Student Union Cancels Redgrave After Her Attack on Zionists

An invitation to actress Vanessa Redgrave to address the Cambridge University Students Union has been withdrawn because of her statement about “Zionist hoodlums.” The decision was made by Daniel Janner, vice president of the Union and son of MP Greville Janner, after the actress made her remarks at the Academy Awards ceremonies in Los Angeles Monday night where she won an Oscar for best supporting actress in the film “Julia.”

“She is obviously violently anti-Zionist to a degree I didn’t realize,” Daniel Janner said. “There were Palestinians as well as Zionists outside, but she chose only to attack the Zionists. I found that disgusting.” He was referring to the demonstrations outside the Los Angeles Music Center where Jewish Defense League pickets were protesting Ms. Redgrave’s Oscar nomination and pro-Palestinian supporters who were staging a counter-demonstration. The actress is under fire from the JDL and other Jewish groups for her documentary film, “The Palestinian,” which expresses an anti-Israel anti-Zionist view.

In Britain, where Ms. Redgrave’s political views are not taken very seriously, her Hollywood exploits were widely reported in the media. Both London evening newspapers yesterday carried front page photos of the actress.

(In New York, Theodore Bikel, chairman of the national governing council of the American Jewish Congress, said Ms. Redgrave’s “public espousal of the PLO and her artistic and financial involvement in a PLO propaganda film brand her as one who condones the murder of civilians, the destruction of the Jewish state and the end of the Jewish people…We repudiate the disruptive and counter-productive tactics of such groups as the Jewish Defense League. But our rejection of the JDL does not mitigate our revulsion at the public support which Vanessa Redgrave has given the enemies of Israel and the Jewish people.”)