AUT fight not over

Melanie Phillips points to an article in the Socialist Worker arguing that although the boycott of Haifa and Bar Ilan universities was defeated "the presumption behind the original vote, that Israel oppresses the Palestinians, went more or less unchallenged."

Phillips suggests that Natan Sharansky should be drafted to tour British universities to win over hearts and minds.

What a weapon it would be to set Sharansky, the survivor of the gulag who understands from the inside the umbilical connection between communism and Jew-hatred and has had personal experience of what David Pryce-Jones has called the psychological warfare tactics employed by totalitarian regimes, against the Marxists and Trotskyites who have hijacked progressive politics in Britain and are currently employing such tactics to delegitimise Israel and terrorise and intimidate British Jews.