As Douglas Murray chokes on his racist bile, is the Torygraph's headline the most stupid ever?
I rubbed my eyes when I saw the headline ‘University which banned beef now hosts 'Communist' summer school’. What could possibly be the connection between the decision to take beef off the menu at Goldsmiths University, as part of their contribution to fighting global warming and a debate between Professor Moshe Machover, the founder of Matzpen, the Israeli Socialist Organisation and myself?
What for that matter is the connection between British Beef and hosting the annual Communist University? I guess in the mind of the Daily Telegraph it’s only the loony left and rabid feminists who would ban the staple food of every red blooded Englishman. Hosting a Communist University must be proof that our way of life is under attack even though it is a commercial booking and nothing to do with the university itself. Small details such as these are irrelevant to the rabid right.
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| Letter to the Telegraph in response to their idiotic article |
The latest move has prompted accusations that Goldsmith is no longer a "safe space" for Jewish students and that it is "officially becoming a Communist university".
So let us digest this. Two Jewish people debating the finer points of whether Israeli Jews constitute a nation means that ‘Goldsmith is no longer a "safe space" for Jewish students’. Is she really saying that hearing two Jewish anti-Zionists debate Zionism will threaten the well being of the spoilt Jewish darlings and JAPs (Jewish American Princesses) who are students at Goldsmith?
Needless to say, when a hack needs a quote then who better to turn to than the misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. They believe that the presence of Professor Moshe Machover and myself on campus is "deeply troubling". The University is “welcoming onto campus a number of individuals who have a history of baiting Jews or outright antisemitism”.
The term ‘anti-Semitism’ has been so shop soiled of late that it has lost its effect. Now we are ‘Jew baiting’ if we disagree with Zionism and anti-Palestinian racism. Indeed we have a ‘history’ of doing this. I guess I also have a history of opposing fascists such as Tommy Robinson and the EDL, who Zionists like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism work with.
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| The head of the college even looks like one of those hated feminist leftist do gooders |
And if this was not bad enough, then Douglas Murray, the frothing at the mouth Islamaphobe who is Associate Director of the cold-war Henry Jackson Societypenned in the following day’s Telegraph, Our anti-capitalist, anti-Western universities no longer care about excellence
This mild mannered, man is the same person who, in 2009, described Robert Spencer, the leader of "Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA)", as a "very brilliant scholar and writer". He is so brilliant that along with Pamela Geller he got himself banned from entering Britain. He is responsible for Jihad Watch which is allied to David Horowitz’s Freedom Centre and Frontpagemag.com an overtly racist and Islamaphobic web site.
In a 2006 speech to the Pim Fortuyn Memorial ConferenceMurray demanded that “conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board.”:
“All immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop. In the case of a further genocide such as that in the Balkans, sanctuary would be given on a strictly temporary basis. This should also be enacted retrospectively. Those who are currently in Europe having fled tyrannies should be persuaded back to the countries which they fled from once the tyrannies that were the cause of their flight have been removed. And of course it should go without saying that Muslims in Europe who for any reason take part in, plot, assist or condone violence against the West (not just the country they happen to have found sanctuary in, but any country in the West or Western troops) must be forcibly deported back to their place of origin.”
So if you sympathise with attacks on American troops in Iraq or Saudi Arabia or wherever you should be ‘forcibly deported’. Bang goes freedom of speech.
Murray wrote in The Spectator that ‘There are certain things in Britain about which it is impossible to speak frankly. The birth rate of the Muslim population is a prime subject” The birth rate of Black and Asian people has always been an obsession with racists and neo-Nazis.
Yet this racist buffoon is given space in The Torygraph to proclaim that banning beef and hosting a Communist University means an end to civilisation as we know it.
Murray told the Telegraph’s readers that ‘tragedy always follows close on comedy’s heels and this tragedy ‘can also be glimpsed on the Goldsmiths campus.’ Why pray tell? Because Goldsmiths ‘is hosting a summer school involving a series of lectures organised by the Communist Party of Great Britain.’
Shocked as you may be dear reader there is more.
‘The lecturers include Tony Greenstein, the founding member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, who last year achieved the almost unachievable when he was expelled from Labour for using terms like “Zionist scum” and accusing “Zionists” of “collaborating with the Nazis”. Also lecturing at the Communist summer camp is an activist called Graham Bash who will be addressing students on the subject of “How can we transform the Labour Party into a vehicle of socialism?” A lecture whose aims might be said to already have been achieved.
I know it’s not much consolation to someone who even the Tory front bench broke off relations with in 2011 because he was seen as a racist and extremist, but being expelled from the Labour Party these days, if you are Jewish and a socialist, is quite easy!
Still I don’t want to spoil a good story since The Telegraph’s readers enjoy having something to shock them over their tea and marmalade first thing in the morning. Murray engages in an attack not merely on Goldsmiths but on what he calls an ‘only slightly watered-down version of the full-throated communism’ at Cambridge University no less. He tells us of ‘a great tide has swept across the university system in America as in Britain’. By now babbling like a hyena on heat Murray splutters that ‘It is a culture war waged with tools such as “de-platforming”, claims for “safe spaces” and more. Most of all it exists in the Academy’s fetishisation of “diversity”.’
Now where have I heard of culture wars before? Oh yes, it is a standard meme of the fascist right
As Noah Berlatsky wrote in Jewish Currents after a neo-Nazi opened fire at Poway synagogue earlier this year, ‘“Cultural Marxism” is a trope that is rapidly spreading from the far right to the conservative mainstream.’ It was first popularised by Andrei Brevik, the Norwegian neo-Nazi (and Zionist) who murdered 77 young people. This is what Douglas Murray is arguing for and what The Telegraph is quite happy to print in the name of fighting socialism and defending Zionism.
Meanwhile if you are interested in a debate between Moshe Machover and myself on whether or not Israel’s Jews constitute a nation, then take yourself off to Goldsmith’s College this Friday for a no doubt riveting debate! Beef I’m afraid will not be on the menu!
The details are here! And here is the timetable. Our debate is timed for 4.45 p.m. this Friday at Goldsmith's University St James London SE14 6AD
Tony Greenstein