October 4, 2007 Edition > Section: Opinion > Printer-Friendly Version

Suppressed Scholarship

BY DANIEL JOHNSON
October 4, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/63946

Who said this on a visit to Americalast w e e k ? “When you think how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been … they more or less monopolize American foreign policy, as far as many people can see.” Mahmoud Ahamdinejad? No: it was Professor Richard Dawkins, speaking at the Atheist Alliance convention in Crystal City, Virginia.

Mr. Dawkins has embarked on a campaign to give atheists a louder voice in the American public square. He appears to be unaware of the irony involved in his chosen method of attracting attention – which is to repeat the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of the Islamic fundamentalists.

As holder of the chair of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, Mr. Dawkins has even less excuse for holding such opinions than the Islamofascists. After all, Oxford academics, known as “dons,” are exposed to a wide range of views, aren’t they? They devote their lives to the disinterested pursuit of truth, distinguish between fact and fiction, tolerate dissent, defend freedom of speech and thought, don’t they? Well, no, actually:aJewishfriend of mine who taught at Oxford until recently told me that he found the atmosphere there to be oppressive for anybody who did not buy the Palestinian narrative. His colleagues simply weren’t interested in hearing the truth. They were tolerant, yes, but only of rabid anti-Semites such as the poet Tom Paulin, who called for “Brooklyn-born settlers” in Israel to be “shot dead.” They were intolerant of those whose scholarship treated Zionism objectively. So, sadly, my friend left the university.

This is the context in which the British University and College Union voted to boycott Israeli academics – though last week the union backed off, after legal advice warning its leaders that such a boycott would infringe anti-discrimination laws. But why did the academics require one of the most expensive lawyers in Britain, Anthony Lester, to tell them what their consciences ought to have told them instinctively?

Part of the explanation is that these academics are, like the rest of Europe, busily appeasing the Islamists. Their forms of appeasement are more offensive than, say, the Sainsbury supermarket chain permitting its Muslim checkout staff to refuse to sell alcohol to customers, but the reflex is the same. It matters hugely, of course, when the free circulation of scholarship is stopped by the scholars themselves engaging in a deliberate act of sabotage. Let me give one very striking example. In the September 17 issue of the Weekly Standard, the German academic Matthias Küntzel wrote a brilliant article on the Nazi roots of Islamism, “Jew-Hatred and Jihad,” which I recommend to anyone who wants to understand the pathological motives and ideological provenance of our present enemies.

Readers of this column may recall that last March I wrote about how Mr. Küntzel was prevented from giving a public lecture on the same topic at Leeds University in England, because the administrators claimed to be worried about “security” – meaning that they had received threats. Even if this had been true, it would have been a shameful capitulation to blackmail, but it emerged that no such threats had, in fact, been received. The Küntzel case deserves to be a cause célèbre in the debate on academic freedom.

Next month Mr. Küntzel’s book, “Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11,” will be published by Telos Press. In it, he will show that Al Qaeda in general, and especially Mohamed Atta, leader of the Hamburg-based terrorist cell that carried out the attacks on September 11, were motivated by a Nazi belief in Jewish world domination. Atta “considered New York City the center of world Jewry, which was, in his opinion, Enemy No.1.”

Amazingly, American and European authorities have completely failed to take cognizance of the anti-Semitic nature of the ideology that led to September 11, despite the wealth of evidence that has emerged since. Yet some of us were warning people about this elephant in the room at the time. On September 11, within hours of the attacks, I was writing the main oped article for the Daily Telegraph, which appeared the next day. This is what I wrote: “Let there be no mistake: global Islamic terrorism is rooted in global anti-Semitism. This was, in many ways, the most vicious blow aimed at the Jewish people since the Holocaust. New York is not only the richest city on earth, the capital of capitalism; it is also the largest Jewish city … The collaboration of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem with the Nazis is only the most notorious instance of a long line of Judaeophobic Arab leaders.”

Why did the American authors of the “9/11 Commission Report,” published in July 2004, fail to notice any of this? Why has the British academic establishment shunned the minority of scholars, such as David Pryce-Jones, Emanuele Ottolenghi, Matthias Küntzel, and Efraim Karsh, who have consistently warned against this dangerous Islamofascist nexus?

The answer is that anti-Semitism has quietly insinuated itself into British social and cultural life again. On Saturday the chairman of Chelsea Football Club, one of the most famous soccer teams in the world, publicly protested about anti-Semitic abuse by the fans of the new manager and coach, Avram Grant. Mr. Grant had been in the job for just one week. His crime? To be an Israeli and a distinguished former coach of the national team.

This week the word from the White House was that President Bush has given up on Gordon Brown. He prefers Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel. Something is rotten in the state of Britain. And I fear that the ugly prejudices of Professor Dawkins are not only typical of Oxford academics, or even of evangelical atheists, but of many more of his – and my – compatriots.