AntiSemitic foothold at UCT

THE UNIVERSITY of Cape Town’s “Palestine Solidarity Forum” (PSF) is an anti-Israel student pressure group with direct connections to the antiSemitic BDS movement.

The PSF is running a nefarious campaign for an official academic and cultural boycott of Israel at the university. The PSF’s demands, predictably, follow the guidelines of the “Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI)”, an arm of BDS that publishes lengthy documents attempting to systematise anti-Israel policy at universities.

These demands include the cessation and severing of all university connections to Israeli academia and academics, research projects, study tours and all cultural and intellectual exchanges.

The PACBI attempts to appropriate the language of academia and human rights to appeal to academics. However, this grandiloquence fails to mask the striking parallels between its campaign and anti-Jewish policies at German universities from 1933 until the mid-’40s, when Jews were victimised and banned from all academic life simply for being Jewish.

The PSF is hoping Israeli academic institutions and academics are victimised and banned from academic life in South Africa simply for being Israeli.

The majority of universities around the world have rejected calls for academic boycotts of Israel on the basis of these being discriminatory, bigoted and counter to the ideals of academic freedom: the pursuit of knowledge and the freedom of ideas.

One hopes sanity prevails at UCT, which falls under South Africa’s worldclass constitution, its outstanding anti-discrimination laws and the excellent Higher Education Act, which promotes academic freedom and the advancement, not derailment, of academic values.