Someone who shall be nameless said to me recently - after a particularly silly article by Steve "the babe magnet" Friedman on the new information bill - that "Friedman's intelligence is, as ever, exceeded only by his stupefying arrogance".

I have to say that I felt quite hurt on Friedman's behalf. After all, I've known the babe magnet, these days a Business Day columnist and various other things, for about 30 years or so.

He was a fire-breathing, tie-chewing "labour" reporter and I a lowly sub-editor on the Financial Mail in the late 70s or early 80s - the days of inter alios Stephen "Muldoon" Mulholland, Nigel "let them eat cake" Bruce, Jacqueline Bosman, Peter Wilhelm, Caroline Southey, and Sharon Rohrbeck (aka Sha-Sha Robe) - in other words, in the heady days when men were men and women didn't necessarily wear knickers to work.

It also seems to me that Friedman ought to be a pretty happy chappie these days. He married two of the prettiest, charming and most intelligent women the city has known and has four clever and equally charming sons (though one, I understand, unaccountably supports Wigan).

What's more, having divorced the two gorgeous wives, Friedman apparently has no problems in engaging the attentions of various other good-looking women - hence the sobriquet "the babe magnet".

In short, he ate the cake but still has it too. Who of us wouldn't give almost anything to be in a situation in which we have these pretty and intelligent wives and fine children, but don't have to live with any of them on a permanent basis, and can spend most of our time doing just as we please? Sounds like bliss to me.

Not only all of the above, but Friedman now also has a doctorate and, I think, a professorship, and his think tank, or whatever, is obviously being subsidized in some way (very fulsomely, I trust) by the University of Johannesburg (UJ - formerly the Rand Afrikaans Universiteit, RAU) and Rhodes University. And the only cost to Friedman is that he must, it seems, be the occasional handlanger to the SABC's favourite Mr Dial-a-Quote, Adam "habibi" [my sweetie-pie] Habib, the vice-chancellor of UJ.

Now all this, as I have intimated, seems to suggest a contented existence.

I therefore find it difficult to understand why the babe magnet has allied himself to - some say he might even be the driving force behind - one of the most remarkable acts of banal and petty intellectual fascism one has ever encountered outside the ANC Youth League.

The clever chaps at UJ - Friedman, Habib, Farid Esack, and others - have managed to get the UJ's senate to threaten to end its relationship with Ben-Gurion University (BGU) in Israel, unless certain "conditions" are met.

I have a niece, Tali, who lives in the desert, hard by BGU, and she tells me that when news of this threat filtered through, a day of mourning was announced, candles were lit, people shuffled by with averted faces, Kol Yisrael (the Voice of Israel) played sombre music, and so on.

But, alas, that is what happened. In a statement, UJ's senate said Ben-Gurion University would have to work with Palestinian universities on research projects and stop its "direct and indirect support for the Israeli military and the occupation".

Aha! So BGU has been giving direct support to the "Israeli military" (let's be fair, some folk call it the Israeli Defence Force, the IDF) - and the occupation. I immediately went on line - and phoned the aforementioned Tali - looking at BGU for courses such as "How to bomb a Palestinian town 101 (the seminar)" or "How to fire white phosphorus shells at women and children 201". But I couldn't find anything.

The UJ senate's statement added: "Additionally, UJ will not engage in any activities with BGU that have direct or indirect military implications, this to be monitored by UJ's senate academic freedom committee."

Hmm, I thought, and immediately investigated the present joint activities of UJ and BGU. This is what I found. It's painfully boring, but so it goes:

September 6, 2009

A Joint UJ - BGU Proposal on Water Technology

Submitted by

B. Mamba, R. Krause- The University of Johannesburg ;
L. Pillay- Durban University of Technology;
Y. Oren, J. Gilron, R. Kasher, C. Linder- Ben Gurion University.

A. Topics of Collaboration

Based on the discussions conducted from August 24 to 28, 2009 at the University of Johannesburg , the following subjects for collaboration on water related issues have been identified:

1. Novel nanofiltration membranes for surface water and wastewater treatment. This approach is based on the current worldwide effort for treatment of wastewater to the highest possible level (e.g. drinking water) for recycling and environmental protection, and on the urgent need in countries such as South Africa , India etc to treat heavily contaminated surface water in rural areas. Wastewater is heavily loaded with organics, bacteria, viruses and sometimes some harmful components such as metallic and nonmetallic ions, micro-pollutants etc. As such, treatment of wastewater by membrane technology requires membranes that are stable under the harsh conditions imposed by such waters while preserving the accepted flux and rejection characteristics. This activity will be based on the PhD program proposed by Mr. Bhekani S. Mbuli from the UJ that will be supervised by the Proff Mamba, Krause and Pillay. It is suggested to focus on incorporating functionalized CNTs in polymeric matrices, including cyclodextrins ..

I leave it there. I am not certain what the military implications are, but no doubt Friedman et al will explain in "the fullness of time", as Mrs Van der Schyff, my history teacher at Brakpan High, used to say. Oh, and as much as I hate screwing up a good drubbing for the Yids with the facts, there's also apparently another joint project - related to algae.

Still, BGU could do something, I think, about kowtowing to UJ's demands; after all, UJ is supported by inter alios that senile, anti-Israeli cleric, archbishop emeritus Desmond "two-three" Tutu.

One problem is that all BGU's male and many of their female students have to do reserve duty - by law. What the hell: scrap the law; scrap the IDF while we're about it. Yeah, it's one of the roughest neighbourhoods in the world - but rather that Israel gives up its army than that the Babe Magnet, Habibi and Two-Three get upset, right?

Of course, rather than do military service, the Jews could go back into exile again - this way, they would not upset the sensitive folk at UJ. There's a fine thought: send the Jews back into exile.

David Newman, dean of the faculty of humanities at BGU, noted recently: "The past 15 years have witnessed a great deal of scientific cooperation in diverse areas. I could spend the rest of this column outlining some of the joint projects which take place between Ben-Gurion and both their Palestinian and Jordanian counterparts - be it in medicine, environmental protection and even overtly political issues such as human rights.

"But in doing so, I would be in danger of harming many of these programs. In most cases, it is the Palestinian side which prefers to keep the project out of sight of the media. Palestinian academics who work with Israelis find the political pressure to bow to the anti-intellectual logic of the boycott campaign difficult to deal with.

"By declaring a long list of cooperative projects, I also fall into the trap of trying to prove myself (or the institution I represent) a ‘good Jew,' one that can be legitimized for no other reason than the fact that I work and sympathize with the ‘other' side, am opposed to occupation, and promote the universality of human rights and independence for all.

"As much as I hold these positions, they are not, for me, a litmus test through which Israeli universities should, or should not, be made legitimate. Joint research is carried out for the intrinsic reason of producing knowledge, not so the researchers can be seen to be ideologically correct."

I'll leave it there, other than to say that maybe the fellows are UJ are correct. But then let's boycott MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in The States - after all, they do a lot of work for the department of defence - and what about all those British universities that have spawned the know-how and research resulting in the deaths of thousands of (mainly Muslim) people in Iraq and Afghanistan ...?

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