Harry's Place under attack

The UK based blog Harry’s Place has been taken offline after a malicious complaint to the site’s ISP. HP is a well-known centre-left blog which generally takes a pro-democracy stance against the totalitarian mindset of elements on the left, especially where issues to do with anti-semitism are concerned.

As such, they make a lot of enemies. On this occasion they have offended some activists in the UCU - the British trade union for academics and college lecturers - which for some reason appears to be obsessed with the issue of Israel and the Palestinians (and in particular the issue of whether or not Israeli universities and academics should face a boycott) to the exclusion of practically anything else. The current dispute has blown up as a result of a posting to the UCU activists’ private email group by the Sheffield-based UCU member Jenna Delich, in which she included a link to the website of the American neo-nazi David Duke.

Astoundingly enough, this link was supposedly posted in ignorance of the kind of site that David Duke actually runs, which led to this (presumably ironic) post with helpful hints on how to avoid inadvertently citing extreme right websites in support of one’s arguments.

See Bob from Brockley for a useful summary of the situation. Also see this post by David Hirsh and this one from Robert Fine who is apparently an entirely sane, rational, thoughtful and compassionate human being apart from an unaccountable aversion to capital letters. Modernity points out the dangers for all bloggers (in fact the danger is to public debate in general) if Harry’s Place is silenced permanently. Flesh is Grass has another summary of responses from around the web and her own take on the original incident here.

Pending the reinstatement of Harry’s Place to its rightful domain, the essential information that the UCU activists are trying to suppress can be found here.

UPDATE: Harry’s Place is now back online, after finding a less spineless ISP.