Academics for apartheid

There are three letters, in today's Guardian, about the proposed boycott of Israeli academia. Two are against the boycott whilst the other one seems to be for it, though frankly, I couldn't really tell since it was couched in extremely cautious terms. There are lots of names to the three letters. I notice Professor Geoffrey Alderman put his name to an anti-boycott one saying that "Neither party in this tragic dispute has a monopoly on suffering or injustice." I've never seen Alderman saying anything like that before. In fact the last time I saw him in print in the Guardian he was promoting one of the more recent zionist myths about the ethnic cleansing of 800,000 Jews from Arab states. David Cesarani is so against the boycott, though like Sharon, he's against the occupation, that he signed both anti-boycott letters.

Then there's the article that I have linked in the headline. It quotes from one of the anti-boycott letters thus

Does anybody suggest that American physicists should be excluded from the academic community if they do not repudiate Guantánamo Bay?

Well no, nobody does. But then does the USA exist on the sole basis of Guantanamo Bay as Israel exists on the basis of apartheid laws? No to that one too.