Saturday 29 September 2007

UCU Israel Boycott Defeated

The union that represents academics in the UK has announced today it will not proceed with plans to debate a boycott of Israeli universities following legal advice.

The University and College Union, whose members passed a motion at its conference in May to circulate and discuss a call to boycott, has been told by lawyers that the move would be unlawful.

Sally Hunt, the union's general secretary, has called a halt to a proposed regional tour to discuss the issue with members. Branches are to be told that making a call to boycott Israeli institutions would "run a serious risk" of infringing discrimination legislation.

The boycott call was also deemed to be outside the aims and objectives of the union.

Delegates at the UCU conference voted by 158 to 99 in favour of a motion to recommend boycotts in protest at Israel's "40-year occupation" of Palestinian land and to condemn the "complicity" of Israeli academics.

However, lawyers told the union that while members were free to debate Israeli policies, it should not spend resources on gauging opinion of something that should not be implemented.

The union said it would now consider ways to press ahead with the non-boycott elements of the motion, such as ending joint projects between UK and Israeli academics.

This decision of the UCU's actually leaves me with somewhat mixed feelings. I have always opposed the boycott, so I am happy to learn that it will not be going ahead. However, I would much prefer the pro-boycott campaign to have collapsed due to lack of support from within British academia, rather than simply because it infringed anti-discrimination laws. Had it collapsed as a result of opposition from within the UCU, then that would have indicated that the majority of British academics were not rabidly anti-Israel. As it is, we are left with the distinct possibility (and, indeed, the strong impression) that the majority of our university professors would love to push ahead and boycott Israel, and that only the law is stopping them from doing so.

On a related topic, I would like to point readers in the direction of two posts at Melanie Phillips's blog, describing some of the ways in which left-wing teachers feed anti-Israel propaganda to our children, under the guise of teaching "citizenship". Well worth a read.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

O/T, O/T. Very sorry, once again, but some things need .............
The Stephen Lawrence inquiry excoriated the Police, and found them guilty of "Institutionalised racialism". Al-beeb, and Al-guardian had a field day.
This report takes the entire inquiry apart, and explains the true reasons for the findings.
You should read it in its entirety to understand the thinking behind it, and relate the systemic undermining of the Police (not to mention other structures(, to recent video contents. It is all part of the same story. Cancer.

Anonymous said...

O/T, O/T, sorry but...........
This report, from the same publishers, also sheds light on the same background problem, and helps identify the .........
problems generated by........

Anonymous said...

Anonymous 9.20am.
I agree, a pattern emerges.
One of the main complaints, that is persistently ignored, is that of uncontrolled immigration/illegal immigration, and a "soft" police and judicial response to "ethnic" crime.
This has lead to a backlash from "right-wing bloggers".
"Not fit for Purpose", who promised a hard response has been retired.
Prescot, deputy PM was portrayed in the press as a fool. HE WAS NOT.
The Office of Deputy Prime Minister initiated many schemes to feed (taxpayer) funds into various public and private enterprises. One such was Yorkshire Forward.
The intelligent use of google on these two names will demonstrate vividly how intertwined Yorkshire Forward, a function of the ODPM, and Common Purpose, a Registered Charity really are.
You will find that Yorkshire Forward gives bursaries to "selected" applicants who wish to attend Common Purpose courses. You will find Common Purpose in residence at government offices throughout the UK.
Do detailed searches on Common Purpose and its founder. Examine its start up funding sources.
An extremely malignant pattern is showing.........

Anonymous said...

You must read this.

Anonymous said...

In order for a democracy to function, and to govern, the population has to be, more or less, homogeneous, to share a common purpose, have common aspirations, a common perceived future.
We no longer live in a homogeneous society. Multiculturalism, and deliberate immigration policies have created an increasingly dysfunctional heterogeneous society.
The best example is Yugoslavia, a totally heterogeneous society that totally exploded into civil warfare after the death of the glue that bound it together, TITO
Hitler, pre WW11 commenced detailed population databases to determine male parental bloodlines, given that German populations were spread thinly over most of Europe at that time.
The same is happening in the UK.
Police held databases now cover 4.5 m population. Given family DNA structures, that effectively is probably 20m population. And the parliamentary statute for the means of acquiring this database is?

ID cards to cover every UK citizen (guess that means naturalized illegals too) are rapidly gaining reality, and at what cost?
The database of Children has/will have 330,000 individuals capable of authorized access.
In which universe do you think that database would offer the remotest possibility of being secure?

Do you really think that Democracy as we know it can govern our society as it is emerging, AND BEING SYSTEMATICALLY MANIPULATED AND UNDERMINED FROM WITHIN?

Google Common Purpose, with its sister organisation Open Ground, to see the "selection" of children for leadership courses, and compare with Hitler Youth programmes! Or Stalin youth, for that matter.
And why Open Ground as a name?
Because of the nature of the minds of children, fertile and open!

Lymphatic cancer is particular malignant and deadly, because of its systemic spread.
This cancer has been incubating since the 1980s, and is growing in strength.

Anonymous said...

"It is the manipulation of consensus that has turned the three main political parties in Britain into one party with their leaders Tony Blair, David Cameron and 'Ming' Campbell all standing on the same ground. They might offer slightly different policies - and only slightly - but they are all agreed on the fundamentals and this makes elections irrelevant. The Conservative Party's David Cameron, the possible winner of the next General Election, is Blair Mark II and this pair certainly have common purpose.

The Tavistock Institute has been working this dishonesty for decades and Common Purpose seems to have the Curriculum Vitae of a Tavistock front. One of the Tavistock founders, Dr. John Rawlings Rees, who also became co-founder of the World Federation for Mental Health, talked of infiltrating all professions and areas of society - 'Public life, politics and industry should all ... be within our sphere of influence ... If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities of other people I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity!' He said that the 'salesmen' of their perception re-programming (mass mind-control) must lose their identity and operate secretly. He said:

'We must aim to make it permeate every educational activity in our national life ... We have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church: the two most difficult are law and medicine.'

The common purpose of the Tavistock/Illuminati guerrilla war on the human psyche is to wipe clean any sense of the individual and unique because only that way can they impose the global dictatorship and have the masses accept it. Brock Chisholm, former Director of the UN World Health Organisation, was right when he said: 'To achieve One-World Government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism'.

Enter Common Purpose and its training of 'leaders'. If you can get the leaders to think the same it makes it much easier to transfer that to the general population. Julia Middleton's organisation, and whoever and whatever else is really behind it, has been making dramatic inroads into British society while it has flown below the radar. It is time we gave it a much higher profile as it goes ever-more international."