Here we go again

Some things never seem to change. Rod Liddle’s article in the Sunday Times has a segment about a Jewish student at Leeds university who ‘failed’ her sociology degree.

“Danielle Greyman had written about the use of human shields by Hamas and clearly failed to qualify her arguments by adding the rider “which is the legitimate voice of the oppressed Palestinian people in their righteous fight against the Zionist entity”. An outside examiner said the 23-year-old’s essay should have passed.

You get good grades these days only by agreeing with the adolescent views of the lecturers."

Never mind “These Days!” Because ..........

in 2005 “right-wing journalist Melanie Phillips” published an email on her website which she had received from a student at Aberystwyth. The student complained that:

[T]he only way to really succeed within the university industry is to pander to the prejudices of the academic staff; anything that differs with the anti-Semitic orthodoxy results in rather harsh marking. When I first went to university, I came with the naive belief that study at such an institution was about the pursuit of knowledge and truth; it is about lies, propaganda and the worst sort of prejudice. [2]

The student claimed that ‘most of the academic staff [believe] that all the world's current ills can be attributed to the activities of the US and Israel, and those that can't are the result of our colonial legacy.’ 

2005 is what, 17 years ago? Yes, that was Aberystwyth rather than Leeds, and the academics whose political agenda tainted the course were  convener Dr Marie Breen Smyth and Dr Richard Jackson rather than the academic who assessed the Leeds essay, namely 

 “Claudia Radiven, studied under Shaikh and Sayyid, specializing in Islamic law, Islamic theology, and Islamic finance, with a special interest in rehabilitation of convicted terrorists.”

I looked at other reports about the latest incident.

Under the header: “Jewish student sues Leeds University 'after being given fail in sociology assignment for not criticising Israel’” the Daily Mail, for example, has published a substantial number of readers’ responses, the majority of which defend the university and criticise the student for ‘one-sidedness’.

Yes, her essay was one-sided. Perhaps the commentariat in their wisdom couldn’t grasp the idea that her study had a specific brief: “crimes committed by Hamas against Palestinians” and not (thanks for small mercies) “a study of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.”

In any case, would the demands for ‘putting the other side’ be equally abundant had the essay been titled “the Israeli state carries out acts of violence” or any similar ‘adolescent’ left-wing idiocy?