Mick Hartley

More on last week's disgraceful Oxford Union debate (previously) from Jonathan Sacerdoti in the Spectator:

The motion for debate was itself a grotesque provocation: “This House Believes Israel is an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide.” Apartheid and genocide are not just loaded terms; they are distortions when applied to Israel, as I planned to explain in my speech. That the Union had decided to frame this debate around them was bad enough. It had caused some to decline their invitation to speak at all. But the problems were much deeper rooted even than students seeking attention through sensationalist wording.

This wasn’t an evening for intellectual rigour or balanced argument. From the very beginning, it was clear the organisation of this event was deeply and worryingly dishonest, aggressive and one-sided. Speakers infamous for their unhinged views were invited to confront us; we were left in the dark about who had been invited on our side. Deception and dishonesty characterised the entire run-up to the debate…..

The tone was set long before the debate began. The president of the Union, Ebrahim Osman Mowafy, an Egyptian Arab, seemed to me to be openly biased from the outset. His behaviour throughout the evening was not that of a neutral chair but of an orchestrator, stacking the odds against the opposition and fostering an environment of unchecked hostility. In the end, perhaps his most disgraceful speaker against Israel withdrew, seemingly intimidated by the strength of the team we had managed to assemble despite the Union’s best attempts to stop us. Having been told a student would take his place, we found out only on the night that Osman Mowafy himself would forgo the traditional impartiality of the chair’s role and speak against us himself….

From the moment the debate began, the crowd displayed its unbridled hatred towards us. Aware that tickets had been tightly controlled ‘for security reasons,’ we soon felt it has been to decrease our security. As I rose to speak, the mob of a crowd pointedly giggled and coughed to show their animosity. Their interruptions grew louder and more vicious as I progressed, culminating in a young woman standing and screaming obscenities in my face like a banshee: “Liar! F*** you, the genocidal motherf***er!” It took an intervention from me to finally prompt the president to have her removed. Even then, it seemed that he did so begrudgingly, as if I had overstepped the mark by expecting basic order.

This was not an audience interested in debate or even in hearing arguments. It was a baying mob, openly hostile and emboldened by the president’s refusal to enforce the most basic rules of decorum. They interrupted every pro-Israel speaker with jeers, coughs, and outright abuse. Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a senior Hamas founder and leader who defected to Israel’s side and saved countless lives, was met with jeering derision and cried of “traitor” and “prostitute” (in Arabic), as he recounted his extraordinary story of moral courage and bravery. In a genius move, after explaining his choice to report information of forthcoming suicide bombing attacks over ten years to the Israelis he asked the audience to indicate by a show of hands how many of them would have reported prior knowledge of the October 7th massacres. The vast majority of the room remained still. Here was an Oxford Union audience which would have buried its head in the sand over the barbaric Palestinian terrorism of that dark day, without trying to prevent it at all.

Yoseph Haddad, an Israeli Arab who has dedicated his life to dismantling the apartheid lie, faced similar treatment. The international law commentator Natasha Hausdorf was hectored to finish her speech far quicker than her proposition counterpart.

Meanwhile, the proposition speakers trafficked in unforgivable and dangerous rhetoric. Miko Peled, a relentless anti-Israel activist, described the atrocities of 7 October as acts of “heroism.” I presume that includes the slaughter and kidnap of babies.

Novelist Susan Abulhawa demonised Jews as foreign colonisers, claiming their true homeland lay in Europe. Her later post on X branded me and Natasha “white colonisers”….

By the time the motion passed – 278 in favour to 59 against – it was clear that the entire event had been a sham. This was not a debate; it was a show trial, it seems to me, orchestrated by a deeply biased president and cheered on by a mob that had no interest in facts or truth.

This felt like a marker, the moment when the Oxford Union truly fell. Not just as a debating society, but as a symbol of intellectual freedom. The room that night was not filled with future leaders engaging in the battle of ideas; it was a mob baying for blood, intolerant of nuance, and utterly resistant to the values the Union claims to uphold….

As our driver sped us out of Oxford, my colleagues and I compared notes about what we had just experienced: it was no less than the fall of the Oxford Union.

The Union president Ebrahim Osman Mowafy was disqualified in June, but reinstated after claims that this had been motivated by "racism, islamophobia, and persistent bias". Hmm.

Sacerdoti's claim that this event marks the fall of the Oxford Union surely isn't overstated. It was a disgrace: a black mark against the university. The Union isn't the university, of course, and no doubt the vast majority of students have no idea and little interest in what's going on there. Still….a desperately grim sign of the times, as what used to be a place for aspiring politicians to practice their debating skills is taken over by zealots with an interest, not in debate, but in spreading their poisonous antisemitic ideology.