Universities claim to oppose all forms of hate – so why do they let antisemitism flourish?
EARLIER this week the US Congress had a hearing for the heads of some of the most elite education institutions in the world.
The presidents of the universities of Harvard, MIT and Penn State all sat in front of Congress.
And one after another they revealed themselves to be ignoramuses.
And moral disasters.
Each was asked in turn about the recent outbreak of anti-Jewish hatred on their campuses.
This has included the hounding of Jewish students and routine calls for the genocide of the Jews.
Each was asked whether calling for the eradication of the Jewish people would count as a problem on their campus.
Each avoided an answer — saying it depended on “context”. Each of them also weirdly giggled as they read out their legalistic non-answers.
In the days since there has been a backlash. Each of the women in question is now having to backtrack.
The president of Penn, Liz Magill, went back on to social media this week to say that, on reflection, she thought calling for the eradication of Jews might be a problem after all.
But it was too late. The damage had been done.
Donors began withdrawing their gifts. One donor to Penn said he would take back a $100million donation he had given.
So that was an expensive day’s “umming” and “ahing” Ms Magill had in Washington.
Meanwhile, billionaire Bill Ackman, a Harvard graduate who has been a vocal critic of how universities have addressed anti-Semitism, said that Harvard students who had signed a pro-Hamas letter should be named.
“One should not be able to hide behind a corporate shield when issuing statements supporting the actions of terorists,” he said.
But the real problem of the testimony was that it revealed a moral hole at the heart of modern education.
As the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog told me in an interview in Jerusalem on Thursday, these people are the product of “decades of brainwashing”.
And this is as true in Britain as it is in America.
This country has just as many sick individuals in our institutes of “higher” learning.
This week Harriet Bradley, a “passionate socialist”, former Labour councillor and academic at the University of Bristol, heard about a Jewish Labour Movement event next month.
The sick 78-year-old promptly called for somebody to “blow up” the venue, later claiming it was a “joke” and apologising.
After negative media attention — not least from The Sun — Bristol distanced itself from the academic.
Hotbeds of hate
But keep in mind that this is the same institution which this week axed our National Anthem from future graduation ceremonies.
Our anthem is “old fashioned” according to Bristol students, as well as being “offensive to some”.
I think anyone who finds our National Anthem “offensive” should think about whether they ought to stay in our country.
This toxic mix is a constant in our universities.
A hatred and suspicion of our own past.
And an encouraged blood-lust against the Jewish people — and particularly the world’s only Jewish state.
The Jews are always first. But everyone else is next.
That is why it is doubly important that Jewish students across the UK have been expressing fear.
In the month after Hamas’s attacks of October 7 there were more incidents of anti-Semitism reported on British campuses than in the whole of 2022.
A student at Oxford wrote for one British publication that fellow Jewish students had been advised not to go to synagogue, were called “colonisers”, started removing religious headwear and had Jewish religious symbols ripped from their doors.
One Israeli student who had relatives murdered at the Nova festival massacre returned to Israel because she felt safer in a country at war than at Oxford.
The author of this article? Unknown.
Anti-Western sentiment
He or she wrote the article anonymously. Such is the state of British campuses. And no wonder.
Because for years our campuses have been hotbeds of anti-Israel and anti-British sentiment.
The London School of Economics produced the jihadist who beheaded the Jewish journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002.
The following year King’s College London produced one of the students, Omar Sharif, who went to Israel and carried out a suicide bombing at a bar in Tel Aviv.
In 2009 the former head of the Islamic Society at University College London tried to blow up a plane over Detroit.
In 2010 an Islamic extremist at King’s College London tried to stab to death the MP Stephen Timms.
And that’s just universities in London.
All these students came out of an environment in which anti-Israel and anti-Western sentiment is routine.
For years now, Israeli government officials have been shouted off campus or actually pushed off by radical students.
Academics routinely make provably false claims against Israel, saying it is committing “genocide” and other calumnies. Most of this goes by without challenge.
These universities are not places of learning. They are places of indoctrination.
Our universities, like those in America, routinely insist that they are places of “equality” which oppose all forms of “hate”.
The truth is that in Britain — as in America — Jew-hate is always allowed.
But mark my words, while the Jews are the first targets of these maniacs of higher learning, they will not be the last.