Tuesday, May 30, 2006

NATFHE Racists Prevail

Quelle surprise, the rabid racists of NATFHE, the largest teachers union in the U.K, have voted in favour of a boycott of all Israeli academic institutions and academics. I said what I had to in my previous post on the matter so suffice it to say that these Trotskyite book-burners have the intellectual honesty and moral clarity of their illustrious ideological forbears and idols Stalin and Mao. Why is it that the utopian world-vision espoused by these bloody communists is so thoroughly cancelled-out by their own blinkered, twisted, disingenuous and hypocritical actions? Interestingly though, the boycott will only be in place until 1 June when NATFHE and the AUT (the guys who tried to boycott Israel last year) will merge and all such union laws will be cancelled. I doubt however this will be the last we hear from the boycotting bigots of Britain.

Friday, May 19, 2006

Correspondence with the BBC

Below is some correspondence I had with the BBC about this article on an IDF strike in Gaza.

BBC Headline: 'Five dead as Israelis strike Gaza', 5 May, 2006

My letter:

The headline and introductory paragraph must state who is killed. If 'militants' are killed the headline must read 'Five Militants are Killed'. Otherwise, the reader is unclear whether or not civilians or combatants were killed. This is crucial to the issues and debate in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. The second paragraph quotes what the Israeli army spokeswoman 'said' (that 'militants' were targeted) but this is not only the claims of the army but established fact as is easily verifiable from other news sources such as Ha'aretz. Palestinian sources confirmed this. The article does not categorically state at any point that five members of the Popular Resistance Committees were killed and so the reader is never properly informed of the nature of the incident. Such ambiguity in reporting the events in Israel and the Palestinian territories detracts from the accuracy and reliability of the BBC's reports and needs to be rectified.

BBC Response:

Dear Mr Cantankerous Camel (name changed for security reasons ;-))

Thank you for your e-mail regarding the article entitled 'Five dead as
Israelis strike Gaza'.

I understand that you are concerned that the article was too ambiguous and
left readers confused as to whether combatants or civilians have been
killed. I can assure you that rigorous checks are carried out before
articles are posted online, however, I appreciate that you feel on this
occasion more care should have been taken to establish exact details on the
incident.

Please be assured Mr Cantankerous Camel that your feelings have been fully registered and have been made available to our news department and senior BBC management.

Thank you once again for contacting us.

Regards

Richard Carey
BBC Information

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Ayaan Hirsi Ali forced from Dutch Parliament and the Country Too

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the courageous woman who until today was a Dutch MP has finally been hounded out of Holland, interestingly enough by her own party. For those of you who haven’t heard of her, Ayaan Hirsi Ali (or to give her her full name Ayaan Hirsi Magan Isse Guleid Ali Wai’ays Muhammad Ali Umar Osman Mahamud), is an unrepentant critic of Islam. She is originally from Somalia, underwent female genital circumcision (mutilation) and a forced marriage before escaping to Holland. Due to her constant criticism of Muslim society and her controversial film ‘Submission’, produced together with Theo Van Gogh who was murdered because of it, Hirsi Ali has had twenty-four hour police protection for over a year and a half and has at various times gone into hiding due to numerous death threats from various Islamists including the murderer of Van Goch.

It appears that she has become an electoral liability for her centre-right party and for this reason the complications of her asylum application have been used against her to force her out. She resigned from the Dutch Parliament today stating that she was quitting primarily because security considerations constantly forced her to change apartments. She is also leaving Holland. You can see her statement here. Today is a sad day for a Europe which is pandering to the extremists in its midst and refusing to listen to the calls to rouse itself from its multiculturalist stupor.

Sunday, May 14, 2006

The Ultimate Look-a-Like



Now, it may have become apparent that a certain blogger on Cantankerous Camel has a bit of a penchant for look-a-likes. Moreover, that certain person seems quite interested in the activities of one Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the rather odious President of Iran, and to this end has scoured the internet for amusing and compromising pictures of everyone’s favourite Holocaust denier. However, the Cantankerous Camel was eating with said person just the other day and as he swept his hair away from his forehead I got a bit of a fright. I think the reasons are clear; Adam is clearly an Iranian spy travelling the length and breadth of the country using his cunning “journalist” ruse as cover for his espionage activities. To whom, you may ask, does he report to? Why, to his big brother Mahmoud!

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Racists Trying to Boycott Israeli Knowledge

What is it with these bloody racists in the U.K? Why do they seek constantly to discriminate against Israeli academics on the basis of their nationality? What has an academic’s nationality got to do with his professional work? Should we boycott British academics for their government’s use of cluster bombs in Iraq which have caused thousands of civilian casualties?

What am I talking about you may ask? A large teachers union in the U.K., the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE), is calling on its 67,000 members to “consider the appropriateness” of a boycott of Israeli academics who do not publicly disassociate themselves from Israeli governmental policy. The amusing thing is of course the rather underhand and cowardly way NATFHE is going about its little boycott. It’s not calling for an actual policy of boycott for fear of being sued, as Haifa University threatened to do to the AUT after last year’s effort. No, instead they have tried this underhand ploy of organising an individual boycott to cover the own snivelling, gutless backs.

The whole thing is so utterly disingenuous anyway. Where are the calls for boycotting Russia over the deaths of over 200,000 civilians in Chechnya? What about a boycott of Sudan for the deaths of perhaps 400,000 Darfurians, the internal displacement of two million people and the creation of 200,000 Darfurian refugees who have fled to Chad? Equally, I don’t see the NAFTHE calling for any boycott of Chinese academics over their government’s atrocious human rights record, widespread use of torture, restriction of religious freedoms and the fifty-six year occupation of Tibet and the cultural genocide they have perpetrated there.

The truth is that a call to boycott academics or anyone else for that matter on the grounds of their nationality is simply racist. Individuals do not create government policy or implement it and cannot be held responsible for it. The pursuit of knowledge should, in the first place be, above contentious political debates anyway. The reasons why British academic unions only want to single out Israel is rather sinister as well, but I won’t go there right now.

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