NOT WHOLLY:

UK Profs Nix Israel: Their sympathy for Arabs is one more example of compassion as contempt. (Theodore Dalrymple, 4 February 2003, City Journal)

There's nothing British academics like more than a good academic boycott. It makes them feel they are at the center of things, important cogs in the motor of history—and virtuous into the bargain: for virtue these days is more a matter of making the right gestures and expressing the "right" opinions than of conforming one's behavior to inconvenient ethical standards. It allows one to be a libertine on a Neronian scale and yet detect the odor of sanctity emanating powerfully from oneself.

The Guardian reported several weeks ago that the British academic boycott of Israel is gathering steam. Colin Blakemore, Professor of Physiology at Oxford, for example, noted that he does not know of a single British academic who has been to a conference in Israel in the past year. The overweening snobbery in what Professor Blakemore says is characteristically British: after all, he implies, he knows everyone worth knowing.

But why Israel, you may ask, when the world pullulates with undesirable regimes whose performance would make Israel's seem positively splendid even if every last accusation against it were true? The most obvious answer is anti-Semitism, but this would not be wholly correct. The boycott's most prominent public advocate has been neurobiologist Steven Rose--himself Jewish--whom the Guardian rather coyly describes as having been active in left-wing causes for many years. This is a bit like describing Dr. Goebbels as "not a multiculturalist": true, but not quite the whole truth. Professor Rose is, and has been for years, a hard-line Marxist, quite unmoved by the millions killed in the doctrine's name. For him, Marxism is like Chesterton's Christianity: it hasn't been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.

Mr. Dalrymple seems incapable of writing an essay that fails to entertain. Posted by Orrin Judd at February 11, 2003 1:28 PM