roles, types, crowds

It is becoming increasingly clear to me that this conference, and the "antiracist movement" in general, consists of several distinct and barely interconnected publics.
After a highly informative event on the work of the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, which was mainly attended by "practical" NGO people from Europe and North America as far I could judge, I am now at a discussion entitled "Racism: the road to genocide," devoted, to the extent I have been able to follow it, to Iran-bashing and talking about the link between Islamic fundamentalism and anti-Semitism.
The person talking now, a Canadian Jewish Israeli professor called Charles Small (director of the Yale Initiative for the Study of Antisemitism), is giving an impassioned speech that reiterates the standard talking points about the topic, quoting from the Hamas program etc. At one point in his speech, he asked everyone in the room to rise to remember the victims of the Holocaust, then said he wanted to discuss why some of those present "didn't have it in them" to do so.

As usual, I am not interested in discussing "who is right/wrong." I will simply note that this is a classic case of using academic authority to make political impact; I am curious to learn what effect Professor Small expects to achieve with this confrontational rhetoric _in this particular setting_ - perhaps it is simply about the rhetorical performance of opposition to Ahmadinejad within the setting of the conference.
My own case is not representative, but although I am generally sympathetic to some of what he said and, given my family history and own publishing activities, certainly in no need of proving my Holocaust remembrance credentials, I feel rather discouraged by such tactics. Scholars are never just scholars and will never be able to put their normative views aside, nor should they. But once again, I feel it would be useful for academics, when speaking as such, to offer analytic insights rather than issue activist statements. At least some of us should try to do so - isn't that what we should be good at?

...and a quote from someone who asked a question about Tamils:
"Sorry, Sir, that question was for the intellectuals on the panel, not for you."