Mick Hartley

The “moronic inferno” yesterday:

Jewish students wearing kippah skullcaps have said they were harassed by activists shouting “free Palestine” as more than 1,000 anti-Israel protesters attended events on the anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attacks.

An undergraduate at Bristol University said that they had been shouted at and told “antisemitism no longer needs disguising”. Other students said that they had found the events “beyond intimidating”….

Up to 100 students attended a protest in Sheffield where the organiser, from the Revolutionary Communist Society, said that he “could not give a damn” if the prime minister called the events “un-British”.

Video of an event organised by the Glasgow University Justice for Palestine Society showed members displaying a six-foot banner that read “glory to our martyrs”. The Times understands that a post on the society’s Instagram page has been reported to the police for celebrating “the glorious Al-Aqsa Flood”, Hamas’s name for the October 7 attacks.

Dozens also gathered in Edinburgh with signs from the Socialist Worker that said “Starmer has blood on his hands” and “Freedom for Palestine”.

This is the hard left – the Revolutionary Communist Society, the Socialist Worker. Is there a feeling perhaps – and I’m trying to be optimistic here – that this is now coalescing into a small clique of hard-leftists?…the hard-leftists that always thrive at universities, before people stop the posing and grow up. It doesn’t help their cause that these people are basically nutters, aligning with the most reactionary forces on the planet. After Manchester, are some of the less committed now seeing this for what it is, and perhaps feeling a smidgeon of shame for helping to add their voices to the antisemitic clamour?

Times comments along the lines of “I’m disgusted with this generation” are understandable enough, but these people – these hard-leftists – are still a tiny minority.