Europes's Universities Are Slowly Being Made Judenrein

As Giulio Meotti writes in Arutz Sheva that Jews are being expelled from European universities in a way reminiscent of the 1930's:

Several days ago the Israeli leftist author Moshe Sakal was booted from an academic conference in Marseilles at the request of Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish.

The director of the conference, French-Jewish author Pierre Assouline, succumbed to the Arab pressure and said Sakal’s participation “was not crucial”.

A year ago, Marseilles’ university was the site of another anti-Jewish boycott, when the septuagenarian Israeli novelist Esther Orner, who is also a Holocaust survivor, was banned from the University of Provence after a group of Arab writers objected to her presence.

For the first time since Vichy’s collaborators, French faculties have been cleansed of the Jewish presence.

From the outside, European universities appear to many as genteel, cultured and tranquil oases of wisdom. In truth, European institutions of higher education are now brutal offsprings of anti-Jew hatred.

The list goes further than just kicking an Israeli off of a conference--other incidents include:

• Last spring, Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz was banned from Trondheim and Oslo universities because of his views on the Jewish state.
  
  
• Last September, Israeli professor from Ariel University, Ronen Cohen, was expelled from a German academic conference in Berlin (he was later reinstated after a storm of protest).

• Palestinian militants violently attacked Solon Solomon, a former Knesset staffer, at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

• Benny Morris, professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, was assaulted by a group of Muslims before a conference at the London School of Economics.

Then there more general expressions of antisemitism in European universities:

• The Spanish Housing Ministry disqualified Ariel University from competing in the international competition between university architecture departments to design and build a self-sufficient house using solar power.
  
• Rotterdam’s Erasmus University’s International Institute of Social Studies just hosted UE funded events in which Israel was equated with the former apartheid regime in South Africa.
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• Recently, Europe’s largest student union, the University Of London Union, joined the worldwide boycott of all Israeli products.
  
• The Cambridge University Students Union voted to call on the University to cut ties with Veolia, a company involved in “infrastructure projects in Israeli settlements”, and employed by the University on a waste disposal contract.

• In Italy, where a Parliamentary committee published the first report on anti-Semitism (one-fourth of Italians surveyed agreed with the statement: “Considering Israel’s policy, I can understand why people do not like Jews”), an Italian website called for the “blacklisting” of more than 160 Jewish professors who teach at Italian universities. The website accused the Jewish professors of “manipulating the minds of students” and “seeking to control Italian universities”.

Meotti concludes:

Will the European Union, many of whose prominent members either participated or acquiesced in the destruction of European Jewry 70 years ago, put a stop to the obscurantist conspiracy of the grandchildren of those Max Weinreich famously called “Hitler’s Professors” to expel the Jews (again) from the family of nations?

Can we really rely on the EU, which allowed matters to come this far to begin with?

Technorati Tag: Israel and Antisemitism.