Mick Hartley

As we brace ourselves for yet another weekend of Jew-hatred on the streets of London, the current wave of antisemitism is being felt in particular at British universities:

It was supposed to be a friendly social event: a bar crawl for new Jewish students at the University of Warwick to make friends and build a community. Then one, glancing at her phone, asked a frightened question: “Are they going to be able to find us?”

On all of their phones, in a WhatsApp group for Jewish freshers, four new members had started posting antisemitic hate, directed specifically at Jewish students.

Messages appeared about Palestine, followed by the phrases “F*** Israel” and “dirty Jewish c***s”, as their group chat was infiltrated by antisemites.

“One girl started to cry, people were afraid for their physical safety, being afraid of somebody with a knife coming in,” said Jacob Lederman, the society’s treasurer.

It is one in a wave of antisemitic incidents faced by Jewish students across the country, including physical attacks and assaults….

This week, more than 500 alumni of University College London have called on the university to address a “morally repugnant” wave of antisemitism, including a motion from the institution’s University and College Union (UCU) branch which called for “intifada until victory”.

The open letter, which was signed by Nadhim Zahawi, a former education secretary, and endorsed by eight rabbis, said the motion passed by the UCU branch and separate material posted online by student societies could “only be interpreted as glorifying the murder of Jews at the hands of Hamas”.

The motion promised to mobilise against British arms companies and banks doing business with Israel, and called for a “Socialist Federation in the Middle East — intifada until victory”.

And of course the lovely academics themselves:

Amira Abdelhamid, an associate professor of international relations at the University of Portsmouth, described the attacks as “legitimate struggle against siege, occupation, settler colonialism, slow violence and genocide”….

Ian Parker, emeritus professor of management at the University of Leicester, shared a post on Facebook describing the Hamas attacks as a “heroic move” and “historical victory”..

On the day of the assault, a Facebook post from the Marxist academic said that “Palestinian freedom fighters from besieged Gaza broke Zionist colonial barriers”..

Describing the gunmen as “brave”, the post said that Hamas had proven that “Palestinian resistance is showing the Zionist regime and the entire world that the Palestinians will not stand passively as the Zionist murder machinery continues with its daily attacks”..

Parker is a self-described revolutionary and honorary secretary of the College of Psychoanalysts who believes in dismantling the British state..

There's nowhere someone like Parker could indulge his infantile fantasies – "a self-described revolutionary and honorary secretary of the College of Psychoanalysts" – outside of a university.

Hamas – or at least the Iranian backers of Hamas – may have hoped that the inevitable Israeli response to the Oct 7th pogrom would lead to a break with the Arab states, forestalling any rapprochement and keeping the Zionist Entity as the Middle East's enemy no. 1. As I noted last week, at the moment that doesn't seem to be happening. What they surely can't have anticipated – as none of us anticipated – is the extraordinary tsunami of antisemitism that we're seeing now in the West, and particularly here in the UK, in the US, and in Canada.