Richard Dawkins kritisiert "Hexenjagd" der feministischen "Gedankenpolizei"

Der weltweit bekannte Intellektuelle Richard Dawkins ist dem von Feministinnen verfemten Nobelpreisträger Tim Hunt beigesprungen:

Professor Dawkins has said the reaction to the 72-year-old's comments has been "disproportionate" and went through schadenfreude into "cruelty", in a letter published in the Times.

In his letter to the Times, Prof Dawkins said: "Along with many others, I didn't like Sir Tim Hunt's joke, but 'disproportionate' would be a huge underestimate of the baying witch-hunt that it unleashed among our academic thought police: nothing less than a feeding frenzy of mob-rule self-righteousness."

Others to come to Sir Tim's defence have included London mayor Boris Johnson, who called for his reinstatement, and television physicist Professor Brian Cox, who said the response had been "disproportionate".

Professor Cox told BBC Radio 4’s The World at One: "You can make the argument that senior figures in science have to be first of all aware that there is a central problem of women progressing up to the highest levels of science and secondly therefore have to be mindful of that and careful of their language. On the other side of course, there is the wider problem of trial by social media. People do make ill-advised comments from time to time so is it appropriate to hound someone out of their position at a university or indeed is it appropriate for the university to react in the way UCL in this case did and ask someone to resign or threaten to sack them? To have a Nobel Prize winner - and by all accounts a great scientist and a good person - being hounded out of a position at UCL after all those years of good work and science, I think that’s wrong and disproportionate - with the caveats I mentioned."

Die Daily Mail berichtet.