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".

"There’s nowt wrong," Ketland notes, "with regular insults for views which — one judges to be — are morally indefensible and deranged". "I sometimes," he adds, "call... [such people]... 'cretins', for it is a precise way of expressing my horror at their dementedness."

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.

Website

His personal homepage on the University of Edinburgh website circa 2006 revealed:

• 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.
• 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.
• 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'.

Affiliations

• Engage
• Euston Manifesto
• Unite Against Terror

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