How long did it take before Cambridge's Jewish students found out the hard way about throwing the baby out with the bathwater? A whole weekend.
Last week, you may recall, Cambridge's Israel Society withdrew its invitation to Israeli historian Benny Morris, who was due to speak on Thursday night, on the grounds that it did not want "to give racism a platform." Professor Morris had been described by complainants from the university's Islamic and Pakistani societies as "an Islamophobic hate speaker."
Extraordinarily enough Azzam Tamimi, long associated with Hamas and a proponent of suicide bombing, is going to speak tonight to Cambridge Islamic Society. An understandably upset group of Jewish students who complained about Tamimi were blithely told, "Yes, we know he's offensive, but we welcome you to attend and challenge".
And you all thought Cambridge was the place the clever kids went to. Dear, dear.

According to Ha'aretz, which is unlikely to have got this wrong, the Jerusalem Post editor, David Horovitz, has emailed Professor Naomi Chazan, the president of the New Israel Fund, and told her that her column is no longer required in his paper.
David's actions — which he has not, so far, chosen to explain in public — appear to have been precipitated by the ongoing, noisy and vituperative campaign against Professor Chazan by the student group, Im Tirzu. The charge is that the New Israel Fund financed a slew of human rights groups which supplied information to Judge Richard Goldstone in order for him to compile his now infamous Goldstone Report.
Im Tirzu, which insists it is not a right-wing group but one "working for the renewal of Zionist ideals," has so far published a vicious cartoon of Professor Chazan, characterising her as "Naomi Chazan-Goldstone" and featuring her with a horn on her head. Additionally group members held a noisy demo outside her home, wearing keffiyahs and waving placards: a little bit of research might have informed them that a)they were outside the wrong house and that b)she was not in the country in any case.
All of a sudden, it seems, free speech and democracy are at a premium in Israel. And elsewhere: in a kneejerk reaction — in my opinion, without the knee — Professor Chazan has been seriously uninvited to speak at a synagogue and community centre in Melbourne, Australia, next week.
I have no means of knowing what pressure — if any — was applied to the Jerusalem Post to make David Horovitz drop Naomi Chazan as a columnist. What I do know is that she is one of Israel's finest and most honourable politicians, who has rendered immeasurable service to her country, not least in her work with African nations. She has worked hard to promote the rights of women and minorities; she spent long and arduous hours in the Knesset, not least as deputy speaker, and the tradition of public service is certainly ingrained in the family: she is the daughter of Avraham and Zena Harman, he a one time Israeli ambassador to the US (and UK born), her mother a former MK herself. So Naomi Chazan is not no-one; she has contributed more to Israel and the "Zionist ideal" than any of the wretched opponents of Im Tirzu.
And let us suppose that one were to agree with Im Tirzu and its followers. Is personal invective a useful way for the group to get its point across? Is demonising Professor Chazan an appropriate or acceptable response? But that seems to have become what passes for informed debate these days: name-calling (cf Alan Dershowitz, of whom I thought better), personal abuse, and, lastly, a determination to shut up people with whose opinions you don't agree (cf the Benny Morris farrago in Cambridge this week.) Censorship and boycott have a way of coming back to bite the instigators.

Zion Evrony's chaotic visit to Carrickmacross, County Monaghan, had all the component parts of an episode of Father Ted.

For the Israeli Ambassador to Ireland to be heckled or 'welcomed' with a protest should perhaps (unfortunately) come as no great surprise.

The idea of ripping a page from the town's visitor book is, however, not only vile but absolutely ridiculous.

It doesn’t surprise me that Sir Victor Blank has landed a job advising the government on business.

Sir Victor, the former chairman of Lloyds, may have been essentially forced out of Lloyds when UK Financial Investments, Lloyds’ biggest shareholder, suggested that it would not support his re-election at the bank’s annual meeting, but he certainly has the credentials needed to help the British economy. In fact, Sir Victor, who until the controversial HBOS deal, had a successful career, chairing companies including Trinity Mirror, the newspaper publisher, and GUS, the former owner of Argos and Experian, is one of the most accomplished and dignified businessmen I have met.

Sky News City editor Mark Kleinman broke the news. He blogs about it here.

Now the Pope has turned his pontifical guns on the government’s Equality Bill, saying it is interfering with religious rights.
Even before his intervention, the bill was having a tough time in the Lords, where last week peers inflicted a defeat on the government.
One of the bill’s aims is to consolidate laws which, for example, make it illegal for a religious organisation to refuse to employ a gay person – although there are exceptions.
Those exceptions were to include a member of a clergy and – the government wanted to state – anyone in a role whose purpose was to promote or represent the religion. (But churches argued these were still too narrow and wouldn’t cover youth workers, for example).
However, the Lords threw out the second provision, thus leaving religious groups freer to reject job applicants they consider religiously unsuitable.
So what will the impact of the bill be?
An Orthodox synagogue will still be permitted to reject a woman as a rabbi.
But let’s take the case of a rabbi who was a man but who became a woman; again the Orthodox synagogue would be free to reject a transsexual applicant, but a Progressive synagogue, which is committed to egalitarianism, would probably not.
But it may not be so clearcut in the case of a hospital chaplain. If the Lords’ changes stay, then probably a chaplain would be equivalent to a member of the clergy and thus exempt from the anti-discrimination regulations: but if the government’s original wording had prevailed, then it might have been more difficult for a religious group to reject a transsexual chaplain.
Meanwhile, with all the arguments over the bill as it is, it now looks a wise decision by the Board of Deputies not to pursue an amendment in order to reverse the recent Supreme Court judgment on JFS.
Any amendment would probably have run into a good deal of opposition along the way, even with a communal consensus.

It's not just members of the US rabbinate who have engaged in public spats about faith education. Another aspect of the topic features in The Times' correspondence columns today where Rabbi Aaron Goldstein, the minister of Northwood and Pinner Liberal Synagogue, takes a swipe at Rabbi Jonathan Romain, the ubiquitous rabbi of Maidenhead Reform Synagogue. What got up Rabbi Goldstein's nose was his Progressive colleague's expressed sadness at plans to establish a Hindu secondary school because, Romain argued, the Hindu community has been very well integrated into wider society and clearly didn't need a secondary school.

From the initimitable Rabbi William Wolff’s “Last Word” column in the new edition of Manna magazine:

Joseph Weissman, third-generation Messianic Jew, reveals how his exposés of Christian anti-Zionism on the blog Seismic Shock earned him a visit from the police. You can read more about his exploits on Harry’s Place.