Calls for sacking of professor over ‘anti-Semitic’ actions

SYDNEY University academic Jake Lynch is under renewed pressure over his support of the BDS campaign against Israel.

Sydney University academic Jake Lynch.

SYDNEY University academic Jake Lynch is under renewed pressure over his support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel, with calls for his sacking following a BDS protest last week.

University vice-chancellor Michael Spence has launched an investigation into a fracas that broke out on Wednesday when students stormed a public meeting on campus and disrupted an address by former British army colonel Richard Kemp. When security guards tried to remove the protesters, Professor Lynch criticised the guards; he says he was then attacked by a woman.

While Professor Lynch has written a letter to Dr Spence asking him to discipline the security guards, Mr Kemp wrote to the vice-chancellor claiming that Professor Lynch and another pro-BDS academic “were both apparently leading and encouraging the protesters”.

“At one point I observed ­Associate Professor Lynch waving money in the face of a Jewish student, a clearly aggressive and insulting act that seemed to invoke the stereotype of the ‘greedy Jew’,” Mr Kemp wrote.

The Australasian Union of Jewish Students has called on Dr Spence to sack Professor Lynch.

“Waving money in the face of Jewish people screams of the classical anti-Semitic falsehood that Jews are obsessed with money,” AUJS national chairman Dean Sherr said.

Professor Lynch, who is the director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, said he held up the bank notes to warn a woman who he said kicked him in the groin that he would sue her if she didn’t desist. He denied the action was anti-Semitic.

He said he had shown ­“almost heroic restraint” against the woman, while the security guards had, he said, shown no ­interest in curbing her actions.