UK: Southampton University cancels seminar by Israeli researcher

Chief Scientist Mark Walport recently said that there's no official boycott of Israeli institutions.  Maybe he should do something about these non-official boycotts, because for Jews - there's no real difference.

h/t Sussex Friends of Israel

Via the Daily Echo:

THERE were protests in Southampton yesterday before a planned seminar by an Israeli academic.

Protesters from Students for Palestine and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign set up a picket line ahead of a planned public talk by Professor Mark Auslender, a researcher and professor in engineering sciences at the University of Ben- Gurion in Negev, Israel.

The English Defence League organised a counter-demonstration, and police and security guards stood by at the University of Southampton.

The protest remained peaceful but the talk on optical sensors and how they can be used in health care, which had been organised by the university’s Optoelectronics Research Centre, was cancelled.