Dedicated to the clowns on apst who at the drop of a hat use the same
spurious arguments as the neo-cons they suck up to calling people
nazis, holocaust deniers etc for daring to question these things.
At least the drivel that makes up MIA as editors are in close company
ere...
vngelis
When academics lose their power of reason
* Nick Cohen
* The Observer,
* Sunday May 4 2008
* Article history
About this article
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This article appeared in the Observer on Sunday May 04 2008 on p32 of
the Comment section. It was last updated at 01:25 on May 04 2008.
Dr Nicholas Kollerstrom is convinced that academics have punished him
for a 'thought crime'. The distinguished astronomer exercised his
right as an intellectual in a free society to speak his mind. His
university responded by stripping him of his research fellow****p and
declared that it wishes to have 'absolutely no association' with him.
To make matters worse, Kollerstrom was denounced by University
College, London, one of Europe's greatest bastions of academic
integrity, whose founder, Jeremy Bentham, defended intellectual
freedom with the stirring words: 'As to the evil which results from a
censor****p, it is impossible to measure it, for it is impossible to
tell where it ends.'
Admittedly, if the philosopher had lived long enough to hear the
conspiracy theories of the 21st century, even his defence of free
speech might have weakened. Once he was away from his scientific
studies, Kollerstrom embraced them all. 'Let us hope the
schoolchildren visitors are properly taught about the elegant swimming
pool at Auschwitz, built by the inmates, who would sunbathe there on
Saturday and Sunday afternoons while watching the water polo matches,'
he said of the Nazi genocide. 'Let's hope they are shown postcards
written from Auschwitz, where the postman would collect the mail twice
weekly.'
Denying the crimes of the clerical fascists of today comes easily to a
man who can deny the crimes of the secular fascists of the 1940s.
Kollerstrom has opined at length on how the 9/11 attacks on New York
and the Pentagon and the 7/7 London bombings were not the work of the
actual bombers, but of Western security forces acting on the orders of
- you'll never guess - their 'Zionist masters'.
As it happens, Hasib Hussain, the 7/7 suicide bomber on the number 30
bus, detonated his explosives in Tavistock Square, just round the
corner from University College's main campus in central London. The
Islamist didn't kill research fellows, but cut short the blameless
life of Gladys Wundowa, a Ghanaian who worked as a cleaner at the
college.
I can understand how the attempts of one of its fellows to exonerate
her murderer repelled the college's managers. Equally obviously, they
must have thought they could safely dismiss him as a member of a
loathsome group of extremists. Rachel North, a victim of the bombings,
would not contradict them on that point. She described how respect for
the dead and injured didn't figure in his tormented mind. He harried
survivors, she said, tracking them down and harangued them with 'his
barking "theories" that the bombers were innocent "patsies" executed
by the state'.
A creep from the fringe, then, and a pestilential one at that. But the
clearest trend in intellectual life is the fringe developing trends in
the mainstream and magnifying them into grotesque shapes. To put it
another way, Kollerstrom is not as far away from respectable academics
as University College assumes. His faults are theirs too.
If a bomb were to explode outside University College today, mainstream
voices would fill the airwaves and say that responsibility for the
carnage lay with the British, American or Israeli governments. Their
arguments would be passionate and convincing, but I don't need to tell
you every one of them would avoid mentioning the Islamist ideology
that motivated Hasib Hussain and men like him. To divert attention
from a criminal is not the same as pretending that the criminal is
innocent. But it isn't so far away from it either.
Media London is currently muttering about commissioning editors being
intellectually crippled by a thoughtless version of multiculturalism
that can't take account of the differences between liberals and
reactionaries, secularists and fanatics, within communities. The BBC
caused the resentment by shelving a drama do***entary on the 7/7
bombings after its researchers, several of them British Muslims,
supplied a detailed picture of young men caught up by the theocratic
justifications for slaughter.
The researchers are bitter, not least because the bombers' families
read the script and vouched for its authenticity. BBC people tell me
that the grounds for postponing the do***entary were artistic and it
may yet be made for the fifth anniversary of the atrocities. I'm sure
they're telling the truth, but am equally sure that if they do come to
film it, they will face internal opposition from colleagues who, in a
vague and ill-thought- out manner, think it not quite proper to
discuss such matters in public.
As for conspiracy theory, though Holocaust denial is not acceptable in
the West, in academia, the scheming Jew is back as a cosmic force able
to pull the strings of his dupes and order the world to his desires.
American academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt argued to
widespread acclaim that a conspiracy of powerful Jews decided to serve
the interests of Israel by persuading America to invade Iraq in 2003.
Why the Elders of Zion didn't direct the US administration to invade
Iran, which wants to wipe Israel off the map, rather than Saddam's
Iraq, which was crippled by sanctions, they don't say and, more
interestingly, are rarely asked. Liberals would once have dismissed
their thesis as far-right ramblings. Now the London Review of Books,
house journal of liberal academia, repeats it.
Indeed, although he perpetuates Nazi doctrine, Kollerstrom presents
himself as a man of the left rather than the far right. He says that
he is not a member of a neo-Nazi organisation, but an active sup****ter
of the Green party, Respect and CND. Given the political gyrations of
our times, he may well be telling the truth.
Before Bentham died, he asked that his body be preserved so that it
could be exhibited at the college he founded. The authorities agreed
and Bentham sits in a wooden box in South Cloisters as if to remind
academics and students to uphold his commitment to reason.
Rather than seeking to restrict Kollerstrom's academic freedom, their
successors would have done better to have agreed to preserve his body
and place it next to Bentham's as a reminder to liberal intellectuals
of the state they may come to if they abandon liberal principles.
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A comment from a reader...
"Hasib Hussain, the 7/7 suicide bomber on the number 30 bus, detonated
his explosives in Tavistock Square, just round the corner from
University College's main campus in central London. The Islamist
didn't kill research fellows, but cut short the blameless life of
Gladys Wundowa, a Ghanaian who worked as a cleaner at the college. I
can understand how the attempts of one of its fellows to exonerate her
murderer repelled the college's managers."
Could you please present the evidence that Hussain and the others
actually did it? In the case of the Underground bombs, the debris was
blown from the floor upwards, quite impossible if the bombs were
carried in rucksacks of Islamists.
7/7 - Mind The Gap
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2001897549763616199
Ludicrous Diversion
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4943675105275097719
"A creep from the fringe, then, and a pestilential one at that."
I see you're more than happy to join in the organised hate, denouncing
Kollerstrom a thought criminal in true Orwellian style. BB would have
been proud of you. There is nothing creepy about wanting to determine
the truth. But there is something very creepy about your ad hominem
attacks, associating Kollerstrom with anti-Semitism and Holocaust
denial. You don't have to be Jewish to be a Zionist, just like you
don't have to be a Zionist to be Jewish.
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