MB Civic

Re “British Teachers Favor Call to Boycott Israelis” (news article, May 30):

Demanding that Israeli academics dissociate themselves from Israel’s “apartheid policies,” while not at the same time insisting that Palestinian academics renounce Hamas’s stated intent to destroy Israel, exhibits intellectual dishonesty and hypocrisy of the highest order.

Daniel Wolf
Teaneck, N.J., May 30, 2006

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To the Editor:

Since the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education is so eager to boycott Israeli academics who failed to renounce what it called Israel’s “apartheid policies,” I eagerly await a similar boycott of British academics who do not object to Britain’s policies in Northern Ireland or who support Tony Blair’s conduct of the Iraq war.

I am sure that there will also be boycotts of Russian academics who are complicit in Russia’s occupation of Chechnya or Indian professors who side with India in its dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir.

Perhaps that would require a bit more courage and careful thought than just the typical Israel-bashing so endemic in academia and in educated European society.

Edwin Andrews
Malden, Mass., May 30, 2006