Anti-Semitism is not a pretty sight.
The Irish Palestine Solidarity Campaign is protesting against the appearance of Israeli poet Amir Or at the Dublin Writers' Festival.
They feel the festival should not have accepted sponsorship from the Israeli embassy in Dublin, given Israel's propensity for blowing up Palestinian picnickers and other such acts of banditry.
Another festival sponsor is the British Council. The last time I checked, Britain was also involved in a war or two in the Middle East which have involved the death of all manner of civilians, though I can't speak for the popularity of picnics in Kandahar and Umm Qasr and the attendant casualty rate.
Somehow it's all right for the Dublin Writers' Festival to accept British Council money, while the Israeli shekel is beyond the pale.
It reminds me of the NAFTHE (that's a British university lecturers' union) boycott of Israeli academics, to go with their existing boycott of Chinese, Russian, Syrian, Burmese etc academics, in protest over the appalling human rights records of those countries. Except of course there are such no boycotts except for the Israeli one, because while the thought of standing up to those evil Israeli bullies may give academics a political hard-on over their own self-righteousness, they don't really give a shit about those other innocent victims, or even, I'm sensing, given their selectiveness, the Palestinian victims either.
Anti-Semitism is not a pretty sight.
PS The Israeli army are a bunch of murdering bastards for what they are doing to people like this ten-year-old girl. Obviously so. But why does saying the above make me feel I need to spell this out in case people assumed I felt any other way about what are, by any standards, war crimes?
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