Gordon Brown - please do not send Hicham Yezza to be tortured in Algeria

I know Gordon Brown is a close reader of Hunting Monsters, so perhaps a plea from me will soften his heart.

Hicham Yezza is an administrator working in Nottingham University. He is currently due to be deported to Algeria, over some not entirely convincing immigration faux pas he may have committed. The real reason he is being deported is that he helped a Nottingham University student, Rizwaan Sabir, by printing out a document for him. The document was downloaded from the website of the Central Intelligence Agency, and purports to be a training manual for Al-Qaeda. Some busybody in Nottingham University saw the document being printed, noticed that Mr Sabir and Mr Yezza both have foreign sounding names, and did what any decent person would do, calling in the police. They unfortunately discovered that Mr Sabir is a student of International Relations who is writing a dissertation on the methods of Al-Qaeda. Just to be on the safe side, the authorities are deporting Mr Yezza, but cannot do so with Mr Sabir, as he appears to be a British national. Mr Yezza is originally from Algeria, a country where they typically torture anyone who might conceivably have anything to do with political Islam, and his prospects are rather grim should he end up there.

Just on the off-chance that anyone reading this is considering a university in which to study International Relations, it might be a good idea not to go to Nottingham, if you think that Islamist extremism might be one of your areas of study.

More:

THE WAR ON TERROR COMES TO CAMPUS (blog)

NOTTINGHAM TERROR ARRESTS (blog)

Deportation plan to be reviewed (BBC)

Desmond Tutu banned

Via Brian's Study Breaks I learn that Archbishop Desmond Tutu has had an invitation to speak at St. Thomas' University in Minneapolis/St. Paul withdrawn. It was feared that the presence of Nobel Laureate Tutu might offend those who lend Israel unqualified support.

Pot. Kettle.

"He's a man who is a propagandist and is not a scholar."

Thus speaks Alan Dershowitz, who when not advocating the legalisation of torture, is a man always ready to heap vitriol on anyone with whom he disagrees. He was commenting on the recent resignation from DePaul University of Norman Finkelstein. DePaul had previously denied Finkelstein tenure, following a campaign against him by Dershowitz. The Dershowitz-Finkelstein love-in has being going on for a while now, with Finkelstein's recent book Beyond Chutzpah being largely a riposte to Dershowitz's The Case For Israel. Part of Finkelstein's claim was that Dershowitz had plagiarised elements of his book from Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial; Finkelstein had originally made his representation by exposing that book as fraudulent and plagiarised.

I can't claim any great familiarity with Finkelstein's work, nor can I comment in an informed manner on his suitability for tenure in DePaul. My suspicion, though, is that Finkelstein is being punished not for unscholarly writing but for taking on one of the giants of his profession, and that he was denied tenure not on academic grounds but because he was trouble.

Apartheid College Upgrades Self To University

Ariel College is a good candidate for being the least politically correct institute of higher education in the world. It is located in the West Bank settlement of Ariel, built on stolen Palestinian land. The college lies roughly half way between the towns of Ramallah and Tulkaram, relatively near to both Qalqilyah and Nablus, but appears to have no Palestinian students from the West Bank (though roughly 5% of its student body are Palestinians from within Israel proper).

Ariel College used to call itself the "College of Judea and Samaria in Ariel", but it has decided that henceforth it shall be known as "Ariel University Center of Samaria".

Academic Boycotts

British lecturers vote to boycott Israeli academic institutions.

Iranian government directs Iranian lecturers to boycott all non-Iranian academic institutions.

Meanwhile, Spy School is effectively boycotting me thanks to its libary's restrictive summer opening hours.

Tanya Reinhart

You may not have heard of Tanya Reinhart. She was an academic linguist by profession, but probably better known as an internal critic of Israel's political establishment and its occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Together with Ilan Pappe, she was one of the leading Israeli advocates of the boycott of Israeli academia (e.g. see 'Why The World Should Boycott Israeli Academic Institutions'). Ha'aretz reports that she died on saturday in New York.

I saw Reinhart speak twice in Dublin, a couple of years ago an then again late last year. I was struck on the most recent occasion by how much older she looked, and thought that it was the stress associated with her decision to leave Israel for good.