In October, I received an email from a student representative of Oxford Stand Up to Racism inviting me to sign a statement headed “The far right are not welcome on our campuses”. This was part of an effort to prevent Alice Weidel of Alternative für Deutschland from giving an invited talk at the Oxford Union. This email arrived two days after I had received an email from students at the American University of Beirut insisting that I withdraw from giving an invited lecture there. One of them, apparently endowed with superhuman resistance to boredom, had searched my CV and been rewarded by discovering that I am an adviser to the Center for Moral and Political Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I am thus in violation of the academic boycott of Israel and, the students claimed, a paid employee of an institution that is implicated in war crimes. I was, therefore, “not welcome” at their university.
I replied to the first email by explaining why, although I share the students’ detestation of AfD, I believed that preventing Weidel from speaking would be counterproductive. I replied to the second by explaining why I would not withdraw and offering to meet the students for discussion.
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