From the Telegraph:
Academics are caught in a dispute about a “racist” journal paper that blamed Zionism in part for the riots in the summer of 2024.
The Royal Geographical Society (RGS) published a paper, in its main academic journal, that linked the disorder that swept through Britain in the wake of the Southport attack to Zionist “financiers”.
The paper, published in The Geographical Journal, which has the highest circulation of any British academic journal in its field, claimed there was a “strategic consensus between Zionist groups and fascist groups” and that white supremacy was “at the heart of the Zionist project”.
Senior geography academics have asked how the RGS – one of Britain’s most prestigious learned societies – could have published a piece of work that they say relied on “age-old, notorious racist ideas”.
George Holmes, a professor of conservation and society at the University of Leeds, said: “The RGS itself must review this episode, reflect on its role in all of this, and explain what changes it seeks to bring in to avoid any repeat of this enormous failure. It needs to ask itself whether it is serious about tackling racism in geography.”
The RGS told The Telegraph that the piece had undergone a double-blind peer review, involving two reviewers, that had been overseen by a journal editor. The society said it welcomed responses to content in its journals.
The row threatens to overshadow the society’s annual international conference, which started on Tuesday and whose theme this year centres on exploring inequality.
Prof Peter Hopkins is facing calls to step down as chairman of the conference because he edited the contentious paper.
In the paper, titled “The United Kingdom’s first anti-Muslim pogroms in a context of genocidal Islamophobia in Gaza”, Dr Kawtar Najib, a lecturer in human geography at the University of Liverpool, explored the causes of the far-Right anti-immigration riots that spread across Britain in July and August 2024.
“The United Kingdom’s first anti-Muslim pogroms in a context of genocidal Islamophobia in Gaza”! That’s quite a title. But the Royal Geographical Society saw absolutely no problem in publishing.
Dr Najib, a French academic, drew parallels between the riots and Israel’s campaign in Gaza, which she called a “genocide”. She wrote that both were driven by “Islamophobic narratives perpetuated mainly by prominent racist and Islamophobic activists”.
She pointed to Tommy Robinson, the far-Right activist who she claimed had encouraged the riots, saying “his speeches are indeed inspired by white supremacist ideology, which is also at the heart of the Zionist project”.
Dr Najib cited academics, including Prof David Miller, a controversial academic who has long campaigned against Zionism and the state of Israel, to claim that “Robinson’s financiers” were linked “to the Zionist entity”.
“There is therefore a sort of strategic consensus between Zionist groups and fascist groups … against a common enemy that is Islam and Muslims,” she wrote.
“Although the primary motivation of far-Right rioters in the UK was above all Islamophobia and racism … their sympathy for Zionism is open and enthusiastic.”
Kawtar Najib, from her University of Liverpool profile:
My area of expertise focuses on Islamophobia and its spatialization, and I explore more broadly issues of social and spatial justice: urban exclusion, austerity, racism and sexism.
Previously, I was a Marie Curie Fellow at Newcastle University where I was the principal researcher of the SAMA (Spaces of Anti-Muslim Acts) project in Paris and London, funded by the European Commission. My research mainly concerns Europe and especially the UK and France where I grew up and completed my PhD at the University of Franche-Comté on socio-spatial inequalities and residential segregations in urban neighbourhoods.
I think we can see where she’s coming from.
Nicole Lampert has more.
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