BDS bullies at Galway University

Alan Johnson for TimesofIsrael.com

A veteran left-wing former Member of Knesset sent me an email today. “This is really shocking. Beyond belief. We shall overcome” he wrote. He was reacting to this video (explicit language from the start), filmed on 5 March at the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG): - Note, the video has been removed from YouTube due to content violations but can be viewed on vimeo.
It has been viewed 27,000 times in three days on YouTube. It shows what happened when I tried to speak on the campus against a ‘Boycott Divestment and Sanctions’ (BDS) push at the University. The BDS supporters shouted vile abuse, threatened the students who disagreed with them, and tried to break up the meeting. “You Zionist pr**ks, f*** off our campus, now!” they screamed.

In a welcome move the University has released a statement calling the behaviour “unacceptable” and promising an immediate investigation.

That’s good. But what explains the hatred and intimidation spreading on some European campuses?

First, anti-Semitism. The activist who tried to break up the meeting - he failed — is Joseph Loughnane, a leader of the NUIG Palestine Solidarity Society. He is on record in 2008 as having said that “the Jews run the American media and push their agenda.” If you launch a campaign to exclude Israeli Jews, but nobody else, from the global academic, cultural, sporting and economic community, then it’s inevitable that your campaign will act as a lightning rod for rising European anti-Semitism. And so it is proving.

Second, ideology. If you really do believe that ‘Zionism is racism’, that the evil Jews ‘ethnically cleansed’ the Palestinians in 1948, have built an ‘Apartheid State’ and are now committing a slow genocide in Gaza — all of which nonsense is the staple diet of progressive intellectual opinion in Europe — then your duty is to deny me a platform on your campus and to attack ‘the Zionists’. The behaviour of the mob at Galway makes a kind of sense.

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