Nuremberg-on-Thames
Aunt Agatha suggested to me that we do this a couple of days ago. With this, the timing seems about right:
The University and College Union (UCU) of Britain, the largest academic organization in the United Kingdom, voted on Wednesday in favor of an academic boycott of Israel.
The motion was passed despite the UCU leader’s appeal to members of the union to ignore the call for an academic boycott.
Of the UCU representatives present, 158 voted in favor of the motion, 99 voted against, and 8 abstained.
Education Minister Yuli Tamir criticized result, calling it a “surprising move that does not conform with reality.”
Oh, but it does, Yuli. It does:
While Israelis are targeted by rockets from Gaza and officials from the “elected Palestinian government” threaten attacks by female suicide bombers, calls for anti-Israeli boycotts based on human rights claims would appear to be both immoral and absurd.
But the small group that controls Britain’s trade unions has managed to combine both traits, and it is escalating its political warfare in parallel with Palestinian violence.
…
[The UCU’s] is the third such academic boycott campaign in Britain in two years, coming after a divestment debate within the Anglican Church, a “boycott Israel” movement led by British activists in the World Medical Association, and the adoption of a similar program by the National Union of Journalists.
And the architects! Don’t forget the British architects!
Even Irish artists are getting in on the act.
Note, please, that the UCU measure was passed overwhelmingly by the rank-and-vile over the objection of the leadership. In fact, in most of the above cases, the boycotts were imposed against the wishes of the leaders. Say what you will about British anti-Semitism, it represents the will of the people.
All of which led Aunt Agatha to wonder—where had she heard of this sort of thing before?
In their 25-point Party Program, published in 1920, Nazi party members publicly declared their intention to segregate Jews from “Aryan” society and to abrogate Jews’ political, legal, and civil rights. Nazi leaders began to make good on their pledge to persecute German Jews soon after their assumption of power. The first major law to curtail the rights of Jewish citizens was the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” of April 7, 1933, according to which Jewish and “politically unreliable” civil servants and employees were to be excluded from state service.
The new Civil Service Law was the German authorities’ first formulation of the so-called Aryan Paragraph, a kind of regulation used to exclude Jews (and often by extension other “non-Aryans”) from organizations, professions, and other aspects of public life. In April 1933, German law restricted the number of Jewish students at German schools and universities. In the same month, further legislation sharply curtailed “Jewish activity” in the medical and legal professions.
You think we’re kidding? Do we look like we’re kidding?