In Which an Anti-Zionist Pro-Hamas Islamist Delivers a Lecture at Haifa University and Jewish Students Are Barred
Sheikh Raed Salah, leader of the northern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel (thatâs the extreme anti-Israel branch), who has served time in jail for providing financial support to Hamas, who in a 2007 sermon âurged supporters to start a third intifada in order to âsave al-Aksa Mosque, free Jerusalem and end the occupation,ââ and who is a citizen of Israel, today told Arab students--and Arab students only--that âJerusalem was an âArab, Muslim and Palestinian issue alone,ââ and that âIsrael constantly dug tunnels under the Temple Mount and that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was planning to rebuild the Temple.â Adds the Jerusalem Post:
Salah's speech also attacked Jews, saying, âThey want to build their temple at a time when our blood is on their clothes, on their doorsteps, in their food and in their drinks. Our blood has passed from one âgeneral terroristâ to another âgeneral terrorist.ââ He also said, âWe are not those who ate bread dipped in childrenâs blood.â
The pusillanimity of the universityâs administrators in permitting the ancient blood libel against Jews to be heard within their walls (âWe didn't invite him, but in the end, for legal reasons, we had to let him inâ) is pretty horrifying, but thatâs the downside of life in a liberal democracy: a person devoted to its destruction, even if only ideologically, is free to speak his mind. But permitting the boycotting of Jewish students at an institution of higher learning in the Jewish state, at the behest, presumably, of the anti-Semitic speaker and his audience, and especially at a moment when American and European academics are engaged in a vicious boycott campaign against Israel itself--that's not freedom of speech, that's just indefensible and unforgivable groveling.

