American anti-Israel activist Shaun King has told British supporters he hopes US President Biden “dies soon in office” because of his support for Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza.
King, a prominent figure in the Black Lives Matter movement, was speaking on Monday at Oxford Town Hall, one of several meetings he has addressed in Britain over the past few days.
King, who has hundreds of thousands of followers in the US, drew fierce criticism in November when he said he had helped negotiate the release of hostages held by Hamas - a claim that was widely denied.
He has been banned for life from Instagram after posting videos of casualties in Gaza and what he terms “fighting for Palestine”. He said that when he tried to contest this, Meta, which owns Instagram, had appointed a “Zionist law firm” to represent it.
King, who was once an active Democrat campaigner, told the meeting that Biden “had no place in his heart for Palestinians”. That, he went on, meant “not only will I not vote for him. I wish he would die soon, I wish he would die in office”.
He said both Biden and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak were “terrorists” because they had supported Israel after the October 7 attacks, claiming that 35,000 Palestinians had so far been killed since October 7. Both America and Britain were “conspirators in this genocide,” while “many of the bombs and missiles were made in this country”.
King said he had noticed that Oxford was twinned with the West Bank capital Ramallah, but “there soon won’t be a Ramallah unless you step up”.
Discussing his ban from Instagram, he said this showed how much both social media giants and governments feared his power, adding that he had been told that he had 400 times as much influence as Biden and Sunak combined. Nevertheless, the ban was a serious blow: “It’s hard to be a leader in society without a Facebook account, without an Instagram account.”
He recalled attending the notorious international human rights conference held in Durban and addressed by Nelson Mandela in 2001, when the US and Israeli delegations walked out because of its antisemitism. He said: “That taught me the Palestinian people were facing a unique opposition… when the most revered human being on the planet [Mandela] spoke up for Palestinians the US and Israel would not hear it.”
But “suppressing the Palestinians” is, King said, “a core value of being Israeli”, and this explained why it was argued that anyone who challenged this “consequentially must hate Jews”.
The event, which was attended by about 40 people, most of student age, was organised by the Oxford Majlis, a debating society founded by Asian students in 1896.
Although King claimed in publicity material he would be speaking at Oxford University, the society has no formal connection to it. A university spokesperson told the JC the event “has nothing to do with the university, so we have no powers to deal with it”.
