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As a non-Jewish lecturer at a major university, I can confirm that British academia is structurally racist against Jews. The penny finally dropped as I was second-marking a piece of undergraduate writing in which Jews were openly compared to scurrying vermin, spreading disease.
The student’s illiterate use of grammar, nonsensical punctuation and mixed metaphors would surely have embarrassed Goebbels. But Hitler’s arch propagandist would just as surely have approved of the spirit of the piece. Not that this was a uniquely awful specimen of the kind of “work” I’ve had to face as first and second marker of a large cohort of students since the horror of October 7.
A different piece, produced by a student in the same year group, accused its readers, in the foulest language, of complicity with “genocide” and of “sleeping” while the IDF killed innocent civilians for target practice.
The obvious Jew-hatred of these pieces of writing were one thing. But then there were the comments of the first academic who had marked them, which praised the “Jews-as-vermin” piece as a moving indictment of Israeli “colonisation” that displayed a fine philosophical turn of phrase and a carefulness of language. As for the “genocide” piece, my colleague reassured the student that his message was deeply important.
This, in a nutshell, is the problem: not the fact that immature, 20-year-old students have been brought up on a diet of hating the West, hating Jews and unashamedly milking their self-declared victim status, but the fact that this pernicious nonsense is actively encouraged, praised and taught by the academy – and has been for decades. Ever since the late 1960s, higher education in the West has been infiltrated by a steady stream of nefarious actors, who claim victimhood and make allegations of “Islamophobia” on the one hand and spout racist hate speech against Jews on the other. The ultimate bait-and-switch.
The academics in question may not be paid agitators but they nonetheless fall over themselves to support one kind of non-white student (any kind of Muslim) over other kinds of minority non-white student (Jews or Christians from Africa, Israel, or elsewhere in the Middle East), no matter the hypocrisies involved.
I ask myself, for example, how the academic who had praised the diatribes would have responded to a piece of coursework in which Muslims in Britain were depicted as diseased vermin? Would said student have been given a first-class mark, as was the proposed grade here? The answer, for those of you asleep at the back, is no: the student would have been hauled up before an anti-racism panel and referred to Prevent before you could say “parody”.
Yet when I suggested a lower grade for the student in question (based on the woeful quality of the piece, rather than the racist slurs) and commented that the work that was uneducated at best, offensive at worst – which, after all, was my job as their tutor – my feedback was removed by the university lest there be negative public repercussions. As a compromise, a high 2:1 was awarded instead.
In my decades as a lecturer, I’ve often seen the bigotry of low expectations masquerading as positive discrimination, which no one in my line of work seems to care is still unlawful in the UK. But since October 7, a new low in racist cognitive dissonance seems to have become commonplace.
Teaching people that “Palestine” was originally Muslim until it was colonised by Jews is so wrong, factually and historically as well as morally, that even as a non-Jewish academic, I can no longer keep quiet.
Not only does it fan the flames of resentment and hostility that lead to violence, but it perpetuates the grievance industry that keeps that part of the world locked in a cycle of bloodshed. There’s nothing glamorous about fuelling this conflict, no matter how edgy students might think it makes their writing, nor how much money there is to be siphoned from the kamikaze culture-destroyer that is Arts Council England.
However, it is not just the blatant untruthfulness of the position that is unacceptable, but the glaring double standards. A piece in which a student speaks on behalf of a “colonised” people from the safety of a university place in the UK would be condemned as “cultural appropriation” in any other context.
Lecturing that the Western slave trade, which Britain abolished 190 years ago, eclipses every global evil, while ignoring the more brutal Arabian slave trade of that era and saying nothing about the many hundreds of thousands of modern slaves suffering today, is another glaringly racist intellectual black hole. Often, these are the very same people who have the gall to say that the Houthis – who are reinstating slavery nationally in Yemen – “make us proud”. Hypocrisy doesn’t even come close.
Teaching that Black Lives Matter without acknowledging that in parts of Africa, black Christians are decapitated and young black girls kidnapped as sex slaves, is another example of the kind of egregious double standards we are all being told to keep quiet about. Ditto: teaching that LGBTQ+ rights are paramount while lauding the Islamic countries that execute homosexuals (in Yemen you can be crucified for being gay), or stating that you must always believe women, unless they’re Jewish, in which case even hard evidence of sexual torture must be dismissed as propaganda.
The fact that there was a vote at the National Union of Students conference to ban the Jewish student group is only shocking if you still believe that actual thinking still takes place in the esteemed halls of British academia. These are places where it has become normal for tents to spring up on campuses along with calls to “globalise the intifada”, with the support of many academics.
If, instead, as the saying goes, you can’t fix stupid, then we should at least stop paying ignorant and/or ideologically obsessed lecturers to make matters worse. Stop subsidising the substandard degree courses on which they get to spread their poison. Definitely stop handing out qualifications like candy from institutions that were once beacons of intellectual excellence and honest inquiry to people who couldn’t find Israel on a map and who graduate having come to learn only one thing over the course of studying for their degree: that they will never stop hating the Jews and, according to their lecturers, that’s the only morally acceptable position anyway.