Intolerance on British University Campuses

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 

One of Britain’s premier institutions of higher learning, Oxford University, in February was ordered by Jo Johnson, the British government’s minister for universities, to investigate allegations of intolerance towards Jews. 

The university’s Jewish Society released a dossier of eight separate allegations against the Oxford University Labour Club (OULC) following the resignation of co-chairman Alex Chalmers, who claimed that “a large proportion of both OULC and the student left in Oxford more generally have some kind of problem with Jews.”

The club’s committee members were accused of singing a song called “Rockets over Tel Aviv.” A campaign of harassment saw one student facing regular calls of “filthy Zionist.”

Louise Ellman, the MP for Liverpool Riverside, said she was “deeply disturbed” by the OULC’s support for Israel Apartheid Week, adding that comparisons between Israel and apartheid-era South Africa “are a grotesque smear.”

Another hotbed of anti-Zionist activity is London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies. During its Israel Apartheid Week in February, Rafeef Ziadah, the event chairman, described Israel, which was created in 1948, as “ ’48 Palestine.” 

Malia Bouattia, now the president of the National Union of Students (NUS), claimed the government’s attacks on the event were fuelled by “all manner of Zionist and neocon lobbies.”

In the past she has described the University of Birmingham, which she attended, as a “Zionist outpost in higher education” and refused to vote for a motion condemning the Islamic State. She spoke at a meeting that was advertised with a poster featuring Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hamas.

Labour MP John Mann, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Anti-Semitism, said the NUS “is not doing enough to combat anti-Jewish hatred, and as such is failing in its responsibilities to its members.”

In March, the University of Sussex Student Union voted overwhelmingly to implement a full boycott on Israel goods, while the board of the student union at University College London passed a nonbinding motion endorsing the anti-Israel boycott movement. 

Prior to the voting, the Friends of Palestine society had organized a series of anti-Israel displays, dubbed the “Palestine Experience,” that included setting up checkpoints at the university that were manned by students dressed as Israeli soldiers.

More and more, at many British universities, one hears the word “Zio” used, not as a shortened reference to a Zionist, but as slang for Jew, the way “Yid” was used by fascists in the 1930s.

London’s new Labour Party mayor, Sadiq Khan, criticized the use of the term “Zio” as a slur and noted that anti-Semitism is “not just a problem for the Jewish community, it is a problem for society.”

He also rejected recent comments made by Ken Livingstone, a former Labour mayor, who recently claimed that Adolf Hitler had supported Zionism before he “went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.”

Meanwhile, the Labour Party has launched a probe, headed by Labour’s former leader of the House of Lords Baroness Jan Royall, into the allegations of anti-Semitism at Oxford’s student Labour Club.