In a welcome response to a campaign by Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, the University of Leeds–UK has been inundated with correspondence demanding that Dr. Matthias Kuentzel’s two-day workshop for the Leeds University Department of German on “Islamic Anti-Semitism” be reinstated, after having recently been canceled the day of its offering after months of planning. European and American professors are expressing their outrage, for example:
Prof. Denis MacEion, a Fellow in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Newcastle University, writes: “…Not… to debate [Dr. Kuentzel’s topic]opens up a glaring gap in our knowledge of the Middle East…It is beyond my comprehension that a scholar with his credentials… should be barred from speaking simply because a pressure group with blatantly vested interests has complained. What will be next? No lectures on Iranian nuclear strategy because someone in the Iranian embassy made a phone call to someone in your office?
Lionel Tiger, Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers comments: “…Dr Sim Ravidovitch who graced your university as a brave and distinguished scholar…during World War Two…must be turning in his grave to learn of his and your University’s capitulation to precisely the forces which so ripped civility and thought during that war. It is shameful, craven, and – worse – now conventionally and unimaginatively ugly. Your fastidious fuss about security pales in significance aside the grave situation which permits you to tolerate a recurrence of what produced wartime violence. Please reverse this miserable decision.