his article is excerpted from the transcript of a speech delivered to a Toronto conference titled: “When Middle East Politics Invade Campus,” organized by Advocates for Civil Liberties on Feb. 16.

In May 2008, the University and College Union of Great Britain called for a boycott of Israeli academia, which went into immediate effect. As Ron Prosor, the Israeli ambassador to the U.K., put it at that time: “Academics, who are supposedly society’s guardians of knowledge, objectivity and informed debate, have seen their union held hostage by radical factions, armed with political agendas and personal interests.” To boycott the professors, teachers and thinkers of an entire country, purely on grounds of nationality, which in the context of Israel effectively means grounds of race (as Arab academics do not seem to be affected), is a morally despicable thing to do, and the University and College Union should be ashamed of doing something so regressive and de facto racist.

One of the key battlegrounds in the struggle over Israel’s survival is on the campuses of the West, where opinions are being formed in the minds of the people who will constitute the national leaderships of tomorrow. I believe the battle is presently being lost, not least in the way that opinions utterly opposed to any sense of tolerance and decency are not only being aired but are being applauded.

Consider the following: In my country, Great Britain, Queen Mary’s University has recently hosted Abu Usamah, who has expressed such sentiments as that homosexuals should be thrown off mountains, that women are “deficient,” and that they should start wearing the hijab from the age of seven, because “by the age of 10 it becomes an obligation on us to force her to wear hijab and if she doesn’t wear hijab, we hit her.” NonMuslims, he says, are “pathological liars,” and “Jews and Christians are enemies to Muslims.”

London’s equally highly respected School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) has a Palestine Society that has recently showed a film that included the following lines: “Allah is the greatest. He who thanks Allah will be rewarded. Oh Allah, loosen your power and strength on the Jews. Please Allah, kill them all. And don’t leave any of them alive.”

The London School of Economics (LSE) has held a lecture by Abdel Bari Atwan titled How much influence does the Zionist lobby exert in the U.S. and U.K.?, and its Palestine Solidarity Society has recently heard from Ahron Cohen, who, despite attending Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent Holocaust Denial conference in Iran, in fact does not only acknowledge that the Holocaust happened, but actually blames Jewry for it: “There is no question that there was a Holocaust and gas chambers. There are too many eyewitnesses. However, our approach is that when one suffers, the one who perpetrates the suffering is obviously guilty but he will never succeed if the victim did not deserve it in one way or another.”

These academic institutions—Queen Mary’s, SOAS, the LSE and others—are not the kind of unknown Internet colleges where you might expect to hear foul, unhinged language of this kind; they are old, established, respected institutions of learning that have simply abrogated their duties to ensure that the laws regarding hate speech are not broken—and broken flagrantly—on their campuses.

Who can doubt that all this has had a direct effect on some students at least, who have in recent years gone on to perpetrate outrages that have led to deaths and mutilation? The former president of University College London’s Islamic Society, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab—the so-called underwear bomber—tried to kill everyone on a Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day 2009. Omar Khan Sharif, who was a student at King’s College, London, and attended meetings of extremist Islamic organizations there, later carried out a suicide attack in a bar in Tel Aviv. Taimur Abdulwahab al-Abdaly, who was radicalized at the University of Bedfordshire, went on to blow up both himself and innocent bystanders in Sweden three months ago. There should be no surprise that the messages of these universities’ radical Islamic societies has led straight to murder and maiming: Hate in, Hate out.

Meanwhile, British trade unions regularly pass motions for economic, cultural and sporting boycotts of Israel. There was even in March 2009 calls to boycott the London Science Museum’s “Israel Day of Science,” which was going to showcase to schoolchildren Israeli advances in cancer research, solar energy and water desalination. The Independent newspaper, as part of its long-term and ongoing campaign of abuse against Israel, dutifully gave over its front-page in support of the boycott. Once you add the Guardian newspaper using its comments pages to normalize extremist ideology and legitimize terrorist organizations, and Channel 4 asking Ahmadinajad to deliver its Christmas Message, you’ll see that we have reached a position where fair-minded debate between people of good faith is at a discount, and the line between rational and irrational has been blurred so badly as to become almost meaningless.…

The Idea of the University, Cardinal John Henry Newman’s great work defining how the republic of the mind should be governed, hailed the importance of increasing the breadth of understanding, promoting excellence in scholarship, advancing student dialogue and freedom of expression and inquiry. These are still what underpin the ideal of the Academy in free societies, over a century later. Yet these are under mortal threat today.

Interestingly, one place where they are not under threat is in Israel and the occupied areas of the West Bank. Ariel University Center of Samaria, near Nablus on the West Bank, has 500 Israeli-Arab students among the 9,000 undergraduates studying at the university. Their presence at an institution that symbolizes the Israeli occupation and is the largest Israeli employer in the West Bank, comes as a surprise to many outsiders. Manar Dewany, a 20-year-old student in math and computer science who commutes each day from the Israeli-Arab town of Taybeh, says: “I never even considered it a reason for not coming here. I have no problem with it. Why not come here? This place is full of Arabs. Politics aren’t a problem here. It’s not even discussed. Studies are one thing and politics are another. Relations on campus are fine, natural. Everyone gets on well with each other. I was the only Arab student in my class last year, and I was treated the same as everyone else.”

There is a wealth of irony in the fact that one of the only places that Middle Eastern politics is not permitted to invade the campus is in the West Bank itself.…

Today we see [the] forces of ignorance and intolerance rising up once more in this campaign to boycott academics, writers and thinkers solely because of their nationality, in effect in the context of Israel therefore, because of their race.…

Israel therefore should not merely see herself as being in the front line in the War Against Terror, although of course she is. But in this present struggle over the academic boycott and the right of free speech in universities, Israel and her supporters—Jew and Gentile alike—are in the forefront of something even more important than that. For today, they stand in the very vanguard of the centuries-old struggle for truth over falsehood, knowledge over ignorance and therefore—ultimately—of civilization over barbarism.