Mick Hartley

From the Telegraph – Cambridge fails to suspend students who threatened to kill classmate over Israel trip.

A University of Cambridge college has been criticised after it failed to suspend students who made death threats against an undergraduate who visited Israel.

The visit, organised by the Pinsker Centre think tank, took Oxbridge student leaders to Israel, where they met Israelis and Palestinians to better understand the Gaza conflict.

But one of the party, Bradley Smart, 21, said he received death threats from fellow students when he returned to Homerton College.

The third-year student, who is not Jewish, claimed he was subjected to abuse in a student group chat in which identifiable individuals from the college wrote “I’m going to kill him”, “kill him”, and “he needs to die”.

Other messages included slurs and degrading language, as well as anti-Semitic content including comparisons between Israel and the Nazis.

Mr Smart claimed that he reported the threats through the college’s harassment channels, but was told to speak to welfare staff or consider moving rooms.

So helpful.

He moved out of Homerton a month later out of fear for his safety.

He said he complained to police, but claimed they told him it was an “academic matter”, and would not investigate.

Are death threats not a police matter? Perhaps if he’d told them he’d been misgendered….

Mr Smart told The Telegraph: “As a Cambridge student, I expected my university to be a place where opinions could be refined through dialogue.

“The reality, however, was that this trip was enough to trigger a campaign of cancellation, including explicit death threats and being banned from a college club.”

Lord Walney, a former government counter-extremism tsar, said: “It is entirely unacceptable that students at one of our leading universities would threaten to kill one of their peers for visiting Israel.

“The college’s response is wholly inadequate, and sets a dangerous precedent that intimidation and threats of political violence will be tolerated. Cambridge must do better.”