Open Letter to the Edinburgh University Students' Association

By Denis MacEoin 

• No one holds meetings to call for reform in Islamic states. Instead, people like yourselves pass resolutions condemning the only country that defends those rights for all its citizens and visitors.
• If your government in Scotland or the UK banned books, imprisoned journalists, censored films, or prohibited campus meetings, you would be rightly outraged. You depend on free libraries, uncensored (though never unbiased) newspapers and journals, and direct access to the Internet. None of those freedoms exists in any Muslim country. Not in Egypt, not in Jordan, not in Saudi Arabia, not in Iran, not in Pakistan.
• Israel is, in every respect, a free society. When you support the Palestinians exclusively, you offer support to censorship and state control of expression. You need to think about this very carefully, because otherwise you reveal yourselves to be hypocrites of the first order. To attack a country that defends the rights you demand for yourselves and your friends is morally unforgivable.
• There are no apartheid laws in Israel. Arabs (both Muslims and Christians) in Israel have the same voting rights as Jews, have political parties of their own, serve as members of parliament, serve on the Supreme Court and other courts, are diplomats, lawyers, military officers, scientists, academics, and anything else they wish.
• "Those who know what real apartheid is, as I know, know that there is nothing in Israel that looks like apartheid. ... There is a widespread allegation, really a slander, that Israel is an apartheid state. That notion is simply wrong. It is inaccurate and it is malicious." -- Kenneth Rasalabe Joseph Meshoe, President of the African Christian Democratic Party in South Africa.

Dear Students,

As a concerned Edinburgh graduate, I write you with a sense of déjà vu, as I have done this before.
I want to restate and expand on my objections to your 2016 motion and resolution to boycott the Jewish state of Israel. Let me put that a little differently: the only liberal parliamentary democracy in the Middle East, one of the very few genuine democracies in the world today. I would like all of you to read this; only your willingness to do so, at least to listen to the arguments of others, will justify your claim to be intelligent young people studying at a world-class university.

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