The Absurdity Extends to The UK

Possibly feeling left out by their American counteparts, UK anti-Zionist Jews under the banner of "Independent Jewish Voices" are trying to claim they are being muzzled as well. It is bad enough that Americans are writing in major newspapers and speaking at major universities that they are being muzzled but now the British are trying to get in on the act! This is all the more bizarre since the legitimacy of Israel's existence and expressions of anti-Semitism are a time honored tradition in the UK.

The British anti-anti-Semitism group Engage has a lot of information about this on their website.

Jonathan Spyer also takes aim at this insanity in Israel's Haaretz:

If we take, as an example, contributors to the Guardian, which published the IJV's founding statement, Jews who have successfully found the courage to resist the Board of Deputies and its anxiety-inducing unwritten laws include Daphna Baram, who wrote in a recent op-ed that Israel is an "apartheid state"; Jacqueline Rose, whose book, as her Guardian interviewer reminded us, "draws tentative analogies between Israel's treatment of Palestinians and Nazi Germany's treatment of Jews," and Ilan Pappe, the Israeli academic who recently wrote in support of a boycott of Israeli academia.

These opinions fit comfortably into parts of the British debate, in which denial of the right of Israel to exist and allegations of conspiracy theory are accepted within the parameters of polite discussion. British-born Jew Tony Judt, for example, was able to promote his thesis advocating the dismantling of the Jewish state in the London Review of Books.