UnCorked: Ireland's Pseudo-Academic Anti-Israel Hate-Fest

by Denis MacEoin • January 7, 2017 at 5:00 am

This will not be an academic conference in any real sense of the word. It is, from the outset, a hate-fest of international anti-Zionist, anti-Israel and anti-Semitic rhetoric and distortion. It is totally without balance.
Some of those 45 participants will be more vehement in their criticism of Israel, but none, so far as is known, is wholly without some degree of association with bias. How do we know this? First, because a significant majority of the participants have made no secret of their support for the boycott of Israeli academics.
For more than 3,000 years, the "original 'aboriginal' inhabitants" were the Jews" – along with Ethiopians, Nubians, Carthaginians, Phoeneicians, and eventually the Romans, Christians and eventually several Arab Muslim imperialists, culminating in the Ottoman Turks. The Jews were the people who inhabited Canaan; the Jews are why Judaea is named Judaea. An Arab "Palestine", bluntly, never existed. If the Jews do not belong in Israel, then the Europeans do not belong in New Zealand, Australia or North and South America.
Prominent at Southampton, and again planning to address the conference, were some of the leading academic activists working both in the universities and outside for the destruction of Israel, regardless of whether that means the expulsion or genocide of the country's Jewish population.
In "Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust," Richard Falk compared some Israeli policies with regard to the Palestinians to the Nazi record of collective punishment, warning (unbelievably) that Israel may be planning a Holocaust in the same way Nazi Germany did. It is arguable that he has done more than any other figure to inspire loathing for Israel worldwide.
This conference is an outright attack on everything academic work is about. Many are already protesting in the hope that UCC can be persuaded to recognize the threat to scholarship that such a conference poses for academic teachers and researchers everywhere.

University College Cork, in Ireland. (Image source: Bjørn Christian Tørrissen/Wikimedia Commons)

The passage of UN Security Council Resolution 2334 on December 23 2016 has upset more than one apple cart.[1] By declaring that Israeli settlements have no legal validity and are a "Flagrant Violation of International Law", the resolution has handed the Palestinians a weapon as powerful as any they have used against the Jewish state in their many physical attacks upon it for more than a century. Lawfare has for many years now replaced warfare (although not terror) as the Palestinian method of choice for the long-term elimination of Israel; this new resolution, even if only advisory, is a major step along the way to declare, not just the settlements but the entirety of Israel itself as illegal.