From the Telegraph – Exeter student faces anti-Semitic abuse – despite not being Jewish:
Dancing in a packed student nightclub, the last thing Amberley Thay expected was to be called a baby-killer by a friend.
Ms Thay, 20, explains: “She had disappeared to the toilets for ages and when she finally came back she looked at me and said: ‘I can’t believe you. Some girl in the toilets told me that you support the killing of children. She told me not to be friends with you.’
“I just stood there shocked.”
As a non-Jewish woman, this was Ms Thay’s first experience of first-hand anti-Semitism, but she had no idea it would be the start of a prolonged campaign of harassment and intimidation.
Her ordeal is a result of her work with the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET), a British charity.
Ms Thay – a third-year history student at the University of Exeter – became involved with HET after travelling to Auschwitz at the age of 16 as part of its Lessons from Auschwitz Project, a programme that facilitates trips to concentration camps for students and their teachers.
She was so moved by her experience, she signed up to become a HET regional ambassador in her first year at university.
As part of this voluntary work, she was invited to the Israeli ambassador’s residence in London in April last year to hear the testimony of a Holocaust survivor on Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.
But when she posted a picture of the meeting on Instagram, she says, everything changed for her.
“People just started making all these offhand anti-Semitic comments to me all the time,” she said.
“For example, one of the clubs in Exeter offers this promotion whereby if you collect their branded cups from the street and hand them in, you can get free drinks.
“One time, I found a cup in the gutter and went to collect it so I could get my drink, and one of my friends just went, ‘Oh that’s a very Jewish thing to do.’
“I’ve been called a mouthpiece for Israel and an agent for Mossad because I work in Holocaust education.”
On a separate night out, she was approached by a stranger in a club who said: “Why would you post something like that. You know what they do.”…
For Ms Thay, all these experiences add up to a campaign of intimidation aimed at discouraging her from her work around combating anti-Semitism and educating people about the Holocaust.
“I’ve asked Jewish students if I should report my experiences of anti-Semitism, but they say there is no point because nothing will be done.”
Ms Thay will be addressing Jewish community leaders and politicians at the HET appeal dinner in London on Monday to talk about her experiences with the trust.
She added:“I don’t think that there is enough Holocaust education in British schools.
“I’ve heard people say that it wasn’t actually six million [Jewish people murdered in the Holocaust], it was only like 250,000 or whatever, because they’ve seen that online.
“And they don’t actually understand that what they’re saying is harmful and wrong.”
How utterly depressing.
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