Another academic year begins, and yet another academic boycott of Israel is launched to great fanfare by a tiny but loud group of mostly obscure British university lecturers.
Their cause is generating enormous publicity and reaction, despite the fact that the launch of just about any other such boycott on a similar scale would fail to make headlines even in the local free newspaper.
The reason this one has stirred great interest is that its backers paid a small fortune (which surely would have been more ethically donated to a charity educating disadvantaged Palestinian children) to place a full-page advertisement in the Guardian.
It announced that some 300 academics have pledged to refuse to act as referees in activities related to Israeli academic institutions, eschew all co-operation with Israeli universities and reject all invitations for academic visits to Israel. However, their boycott will not, they reassure us, extend to Israeli colleagues working in their individual capacities.
But how, exactly, will that work in practice?
Are the latter's social media accounts now to be obsessively monitored so they can be dutifully shunned in the campus canteen and lecture circuit should their academic commitments breach the new Gestapo-like rules and regulations?
The list of signatories has since grown to about 600. At first glance that figure looks alarming, and the movement's organisers are positively ecstatic.
But those of us who live in the real world should keep in mind that there are approximately 180,000 full-time, contractually employed academic professionals working in Britain's higher education institutions, and roughly the same number of part-timers.
In other words, less than 0.1 per cent of them have thus far pledged allegiance to the fascist cause.
So there is, in fact, no great excitement among Britain's academics when it comes to joining this deranged fringe group of anti-Israeli obsessives.
Israeli academics will not, one assumes, be tearing out their hair in despair as they postpone the lucrative series of lectures they had lined up for Dr Mark Bould, a reader in Film and Literature at the University of the West of England who specialises in science fiction, political cinema and Marxism.
A grossly disproportionate number of the others are of Muslim origin and/or teaching at that hotbed of pro-Palestinian activism, the School of Oriental and African Studies. So it is no surprise to find out where their sympathies lie.
They include Dr Atef Alshaer, an Arabic lecturer at the University of Westminster, who was born in Gaza and completed his English Language and Literature degree at Birzeit University. He contributes to such illustrious news websites as the Electronic Intifada and the Palestine Chronicle.
Almost all of the more prominent signatories have similarly been spouting anti-Zionist claptrap since they were able to crawl. They likewise would not be seen associating with an Israeli Jew even if their lives depended on it, boycott or no boycott; and no intelligent person - Jewish or otherwise - could suffer their company for more than a nanosecond.
Of course, despite its complete irrelevance to ordinary people, the boycott should be opposed for its shameless McCarthyism, and be exposed for its monumental stupidity and rank hypocrisy.
What better place to start than Oxford University, which employs 12 of the boycotters? The university's Centre for Islamic Studies has accepted (as have many other Islamic Studies and Middle East departments in the country) millions of pounds from that barbaric medieval theocracy Saudi Arabia, currently bombing to bits the poorest Arab country, Yemen.
Saudi Arabia oppresses its Shia minority, beheads sorcerers in public squares, and bans all forms of Christian worship. It has made calling for democracy a capital offence, and in general has a human rights record that rivals that of North Korea.
More to the point, since the 1930s the entire country has been under occupation - the boycotters' favourite subject - by the House of Saud, which, backed by British money and air power, slaughtered as many as one third of the population to establish its rule.
Then there are the dozens of American, British and European universities who have set up campuses in other despotic Gulf Arab states.
Christopher Davidson, a reader in Middle East politics at Durham University, recently told the Financial Times that there is, as a result of this shameless money grab, a serious glut of critical studies on Gulf topics being produced by Western scholars.
In stark contrast, there are no taboo topics in Israeli universities. A research student there would even be allowed to research a thesis on why he thought Israel should be considered an illegal colonial settler state.
No one, though, better encapsulates the sheer lunacy of the Israel academic boycott than Conor Gearty, a professor of human-rights law at the London School of Economics.
LSE is the university that gave Saif Al-Islam a bogus doctorate while pledging to accept millions in donations from the human-rights loving Gaddafi regime. When that scandal broke, rather than expressing his disgust, Professor Gearty wrote a piece for The Tablet lamenting calls to restrict donations from such countries and individuals, arguing that this approach would "embrace insularity as a price worth paying for an easy but dull life".
And now here he is embracing insularity to death, backing calls to boycott Israeli universities that are completely independent from the government, have always been bastions of support for co-existence with the Palestinians, and which exist under the full human-rights protection of the only democracy in the Middle East. The mind simply boggles.
Still, the boycott will serve at least one useful purpose. Any student who is eager not to pay through the nose to be tutored by a lecturer whose understanding of the world is on a par with the comic character Borat now at least has a list of the academics to look out for.
