There is an annual war conference which calls itself a peace conference. The leadership of the pro-war movement in the UK (which calls itself anti-war) attends. John Wight, a Scottish antisemite, who is active in the ‘Edinburgh Stop the War Coalition’ attended this year as part of a delegation from the antisemitic Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign. John Wight has written this account of his part in this year's Cairo Conference.

One especially cringe-worthy passage is his own excited description of a moment of attention which Fayad Ali of Hezbollah generously gave John Wight.

"He was on his way out of the hall, surrounded as ever by a coterie of Stop the War/SWP minders, who throughout the three days of the conference seemed intent on keeping him ring fenced away from other international delegates. As he passed me and other SPSC comrades, Ali shook my hand, leaned forward and putting his other hand up to his ear, said: “I heard you.” Then he walked on."

More substantial is Wight's confirmation of the split within the UK boycott movement and apparently within the SWP itself:

“At the Stop the War meeting myself and Vanessa Fuertes of SPSC had an exchange with both Chrish Nineham and Alex Callinicos over the state of the movement, while at the workshop on the academic boycott Mick Napier and Sofiah MacLeod of SPSC had it out with John Rose when he proposed a limited academic boycott encompassing only those Israeli universities and institutions located in settlements.”

John Rose, it seems, is still pushing his line that the only winnable boycott in UCU is a boycott of Ariel College which is an Israeli settler college in the West Bank. The SWP Central Committee is evidently unable to control its own loose cannon, Tom Hickey, who leads the SWP comrades in the UCU and who has recently proposed a general boycott resolution.

John Wight goes on to let the cat out of the bag concerning the real aim of the academic boycott campaign:

“More specifically, I talked about the academic boycott as being a transcendental initiative, in that it went beyond its material effects and began to chip away at the foundation of moral legitimacy upon which this apartheid state rests.”

Everyone from now on who claims that they support the boycott but also recognize Israel's right to exist should be confronted with this truth, out of the mouth John Wight, a keen supporter of the campaign. John Wight also believes that

"The state of Israel is a hydra-headed monster, comprising Zionist ethnic cleansers, US imperialists, and Arab collaborationist regimes. Arrayed against this monster are the forces of human progress."

Also:

"As soon as the scales fall from the eyes of international Jewry with regard to the racist and fascist ideology that is Zionism, the world will begin to emerge from the iron heel of war and brutality in the Middle East."

Wight's whole report of this year's Cairo Conference is well worth a read. Here.

More on the Cairo Conference on Harry's Place.