Jeffrey Ketland
Jeffrey Ketland is a philosophy lecturer at the University of Edinburgh who says he opposed the war in Iraq and yet signed the Euston Manifesto, which stated that the left as a whole is too critical of the actions of Western governments, including the military presence in Iraq. Regarding what he terms "militant jihadism", he writes in a statement on the Unite Against Terror website, "we must ... challenge the "Chomskified cretino-left which has made common cause with this totalitarian ideology".[1]
'There’s nowt wrong,' Ketland notes in a blog posting at around midnight on Friday 29 September 2006, 'with regular insults for views which — one judges to be — are morally indefensible and deranged.' 'I sometimes,' he adds:
- call Galloway and the “we are all Hezbollah” crowd (as well as the bizarre Heidegger/Lacan/Foucault/etc. crowd in our universities) “cretins”, for it is a precise way of expressing my horror at their dementedness. It does not raise the level of the debate beyond scorn, I suppose, but in some cases one can only respond with scorn.[2]
Views
Ketland gave this account of his views on politics and war in September 2006:
- For the record, I’ve always been a rather boring Labour supporter, probably in the “right” of the party (e.g., I opposed Foot/Benn; I welcomed Kinnock and Smith). Regarding British (and/or Western) military action since 1982, my views were:
- Falklands (in favour; hideous military dictatorship invades part of a liberal democracy),
- 1st gulf war (in favour; Saddam’s barbaric regime, extending itself violently into the gulf),
- Kosovo (in favour; I had long felt that we appeased Milosevic’s aggression for far too long; I argued, often bitterly, with friends about this),
- Sierra Leone (in favour),
- Afghanistan (against—it’s a pathetic excuse, but I was badly influenced by Chomsky’s “silent genocide” line of argument in late 2001, which also seems to have been similar to what Nick Cohen argued; Chomsky has never admitted he was wrong),
- Iraq war (against; sceptical of WMD claims; worried about the medium-term consequences, both in Iraq and globally, of a screw-up).
- I was certainly *wrong* about Afghanistan, and I feel irritated with myself for getting it wrong. That feeds into my animosity against Chomsky and I know quite a few people who feel similarly. Brad de Long has said similar not too long ago on CT in relation to Chomsky’s bizarre analysis of the Cambodian genocide. I have to thank Oliver Kamm, again publicly, for educating me on the speciousness of Chomskyism.
- I still do not know whether I was right or wrong about Iraq. I am one of the EM signatories who opposed the Iraq war, as are Jon Pike and Shalom Lappin.[3]
Website
His personal homepage on the University of Edinburgh website circa 2006 revealed:[4]
- A section titled 'Criticism of Chomsky, Galloway and Pilger' with links to articles by, amongst others, several Neoconservatie linked writers such as Russil Wvong, Brad DeLong Christopher Hitchens, James Ostrowski, Keith Windschuttle, in The New Criterion, Oliver Kamm , William Shawcross, Johann Hari.[5]
- A Section titled 'Can There be a Decent Left? Some Stuff'including links to articles by, amongst others, Michael Walzer, Alan Johnson (at Labour Friends of Iraq) Shalom Lappin Norman Geras Will, from A General Theory of Rubbish, Daniel Finkelstein.[6]
- He has been active in undermining the AUT call for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions as can be seen from his statement that 'in early 2005, a small group of political extremists attempted to hijack the AUT, the British academic trade union, and to implement an “anti-Zionist” policy of boycotting Israeli Universities. I opposed this attack on academic co-operation and freedom.' and his posting of links to Engage and his own statment opposing the boycott in which he claims that what he describes as 'extremist anti Zionism' has a 'nasty whiff of antisemitism'.[7]
Affiliations
Contact
- Department of Philosophy, David Hume Tower
- George Square, University of Edinburgh
- Edinburgh EH8 9JX
- 44 (0)131 650 3662
- jeffrey.ketland at ed.ac.uk
- Website: homepages.ed.ac.uk/jketland
Related Articles
- ↑ Jeffrey Ketland's statement on Unite Against Terror, accessed from the Internet Archive of 9 November 2007 on 17 March 2009
- ↑ Jeffrey Ketland, Comments on the Blog 'Drink-soaked Trotskyite Popinjays for War'Early Euston Manifesto Manifestations, Friday 29 September 2006 at 23:58
- ↑ Jeffrey Ketland, Comments on the Blog Drink-soaked Trotskyite Popinjays for War'Early Euston Manifesto Manifestations, Friday 29 September 2006 at 23:58
- ↑ Jeffrey Ketland Other Things, University of Edinburgh Personal Homepage, Retrieved from the Internet Archive of 10 November 2006 on 17 March 2009
- ↑ Jeffrey Ketland Other Things, University of Edinburgh Personal Homepage, Retrieved from the Internet Archive of 10 November 2006 on 17 March 2009
- ↑ Jeffrey Ketland Other Things, University of Edinburgh Personal Homepage, Retrieved from the Internet Archive of 10 November 2006 on 17 March 2009
- ↑ Jeffrey Ketland Should there be an academic boycott of Israel? (To be published as an invited comment in The Philosopher’s Magazine, May 2005. The comments here are entirely my own, and are in no way endorsed by the University of Edinburgh.), University of Edinburgh Personal Homepage, retrieved from the Internet Archive of 3 May 2005, accessed 17 March 2009
