More Love and Togetherness at the SOAS

The London School of Oriental and African Studies is rapidly acquiring a reputation as an international hotbed of hatred. Apparently anti-semitic sentiment is not the only piece of bigotry to reach boiling point. In the April New York Review, William Dalrymple writes:

In November 2003, at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, I was acting as moderator of a lecture on the great Hindu epic the Ramayana given by the celebrated Sanskrit scholar Professor Wendy Doniger, who was once Courtright's teacher. Midway through the lecture, a man stood up, walked threateningly toward the podium, and threw an egg at Doniger, which narrowly missed her. During the questions that followed the lecture, Doniger faced a barrage of insults from a group who had come with the egg-thrower, and who maintianed that as a non-Hindu she was unqualified to comment on their religion. Other lectures on India have since been broken up in similar circumstances.

The administration at the SOAS would have us believe that media reports of tensions on their campus are wildly exaggerated, no doubt reflecting jewish hysteria. This account would seem to contradict that. Nobody is likely to accuse Dalrymple of having a covert zionist agenda.

Note - please (Victor) don't imply that I have tremendous respect for Dalrymple - his review of Bernard-Henri Lévy's book on Daniel Pearl was mostly memorable for description of the 'glitzy departure lounge' at Karachi Airport intended to refute BHL's description of Pakistan as society in which women are not merely oppressed, but suppressed:

Looking around at the chic Pakistani women journalists, models, and politicians in the room as smiling turbaned waiters circled to offer us cups of chai...

First class lounges are just the same everywhere, aren't they!?