No need to boycott the University of Johannesburg
The 400 so-called academics who backed the University of Johannesburg's boycott of Ben-Gurion University in Israel have demonstrated their own prejudice and established the irrelevance of UJ as an institution. While brutal Arab regimes and Iranian theocrats cling to power by imprisoning and murdering students and professors (among others), these supposed intellectual leaders are targeting Israel - and only Israel - for isolation.
A few years ago, when it was (more) fashionable among Western elites to believe Israel was the cause of all the troubles of the Middle East, the radical academic left tried to instigate academic boycotts of Israel worldwide.
In Britain, the Association of University Teachers briefly boycotted the University of Haifa and Bar-Ilan University in April 2005, before rescinding those boycotts a month later. In the USA, home to the world's leading universities, the boycott effort was flatly rejected in 2007, with 286 university presidents and 32 Nobel laureates signing counter-petitions condemning boycotts of Israeli universities.
Even Noam Chomsky, whose opposition to Israel is legendary, opposes academic boycotts. Those few obsessives who still push for boycotts of Israeli universities are a radical, marginal, and discredited bunch, regarded no more highly than AIDS denialists.
The organizers of the UJ boycott effort are now congratulating each other, hoping that they will inspire others around the world to follow their example. In reality, they have placed their own faculty and students at risk of isolation and rebuke by foreign scholars and academic institutions--even those critical of Israeli policies--that consider academic boycotts to be counterproductive and fundamental violations of academic freedom.