Denis MacEoin sent this letter to Southampton University Professor, Malcolm Levitt who has weighed in on Stephen Hawking’s boycott of Israel.

Subject: Israel’s explicit policies
11th May 2013
Prof. Malcolm Levitt
Dept. of Chemistry
Southampton University

Dear Professor Levitt,

I am not a chemist nor, indeed, a scientist of any kind. My academic background exists in a very different field, but one, I hope, that is of particular relevance to the subject of this e-mail. I am a former lecturer in Arabic and Islamic Studies and a former editor of The Middle East Quarterly, an international journal. My PhD was in an adjunct area of Persian Studies. I have a particular interest in the Middle East (where I have lived, first in Iran, later in Morocco) and my several visits to Israel have created in me a particular interest in matters relating to that country, both religious and political.

I was alerted today to a statement you made recently relating to the decision by Professor Stephen Hawking to boycott a conference due to be held in Israel, when you said ‘Israel has a totally explicit policy of making life impossible for the non-Jewish population and I find it totally unacceptable.’ Assuming I have quoted you correctly, I feel impelled to ask you where on earth you obtained such a manifestly nonsensical view. Like anyone, I feel free to criticize Israel when its government policies stray from the straight and narrow. Like any country, Israel makes mistakes. But when critics level accusations that are simply divorced from reality — that Israel practises apartheid, for example, or that it is ‘a Nazi state’ — then I cannot let such remarks pass by.

Israel is the one country in the Middle East (and often far beyond) of which it plainly and categorically cannot be said that it ‘has a totally explicit policy of making life impossible’ for adherents of any but the dominant faith. In Iran, for example, members of the indigenous Baha’i religion (about which I have written extensively) are hanged, imprisoned, denied employment in all professions, refused entry to the universities, and are threatened with genocide. Christians, Zoroastrians and Jews there are treated harshly. For many, life is impossible. Jews have been driven out of all the Arabs countries. In most Arab countries (notably Egypt), Christians are persecuted, churches are destroyed, and whole communities have been leaving over the past ten years and more. Those are all countries you would do better to condemn.

Israel is the only country in the Middle East whose Christian population has risen steadily since 1948. And Israel’s treatment of the Baha’is is exemplary: they have their international centre in Haifa, where they have built gardens, terraces, and white marble buildings facing the Mediterranean, half of a UNESCO World Heritage Site that puts the Iranian regime to shame. The other half of the UNESCO site is situated outside Acre and contains the holiest of the Baha’i shrines. In Iran, every single one of the Baha’i holy places has …read more
Source: Israpundit

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here