By
Steven Plaut:
In the campaign in the UK to organize an academic boycott of Israeli universities, led by the British Association of University Teachers (AUT), it turned out that a fanatic anti-Israel faculty member at an Israeli university, Ilan Pappe from the University of Haifa, was the driving force. He was seeking to create a boycott of his own university. That boycott campaign ultimately fizzled and failed.
But the attempts by radical anti-Israel faculty members in Israel to promote attacks on their own country continue. Recent campaigns are in some ways more outrageous and far worse than the earlier boycott initiative. The newest campaigns are directed against individual Israelis in their private capacity and are being promoted by some of the most openly anti-Semitic of Israel's academic extremists.
These campaigns are based upon demonizing and persecuting individual Israeli military officers as "war criminals" in European courts.
Throughout the West, radical leftists are a force for internal subversion using intellectual demoralization. They have been more successful in Israel because Israel is smaller, has better-funded enemies and is higher in priority for destruction.
