If you start clamping down on inhumanity, where will it
end? David Bernstein asks.
So Britain's largest union of university lecturers has
courageously bitten the bullet. Defying any spurious claims of
latter-day "McCarthyism" or politically correct twaddle about
"academic freedom", the National Association of Teachers in Further
and Higher Education has voted in favour of a boycott of Israeli
academics and higher education institutions that do not publicly
dissociate themselves from Israel's "apartheid policies" (The Age,
31/5).
About time, too, some might say. Although there are as many
differences as there are similarities between the old white South
African version of apartheid and the present Israeli version, when
it comes to academic moral rectitude, near enough is close enough.
But why stop with Israel?
Just this week, The Age's United States correspondent,
Michael Gawenda, wrote about the wall the US is planning to build
along the 1341-kilometre border with Mexico to stop the estimated
500,000 or more people coming into the US each year (Opinion,
29/5). At least Israel could argue some security rationale for its
"apartheid wall", which has so offended the British academics: it
has, after all, greatly reduced the number of suicide bombings in
Israeli cities - but when last did a Mexican suicide bomber blow up
a party of US schoolkids in a Texan steakhouse?
True, Gawenda informs us, George W. is digging his heels in at
this draconian measure - which should earn him a few Brownie points
with defenders of British academic rectitude. But will that be
enough, in the eyes of these moral crusaders, to offset his
responsibility for the carnage the US-led invasion has brought to
the people of Iraq?
I haven't seen a body count - the Americans aren't into such
bookkeeping when it comes to Iraqi civilians - but the anecdotal
evidence would suggest that far more innocents have been
slaughtered in occupied Iraq over the past three years than have
been in the Israel-occupied Palestinian territories over the past
38 years.
Surely any American academic who does not "publicly dissociate"
him or herself from the US policy in Iraq has no place in the
Hallowed Halls of British Academe.
Oh, and let's not forget British Prime Minister Tony Blair's
complicity in all this. Surely any British academic who refuses to
"publicly dissociate" him or herself from their Government's
morally bankrupt neo-colonialist adventure in Iraq should be
similarly black-balled. Or would that be a trifle "uncollegiate",
old fellow?
Sigh, and then there's the Third Iraqi Musketeer - our very own
John Winston Howard. He's as gung-ho as ever over Iraq, which
surely should invite some "public dissociation" from his policies
by Aussie academics if they're ever to set foot in a British
tertiary institution. But let's hope the good folk at the National
Association don't look too closely at Australia: it could be a real
can of "apartheid" worms.
True, we don't have an "apartheid wall" in Australia - at least,
not a full-blooded razor-wire-and-concrete job like the Israelis'.
But we do have a "virtual" wall that is at least as effective: the
so-called "exclusion zone" that has just been extended to make the
whole of Australia and its outlying islands refugee-free.
And just in case any "illegal entrants" manage to breach those
defences and pose a "terror threat" to our "relaxed and
comfortable" Aussie way of life, we have a set of draconian
"anti-terror" laws that place unprecedented restrictions on
individual freedoms.
Some of these not only ape those in force in apartheid South
Africa (detention without trial, for example), but - on the
near-enough-is-close-enough principle that highlights superficial
similarities while ignoring fundamental differences - would not be
out of place on the statute books of the mercifully defunct
totalitarian dictatorships of 20th-century Europe.
And, perhaps more to the point in terms of the present
anti-Israel boycott, how are these morally sensitive British
academics going to react to the putrid sore at the heart of
Australia that Wadeye has opened up for all the world to see?
What we have seen at Wadeye in recent weeks paints a picture of
race-based neglect, apathy and cynicism that has left Australia's
indigenous population, after 200 years of white "occupation", as
economically and socially disadvantaged and as devastated as South
Africa's blacks were at the height of apartheid.
If Wadeye does not represent the fruits of 200 years of
effective "apartheid" in Australia, then what does it
represent?
So, Ye Guardians at the Gates of British Academe, can Australian
academics now expect an ultimatum to "publicly dissociate"
themselves from the "fascist, apartheid policies" of the Australian
Government - or find themselves sent to Coventry with their fellow
Israeli recalcitrants?
Or is that a club restricted to citizens of the Jewish state
alone?
David Bernstein is an Age writer.
