These Pears Are Rotten

I have written before about the Pears Foundation. One of the principal philanthropic organisations in the UK Jewish Community funds would-be Israel boycotters.

And the Institute which it funds (the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck College, London University) sees nothing wrong with hosting Israel traducers such as Jacqueline Rose who makes antisemitic comparisons between Jews and Nazis (in an interview in 2005, Rose said: “It seems to me that the suffering of a woman on the edge of the pit with her child during the Nazi era, and a Palestinian woman refused access to a hospital through a checkpoint and whose unborn baby dies as a result, is the same”).

Now this wholly inappropriately named Institute is organising (in June) a conference on Boycotts, unbelievably featuring at least two boycotters - John Chalcraft of LSE and Philip Marfleet of University of East London.

http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/43726/jewish-leader-threatened-lse-isr...

http://www.pearsinstitute.bbk.ac.uk/events/events-calendar/boycotts-past...

I quote: “ …the conference seeks to create an academic forum to better comprehend the causes and content of boycott movements and to advance understanding of whether and how BDS sits within the debate on contemporary antisemitism”

It is utterly wrong that a so-called “Institute for the Study of Antisemitism” should give a platform to boycotters and to those who believe that a boycott of Israel is either justified or is not antisemitic.

What next, Professor David Feldman of Birkbeck – a Conference on Holocaust Denial, starring David Irving?