There is a profile of Richard Dawkins in today's Observer. Having rightly praised Dawkins' brilliance as a populariser of difficult and important scientific ideas, Robin McKie alludes to his politics. McKie gives away more than I suspect he intended when he writes that Dawkins "retains a hatred of President Bush (that now encompasses Tony Blair) which he has outlined in streams of anti-war letters to newspapers." Like many soi-disant "public intellectuals", Dawkins doesn't so much have a politics as a pathology - "hatred" of Bush and Blair. Those "streams of anti-war letters" are mostly lacking in the reasoned argument for which his scientific work is justly celebrated. For example, in a letter to the Independent on 23 August 2003, Dawkins made the familiar lumpen equation between the murderous insurgency in Iraq and the troops of the coalition: "The United Nations headquarters in Baghdad was attacked for exactly the same reason as the Americans chose Iraq in the first place. Both were soft targets, known to be ill-equipped to defend themselves or hit back. Ideal for belligerent cowards." Dawkins was also a signatory to Steven Rose's shameful petition calling for an academic boycott of Israel.
CORRECTION: In case readers aren't in the habit of reading the comments, James points out a gross oversight on my part - the Guardian added the following correction/clarification at the bottom of the story linked to above: "what Oxford professors Colin Blakemore and Richard Dawkins endorsed with others was the call for Europeans to suspend scientific grants and contracts until Israelis 'abide by UN resolutions and open serious peace negotiations with the Palestinians'." I'm not sure, though, that this affects the substance of the charge that Dawkins' commitment to academic freedom is partial and selective.
Les hommes dont la fonction est de défendre les valeurs éternelles et désintéressés, comme la justice et la raison, et que j'appelle les clercs, ont trahi cette fonction.
Julien Benda, La Trahison des clercs