Calls to boycott gyms over CEO’s Question Time arms
HUNDREDS of staff at a university in Scotland have signed a letter demanding that the university sever ties with Israel, expressing solidarity with the pro-Palestine student encampment set up on campus grounds.
A total of 549 staff at the University of Edinburgh signed the letter, which was sent to senior management yesterday afternoon.
The letter expresses support for the student encampment set up at the university last Sunday, as well as demanding that the university takes “immediate emergency measures” to divest from any companies which are “complicit with Israel’s regime of apartheid and plausible genocide”.
Staff from every college at the university are represented in the letter, in addition to multiple staff networks such as the Staff Pride Network and the Staff BAME Network, the largest Black, Asian and minority ethnic academic and professional staff network at the university.
Samer Abdelnour, one of the coauthors of the letter and a senior lecturer in the university’s business school, told The National the university has not seen such widespread support for a single cause before.
Inspired by a global movement of
CALLS have been made to boycott a gym chain following comments made by the company’s CEO on Question Time.
As the UK Government continues to come under increasing pressure to halt arms sales to Israel amid concerns of a ground offensive in Rafah, PureGym Humphrey Cobbold appeared on the BBC programme and expressed his views about Israel’s continued bombardment of Gaza.
Cobbold said he was “deeply concerned” about what is happening in Gaza with more than 34,000 people killed in Israel’s bombardment.
“We should support the Israeli government in being able to defend themselves”
He further added there should be an “insistence on Israel providing safe harbour and doing everything that can be done and more than they’ve done in the past in order to look after the citizens of Gaza, who are not to blame”.
However, he said we “should not forget the origin and trigger” of the bombardment in reference to the October 7 attacks.
He was then pressed by host Fiona Bruce on whether he believed the UK Government should halt arms sales after Joe Biden said the US will not supply offensive weapons Israel could use to assault Rafah.
It followed the US president’s decision to pause a shipment of heavy bombs to Israel last week over concerns the US ally was moving closer to an attack on Rafah despite public and private warnings from his administration.
Cobbold replied: “I’m not aware of which specific weapons the US is stopping. They’ve got a lot more weapons they’re shipping than we are.
“They’ve stopped some big bombs which sounds like a very sensible thing to stop doing.
“I certainly think any weapons that are required for defence and for the Iron Dome, I see no reason why we wouldn’t do that. dents in Gaza have paid a terrifying price. Every one of Gaza’s universities has been destroyed or damaged; three university presidents, at least 100 academics and thousands of students have been killed, many targeted for assassination with their entire families. This is an unprecedented intensification of a long pattern of scholasticide enacted by Israel over decades through systematic attacks against Palestinian education.
“As staff of an institution which has a direct historical legacy of colonial dispossession in Palestine through the role that our former chancellor played in 1917, we urge our leadership not to repeat the mistakes of our past chancellor and other institutional figures which have entangled our university to a legacy of colonial and imperial dispossession and slavery.
“We thus stand with our students who today urge our leadership to stop all investments in companies complicit with Israel’s regime of apartheid and plausible genocide, abiding by the principles of due diligence and
saw horrendous attacks on Israel from Iran that were dealt with partly by British and American forces as well as we saw and I think defensive weapons should still be allowed to go through.
“As I stand at the moment, I think we should support in general the Israeli government in being able to defend themselves against Hamas. A prescribed terrorist organisation that has insisted on deciding to eradicate Jews and eradicate Israel and we’ve got to remember that when we deal with this.
“And that’s absolutely not the fault of the Palestinian people in general. They deserve more protection than they’re getting