British school bans books by Jews from its campus in the Persian Gulf

LONDON, March 28 (JTA) — A British university has banned Jewish authors from its courses at its campus in the United Arab Emirates. The University of Lincolnshire and Humberside has confirmed that books by Jews, as well as those that mention Jews in their bibliographies, are banned by its affiliate in the Gulf state. In addition, the British Council, a state-run organization designed to promote British cultural achievements abroad, also conceded that it acquiesces in the censorship of works by Jews to accommodate “local political, religious or moral publishing laws.” The Board of Deputies of British Jews, the umbrella organization of the Jewish community, expressed outrage and is seeking to have the matter raised in Parliament this week. One Jewish official accused the university — one of the newest in Britain — and the council of “putting profits before principles.” The ban on Jewish authors was discovered by the Quality Assurance Agency, a British government standards watchdog, when it inspected the Skyline Institute in the United Arab Emirates, which teaches the British university’s degree courses. The agency has warned the university against “excluding its students from a body of scholarship on the grounds of the authors’ race or creed.” Leading academics are privately critical of the “new” universities, which they have long suspected of sacrificing quality to gain contracts abroad. This is the first time, however, that a university was found to be censoring work for political reasons. A university official, Derek Crothall, initially insisted that the school had never allowed censorship in the United Arab Emirates, but he later admitted that “there is a small amount of censorship which applies to all universities in the UAE.”