Even by the standards of those who support the BDS, and call on the National Union of Students and others to support it, this article seems to have been held to an even lower standard of fact checking or basic logic. Mr Haywood and his brothers-in-folly accuse the State of Israel of apartheid and Israeli companies and institutions of racism; it lies not in their mouths.

Haywood mentions the cowardly denunciation by NUS President Burns of King’s College London, my own university, over their partnership with an Israeli company that greatly benefited both parties, holding this up as some great act of heroism. As if we are not all used to the same rhetoric of bashing Israeli-related entities by public figures with a nod and a wink of an apology in private. Haywood goes further and suggests that the French giant Veolia in some way supports a racist infrastructure. Of course in reality, the transport system he refers to accepts only Israeli citizens and permitted foreign nationals, and excludes Palestinian Authority ‘citizens’. Any Arab-Israeli could use the service if he happened to work where the transport system services. There is nothing racist about Veolia’s transport network whatsoever. This willing disregard for the facts sets the tone for the rest of this article.

The next unsubstantiated claim is that there are now ‘terrifying similarities’ in the state apparatus of modern day Israel and apartheid South Africa. Not one is named. Hot on the heels of that statement of warped opinion rather than fact is the claim that groups like the BDS have put out of business Israeli companies, or are having an effect on the profit of companies that operate in the Territories. While there is no doubt that these campaigns have stopped minor deals for some companies, Israeli-EU trade has been growing more on more every year for over two decades, and in the UK Israeli companies have never been doing so well. Any effect of the BDS seems to be negligible, apart from in the area of academic links where UK-Israeli university exchanges are fast becoming extinct due to the militant hostility of the anti-Israel mob. How are you expecting to change the minds of Israelis if you refuse to permit them to come and study in the UK, meet you and hear your arguments? Why is no similar campaign launched against universities either based in disputed territories or as seems to be the case with the BDS are just in the same country as the conflict elsewhere? Why only Israel?

References to Palestinian Ghandis would be laughable if they were not such a libel on the good name of one of the great leaders of the 20th century. Haywood goes on to challenge those of us who strongly oppose the BDS movement to ask who we stand for, and the answer is clear; the great silent majority. This majority is the one that believes that the BDS mob should not be permitted to bully, shout-down and boycott Israeli companies and Israeli institutions just because they are prepared to be more vicious. We call for the equal treatment of the Jewish State because it seems that Haywood and his ilk are unprepared to offer it otherwise. Of course his article and their campaign is about singling out Israel, why else would they pick Israel rather than their own country, the US, China, India, Iran, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, Kazakhstan or any of the other countries who breach international law in far more blatant and violent ways than the State of Israel?

The cause of anti-Apartheid was a just one, and the issue was black-white; the NUS was proudly involved. To tar any aspect of the Arab-Israeli conflict, or the modern State of Israel, with the same brush is to willingly disregard the facts in favour of a radical, partisan assault that is utterly unjustifiable. The Palestinian people have suffered long enough and made their own fair share of poor alliances to be hijacked by students in London, Birmingham and Leeds who have no concept of the situation. The BDS movement does not help them, and it betrays a level of double-standards for the one Jewish State that is as offensive as it is deplorable.

In a week where yet more evidence of rampant anti-Semitism was uncovered on UK campuses, Mr Haywood would do well to return to the library, take out a dictionary and a history book, and start checking his use of the words ‘apartheid’ and ‘racism’.