupations and he goes off to show solidarity with the occupied somewhere else entirely - someone else's occupied!

It's par for the course over here in Boycotting Britannia. As we know, Palestinians are the totems of the world's suffering and the Israelis, the ultimate bad guys who, alone in this universe, attract boycotts & so forth.

We know why Banksy was likely to choose a wall in Bethlehem over, say, Baghdad: think security, think basic amenities and it's not hard to see why this would be a good deal more attractive an option for these 'brave souls' in the international solidarity crowd (not to mention the press opps it affords since our journos are apparently of equivalent bravery, going by the sick obsessions of places like CiF). We know, from experience, that these solidarity types don't want to suffer personally. Otherwise our bonkers boycotters might have suggested boycotting their own academic institutions instead of Israel's, on account of our occupations (plural) and the absence of any of our universities having "publicly condemned what is being done" in our names as part of those occupations - or, if that defies logic (boycotting of self), they might at least have suggested boycotting the academic institutions of the USA. That won't do, though, oh no - think of all those pay-checks & all those research grants they'd have to boycott & all those prestigious academic conferences and journals from which they'd have to be excluded.

What I hadn't anticipated was that Banksy's gesture would spectacularly backfire, perceived not as showing solidarity but denigration, and causing widespread offence to Palestinians in the process.

This is one of the offending pictures Banksy painted on the wall:



Palestinians didn't much appreciate being likened to a donkey in Banksy's representation here of IDF checks on identity papers. In Arabic - as indeed in Hebrew - the word is also used to mean idiot! The upshot is that the picture is no longer - this is how the relevant section of the wall looks today:



Given what I've seen of our solidarity movement here in Boycotting Britannia, I should really have known better and anticipated this. What with the experience of this whole sorry story of the academic boycott, we know very well that these people are all desperate to do something but they don't really want to get involved. They don't want to engage. Instead, they like to reduce the situation to one of good & evil; they want to have someone who can be blamed for everything. What they don't realize, however, is that this constructs an "infantilizing and dehumanizing representation of Palestinians" - the sort of construction perceived in Banksy's representation of Palestinians here which has so caused offence. In ignorance, they opt for the most inappropriate forms of solidarity. Like proposing a racist boycott of Israeli academics!

First Instincts

The crucial place of Israeli academia in the advancement of science has been recognized in the latest compilation of Scientific American's list of 50 of the world's leading innovators, just published. In fact, Israeli researchers dominate the section on neurological insights, contributing half the entries in the field, thanks to advances in treating neurological disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. How can anyone suggest boycotting this?

The plot thickens. When I read about the story of one group of researchers recognized in this list, my first instinct was to think it showed traces of a silent boycott, that well hidden but no doubt (and therefore) potent campaign which likely precedes and succeeds UCU's shameful Motion 30 and the official campaign. That's the thing about the silent boycott. When something as absurd as this happens, one reaches for the explanation which is so readily suggested here in Boycotting Britannia:

Ben-Jacob told The Jerusalem Post he was very happy his and Baruchi's work was being recognized, especially since when he first sent an article on it for publication to the prestigious journal Nature along with recommendations from three Nobel Prize laureates, it was rejected on the grounds of "not being of general interest"

Do I need to add that Nature is based here in Boycotting Britannia?!

UPDATE
You know that saying about always trusting one's first instincts? Well, it seems that I should have been more trusting. Remembering how silent and not-so-silent boycotts have cropped up in our journals, I read with interest the links sent to me by one of the lovely BBA Forumniks which suggest the people over at Nature are not always very clear on the wrongs of boycotting Israeli academics, having lent the journal's pages to a lengthy debate on the subject a few years back, perhaps when the review process for the Ben-Jacob/Baruchi submission was underway. That being said - although I find it truly alarming that the question of a boycott should have been posed in reference to Israel, in no way the obvious target for a boycott and therefore absurd for it to drive a theoretical enquiry in such a prestigious journal - the exercise did produce a very strong piece against the boycott which was particularly important & compelling.

That a silent boycott should come to be associated with this otherwise prestigious journal just shows how damaging & bad this boycott is proving to be for all concerned - in this case (one amongst many suffering the boycott's damaging effects, as this BBA can attest from personal experience!), for Britain and the prestige of its journals & academe. Thanks to the potentiality of this uncontrollable silent boycott - this potentiality being its most emboldening characteristic: when one doesn't know the size of the beast, its size can be exaggerated - in the not-knowing, it can grow in size, stretching even to encompass prestigious journals which shouldn't be vulnerable to abasement in this way; but necessarily are, given the damage which this boycott movement has done to British academia.

"Excuse me, but you sound just like the far right"

The sound in question was that made by the boycotters over here in Boycotting Britannia over the week-end...

Football Morality

After the match, the news trailed a clip of a bellowing football commentator, struggling to make himself heard above the din celebrating the last-minute winning goal scored by the footballer now nicknamed - get this - the Golan Heights (for the heights achieved by Omer Golan in scoring that goal)! The commentator repeats, exuberantly & incredulously:

Israel has done England “a favour to end all favours”

Afterwards, during a radio phone-in about the game, a grateful caller (who stressed he was neither Israeli nor Jewish) tried to say something about how he hoped that we would now stop demonizing and vilifying Israel; but the Boycott Boosting Corp came into its own & he was cut off in mid-call by the show's host, on the basis that politics shouldn't be brought into this.

I wonder, though - remembering what Camus once quipped about how the best lessons of morality and the duty of man are learned through football. Here in Boycotting Britannia, we have shown ourselves to be in desperate need of some lessons in duty & morality, obviously, what with our unions having so spectacularly fallen foul of protections against discrimination & racism.

I glanced through some of the talk-backs in The Sun on the game - quite a discovery, this is indeed a first! In addition to finding with some amusement how one thread seems to have been taken over by Hebrew-speakers, I was pleased to note how one poster (Elvis) seems to have been transformed by the experience: before the game, he'd gone for a Protocols take on the situation (or should that now be W&M?!), imagining the match was going to be fixed by Jewish money, with some footie-mad Russian, with cash to spare, pulling the strings to rig England's chances & boost those of Russia. After the game, the same Elvis was all sweetness and light, in a clipped sort of way, in thanks to Israel. (Graun - of course! - made much the same Jewish conspiracy insinuation in one of its pre-match sports blogs... Seriously!)

Camus was apparently referring to:

an ethic of sticking up for your friends, of valuing courage and fair-play

believing that people

try to confuse us with convoluted moral systems to suit their own agendas

when we

may do better to look to the simple morality of the football field than to politicians and philosophers

... and especially, bien sure, boycotting academics!

Let's hope the qualities of friendship, courage & fair-play demonstrated this week-end retakes the field and that the simple morality of football will replace the shameful & petty posturing of the boycotting academics still trying to ruin our union and our academy to suit their own agendas.

One of the lovely BBA Forumniks does well to remind us that the academic boycott is a zombie, apparently possibly about to rear its ugly ahead again. And there's still the silent boycott which, no doubt, informally or unofficially precedes & succeeds this whole disgraceful debacle over UCU Motion 30. Let's hope we'll learn the lessons of morality & duty suggested by the football mania of this week-end and that the favour Israel did for England will be one to end all boycotts!