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Boycott notion is blasted
Prof Steinberg (Bar-Ilan) addresses the UK National Postgraduate Committee
- The Jewish Chronicle Report -

Boycott notion is blasted, By Mark Scodie, The Jewish Chronicle, 25/08/2005

A NATIONAL postgraduate education conference hosted an Israeli academic in a gesture meant to signal their disagreement with the Association of University Teachers' attempt to boycott two Israeli universities earlier this year. Bar-Ilan University's Prof-essor Gerald Steinberg took the podium at the conference, organised by the National Postgraduate Committee at Glasgow's Strathclyde Univer-sity. Conference secretary Dun-can Connors told the JC that "academic freedom is more important than politics. As a body, we believe the work of postgraduates would be hindered in general ­ and specifically in computer science, physics and and medicine ­ by a boycott. Personally, I feel the AUT boycott was based on very shaky criteria. Even at the height of apartheid, they never boycotted South African universities." An AUT conference passed a resolution in April to end contact with Bar-Ilan University and Haifa University, but this decision was overturned the following month. Professor Steinberg told an audience of some 40 student and staff representatives that the boycott attempt had been "politically correct but morally incorrect." He blasted the claim that Israel was an apartheid state, which had been promoted by Palestinian and Arab delegates at a controversial UN Anti-Racism Conference in Durban in 2001. "The accusation is itself racist to Israel, because it denies Jewish people the right to self-determination," Professor Steinberg asserted.