This year follows the pattern, with the UCU suggesting that its individual members "consider the moral and political implications of educational links with Israeli institutions and to discuss the occupation with individuals and institutions concerned, including Israeli colleagues with whom they are collaborating."

The word "boycott" is not mentioned in the draft motions for the UCU conference, which also ask for "personal testimonies" from members who visited the Palestinian territories in January as part of a trade union delegation. That is likely to be because last year the union received advice from its lawyers that its attempts to impose a boycott were unlawful.

The union's propositions are part of an ongoing effort to isolate and condemn Israeli universities, organizations and academics. Not all members of the union, which represents more than 120,000 academics, support these attempts. There are credible grounds for believing that the union is being manipulated by a group of left-wing activists.

Jeremy Newmark of the Stop the Boycott Campaign said that "the president and general secretary have allowed a situation to emerge in which UCU's policy is decided by the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers Party. In the face of its own legal advice, it is shameful that UCU would press ahead with a discredited and discriminatory policy."

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabian and Muslim organizations are funding cash-strapped British universities to the tune of more than $466 million, warns a report about to be published by the Centre for Social Cohesion, an offshoot of the center-right Civitas think tank.

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Universities mentioned include long-established and prestigious centers of learning such as Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, University College London, and the London School of Economics.

Professor Anthony Glees, director of Brunel University's Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, said that accepting donations from these sources was encouraged by government policies that "push the wrong sort of education by the wrong sort of people, funded by the wrong sorts of donor."

Three years ago, Glees warned that the threat posed by radical groups should be "urgently addressed" since as many as 48 universities had been infiltrated by Islamic fundamentalists.

The government sees the funding of Islamic studies in institutions of higher learning as a weapon in its fight against the radicalization of young people, but Glees condemns it as likely to "create the very situation the government wants to avoid: the development of self-imposed Muslim apartheid in the UK."

The report claims that over the past five years, 70 per cent of politics lectures at the Middle Eastern Centre at St Antony's College, Oxford, were "implacably hostile" to the West and Israel - an allegation denied by Oxford - which next year will see the opening of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, funded by a donation of £20 million (over $39 million dollars) from the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia.

Glees sees the donations as a poisoned chalice: "Britain's universities will have to generate two national cultures: one non-Muslim and largely secular, the other Muslim. We will have two identities, two sets of allegiance and two legal and political systems. This must, by the government's own logic, hugely increase the risk of terrorism."

British filmmaker James Miller was mistakenly shot and killed by an Israeli soldier in May 2003 at the height of the Palestinian intifada. Israel's Foreign Ministry has agreed to pay $3.5 million, provided that the British government, acting on behalf of Miller's family, agrees to close the case and drop its demand that the soldiers involved in the incident should be extradited.

Prior to this agreement, it was feared that an Israeli army officer could have been extradited to Britain and brought to trial there, following the involvement of the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, who ordered the Metropolitan police in conjunction with the Crown Prosecution Service to initiate an inquiry.

Israel's Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, negotiated with representatives of the British government in the case. The Israeli Foreign Ministry admitted that the incident had "burdened" Israel's relations with Britain.

Unlike other incidents in which foreign nationals were accidentally killed by the Israeli army, Miller was not an activist but was in the Gaza Strip for the purpose of making a film about the impact of violence on Israeli and Palestinian children.

A doll styled as Adolf Hitler, complete with jackboots, trench-coat and swastika armband, is being sold in Kiev, Ukraine's capital, for $200. The marketing of this action doll, which comes in its own presentation box imprinted with the dates of Hitler's birth and death, is a chilling reminder of fascist currents within Ukraine.

Nothing appears to have changed in this corner of the former USSR, where at least three million people, including 1.5 million Jews, died as a result of the Nazi occupation during World War II. Ukrainian concentration camp guards were notorious for their brutality. There are signs that a glorification of Hitler and Nazism could be developing among the young disaffected underclass whose knowledge of the events in the Ukraine in World War II is limited.

A spokesperson explained that the doll "is like Barbie. Kids can undress the fuhrer, pin on medals, and there's a spare head in the kit to give him a kinder expression on his face."

As if this were not sickening enough, the production company has plans to launch a series of themed Third Reich toys, including interiors of Hitler's chancellery, toy concentration camps with barbed wire, barracks and operating models of gas chambers.

In Germany, where Nazi emblems are proscribed by law, none of this would be possible.

Despite pressure from European Jewish organizations and the Union of Belarusian Jewish Public Associations and Communities, officials in Belarus have rejected the concept of a national Holocaust day to commemorate the near-eradication of the Jewish community of Belarus. The refusal to allow a Holocaust memorial day, in keeping with the trend in most of Europe, reflects the ambivalence of the government of Belarus towards anti-Semitism.

Secretary General of the European Jewish Congress Serge Cwajenbaum suggested that Belarus was out of touch with modern attitudes toward the Holocaust.

"Holocaust Memorial Day is now accepted by almost every country around the world, including the former Soviet Union. I hope they will understand their role in the Holocaust. If they want to join Europe and become full partners they have to adapt and do the necessary justice not only towards the Jewish community but the entire population."