Unintelligent People Tap Intelligence Agency Against Pro-Israel Views

Maybe if Jewish Voice for Peace weren't a radical anti-Israel group, its MuzzleWatch blog would have been bothered by this. But, of course, they have nothing to say about the disturbing assault against academic freedom:

The University of Rostock consulted the state’s domestic intelligence agency to justify the refusal of space for a pro-Israel event sponsored by the German-Israel Friendship Society.

With Israeli media detailing an increasingly hostile attitude by German authorities toward Israel, the involvement of a regional intelligence agency in the cancellation of a pro-Israel lecture has sparked claims of increased bias toward the Jewish state.

Sacha Stawski, who heads the pro-Israel NGO Honestly Concerned in Frankfurt, told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday that the involvement of the intelligence agency with the university in pulling the plug on the Israel event is “an absolute scandal.”

Alex Feuerherdt, a German journalist who writes extensively about anti-Israel attitudes and contemporary anti-Semitism in the Federal Republic, told the Post that the intelligence agency and the university have “criminalized de facto engagement for Israel and this is a particularly huge scandal in light of German history.”

The Post conducted telephone interviews and email exchanges over a one-week period in late August and early September to shed light on the highly unusual form of government intervention to bar a pro-Israel speaker from delivering an early July lecture on the property of the University of Rostock, located in the eastern German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.