Middle East Centre

Like most university Middle East programs worldwide, Oxford’s centre appears to have disastrously betrayed academic integrity and scholarly rigor to bow before activist-academics whose pseudo-scholarship has and continues to dangerously indoctrinate students against reality. You need more Israeli and Jewish scholars to balance out the ideological virulence, lies and distortion of the vast majority of your speakers (settler colonialism? Here too? By the 3000-year-old indigenous population of the land most of whom returned as homeless refugees to build the region’s only pluriethnic democracy? What empire is that again? How about a few lectures on the virulent antisemitism pumped for decades into the Arab street or the murderous intransigence of Islamist political forces and genocidal Iranian proxies encircling Israel?) I earned my undergraduate degree at Oxford and was proud of its commitment to intellectual rigor and serious critical thinking. Yes, there are far fewer Jewish voices against oceans of Arab or Muslim points of view- that’s always been demographically true. But that’s no excuse and not pertinent in the perennial battle of truth against lies. Do better. Oxford has a real chance here to restore its reputation as a fount of world class education and deep intellectual commitment instead of devolving into another dangerously corrupted vehicle for dishonest activism and indoctrination.