Almost three years ago to the day, moves towards an academic boycott of Israel began in earnest when a moratorium on European funding for Israeli research was suggested by Steven and Hilary Rose and 120 other academics, in a letter to the Guardian. The issue has burst on to the front pages intermittently: when Umist's Mona Baker sacked two Israeli linguists from a translation journal she edited; when Oxford's Andrew Wilkie refused a place to an Israeli PhD student; and last year, when the School of Oriental and African Studies hosted a conference on the subject entitled Resisting Israeli Apartheid: Strategies and Principles.

Behind the scenes, its leading campaigners in the UK, France, the Occupied Territories and Israel, have been refining what an academic boycott is, what the arguments are, and whose support they really have. That debate, which has existed mainly in email exchange groups, obscure online publications and weblogs, is about to be aired very publicly. In two weeks time, in Eastbourne, the Association of University Teachers will debate, once again, whether to adopt a form of the boycott as official union policy.

This time the boycott advocates are picking their battles:

. . . rather than committing the union to a boycott, the only action the motion requires is that the full text of the Palestinian call be circulated to all AUT members. The final motion is significantly softened compared with previous drafts, which called for a full boycott. "It's a tactical attempt to get it through," admits Birmingham's Sue Blackwell, one of the motion's authors. "We've got to be a bit more sophisticated. We are now better organised. One of the reasons we didn't win last time was that there was no clear public call from Palestinians for the boycott. Now we have that, in writing. . . . To call for a general boycott of all Israeli institutions, without specifying the reasons, is harder for people to swallow."

The union's executive, which, two years ago, refused to recommend the boycott call to conference, independently tabled its own motion on the subject - before the OU/Birmingham move - pointing out the recent ceasefire and offering support to Palestinian academics working in difficult and dangerous conditions. But, in what sounds like a warning, albeit shallow, to both the Israelis and the members who want a boycott, it adds: "Council also recognises that the peaceful resolution of the problems facing the Middle East will not be brought about by the erection of barriers, but by open dialogue."

Even if the union doesn't vote to make this official policy, the boycott has been proceeding informally all along.

Blackwell says that over the past three years the boycott has been as active as ever, but on a quiet and individual level - "a covert boycott where people are quietly getting on with it. It's a passive boycott that dares not speak its name".

Dr Tamar Jaffe-Mittwoch, director of the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) says that passive boycott has been "very painful . . . We've had about a dozen people refuse to work for us, in the previous two years there were more. It wasn't big, but, conceptually, it was a shock. The shock is that the academic world is being contaminated with politics. We feel academia is something that should be pure."

So there you have it, folks: for the past three years there has been an ongoing stealth boycott by European academics of Israeli academics. And this is not just in mushy areas like "cultural studies," but in the hard sciences.

Somehow, I think Europe is going to end up a bigger loser in this struggle than Israel.

Jewish representatives in the UK's National Student Union criticize its refusal to condemn antisemitism.

Solomonia got a chance recently to hear a presentation on Palestinian manipulation of the media, especially the video of the Muhammed Al-Dura "shooting." Read his report and explore his links to other efforts to expose this fraud.

The number of bias incidents against Jews in the US is the highest in nine years.

The ADL attributed the 2004 increase to organized neo-Nazi hate groups and friction in public schools, where 13 percent of the incidents took place. �There was a spike in schools of children being told �You killed Christ,� � said ADL national director Abe Foxman. �We haven�t seen epithets in those numbers for years.�

ADL and other groups in recent years have substantially increased their educational efforts to fight anti-Semitism and other prejudices. But at the same time, Foxman noted, hate groups are also working harder to achieve the opposite effect, while young people have increasing access to hate messages via the Internet. �Although we are doing more there are more people to deliver it to, but also and a lot of counterveiling forces,� said Foxman. �It is much quicker to teach kids to hate than to teach them to unhate.�

Okay, that's from the right. Now lets check out the latest bloviating from the far left. Ward Churchill has been using the controversy about his 9-11 remarks as a great opportunity to make money touring campuses presenting himself as a victim of censorship (I know, I know, the irony). His most recent appearance at Berkeley turned into a Jew-bashing session very quickly.

UPDATE: The Moronic Convergence is alive and well: London's East End used to be a working-class Jewish neighborhood, but like similar neighborhoods in big cities here, second-generation Jews moved out and newer immigrants moved in. Now the area is largely Muslim, and Saddam apologist George Galloway and black-Jewish daughter of a civil rights worker Oona King are duking it out to represent the district in Parliament. Galloway is pandering to Muslims antisemitism - no surprise there - and King is getting pelted with eggs. At a memorial service for Jewish war veterans.