[From article]
It took a George Orwell to point out that higher learning and stupidity make a regular couple. “There are notions so foolish that only an intellectual will believe them,” wrote Orwell, laconic and lucid together.
[. . .]
He’s a reminder that professors may lack a modicum of common sense. He learnt that to parley with learned people may be to parley with fools. We don’t have to upturn rocks to uncover Orwell types. Look no further than a fashionable cause or a conventional wisdom and you’d find them – fool believers clinging for dear life to nonsensical notions.
In our troubled landscape one collecting point attracts more such pairings than any other point. A vast deposit of learned fools sticks to the brouhaha over Palestinian rights and Israeli wrongs.
[. . .]
“BDS is a rights based movement which is opposed to racism in all its forms – including, explicitly anti-Semitism.” (source) You can picture Orwell beaming. It would take a professor of philosophy, (in this case Peter Slezak at the University of Sydney) to believe that boycotters are there for human rights, or Palestinian rights for that matter. Better look at what boycotters do rather than listen to what they say. True, BDS bullies the world to cut off Israel for the way it treats Palestinians; but not The Palestinians, mind. The focus is more pinpoint. For that portion, and no other, living under the Jewish ‘occupation’ the halo brigade acts. Desperate Palestinians rotting in Arab lands go under the radar. Come hell or high water, academics won’t batter an eye for a people living and dying worse than cur dogs under the Arabian sun.
Academia wears the formula on its sleeve: Muslim crimes on Palestinians are Muslim business. Jewish crimes on Palestinians are OUR business.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/05/when_professors_turn_foolish_they_turn_really_stupid_.html
May 16, 2015
When Professors Turn Foolish They Turn Really Stupid
By Steve Apfel
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