The University of Leeds has canceled a lecture by Matthias Küntzel entitled “Hitler’s Legacy: Islamic anti-Semitism in the Middle East.” The title had caused some controversy amongst Muslim students, leading administrators to rename the lecture “The Nazi Legacy: the export of anti-Semitism to the Middle East.” The renaming seemed to have sufficiently cooled the tempers, but the event was canceled anyway, on “security grounds,” after a number of complaints were made by email–though it’s not clear that any of those emails contained explicit threats against Küntzel. (Küntzel recently published a piece in THE WEEKLY STANDARD under the title Iran’s Obsession with the Jews.) According to the Times:
The university authorities contacted the German department on Tuesday and asked for a change in the title. The department agreed to relabel the talk as “The Nazi Legacy: the export of antiSemitism to the Middle East”.
Yesterday morning, the head of the German department, Professor Stuart Taberner, was called to a meeting with the Vice-Chancellor’s staff and the head of security. After the meeting, Dr Köntzel’s lecture and workshops were cancelled.
Annette Seidel Arpaci, an academic in the German department, said: “This is an academic talk by a scholar, it is not a political rally. The sudden cancellation is a sell-out of academic freedom, especially freedom of speech, at the University of Leeds.” A spokes-woman for the university said that it valued freedom of speech and added that the cancellation of the meeting had been a bureaucratic issue.
Over at the Commentary blog Contentions, Daniel Johnson writes that
The Küntzel case shows that Muslims do not even need to resort to the threat of violence in order to close down academic debate on subjects they dislike. Anthony Glees of Brunel University has been warning for years of the danger posed by Islamists on campus-a danger to which university authorities are notoriously weak in responding. Before his death last year, I spoke to Zaki Badawi, the leading Muslim opponent of Islamism in Britain, about this problem, which he saw as one of appeasement. This case, however, goes beyond appeasement. Leeds has set a new precedent: the pre-emptive cringe. Islamists everywhere will take heart from the spectacle of a reputable university setting a lower value on academic freedom than on the possibility that Muslim students might take offense.
