Opinion
It’s time to tackle the extremists fuelling hate
For too long the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have spread poison on British campuses
August 10, 2023 11:20
3 min read
For too long the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have spread poison on British campuses
August 10, 2023 11:20Like the frog staying in a pot of water that is slowly being brought to boiling point, we have become desensitised to the creeping dangers of an increasingly hostile climate. With the gradual rise in temperature, a campaign to radicalise British students by chiefs of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has gone unnoticed for years. It is time to take notice.
The latest Community Service Trust (CST) report shows a 29 per cent rise in school-sector antisemitic incidents perpetrated by minors. It is an inevitable trend when you consider that most children will encounter anti-Jewish posts on social media before they encounter a Jewish person in real life.
Social media platforms profit from hate and there is no legislation to control them. Research by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) showed that just 700 antisemitic posts were viewed 7.3 million times. And most antisemitic posts on social media don’t get removed, with 84 per cent of them remaining up.
Imagine a bookshop where over a quarter of Holocaust material was denial or distortion. You might well assume it was run by a neo-Nazi. But a Unesco study showed that to be the case across all social media platforms.
The next step for many children to becoming young adults is university. But another CST report from this year showed a 22 per cent rise in antisemitic hate incidents on campus.
An antisemitic mindset can be validated by academic staff. In the case of David Miller with his ideas about Jewish power and disloyalty, the public support he received from hundreds of fellow academics, his university and the University and College Union, showed the shocking scale of the problem. Miller can now be found spreading hate about Jews on behalf of the Iranian regime.
There has been a damning report on antisemitism in the National Union of Students, and an antisemitism investigation is underway at Goldsmiths University. In some ways opening an enquiry is a positive step because it means the institutions involved admit they might have a problem.
However, they are not always keen to make the kind of changes required. After chairing a panel about the inadequate response by SOAS University of London to a student who suffered from its “toxic antisemitic environment”, Dr David Hirsh expressed his concerns about their unwillingness to even take steps recommended by the panel to find if there was a culture of hostility within their institution.
One outcome of creating a toxic environment on campus is that IRGC chiefs radicalising students with Holocaust denial and calls to kill Jews have been able to hide in plain sight.
The IRGC are unlike an ordinary terrorist group. They have an army and navy of about 125,000 troops who function like the SS — an elite force to keep the regular army in check, keep the regime in place, protect its ideology and spread it across the world. They achieve this by killing domestic dissidents, murdering Jews worldwide and funding terrorism to create instability and increase their influence.
Targeting British universities helps them to achieve their aims. Academics are not immune to the influence of poisonous ideologies — far from it. Findings released by German academics 23 years ago revealed that many more areas of Nazi doctrine and policy were formulated by academia than was previously thought to be the case — academics turned away from rational thinking and democracy without any encouragement. An irrational worldview in academia poisons society, fuelling any group wanting to create instability to spread their ideology.
A 2023 scientific study released in Nature journal showed that education or political affiliation does not prevent antisemitic thinking. A conspiratorial understanding of the world is linked to a penchant for authoritarianism, such as the ideology promoted by the IRGC.
This year, a Parliamentary Task Force reported that Jewish university students feel so unsafe that they hide their identity. It is clear that the route to antisemitism needs to urgently be identified and disrupted.
The government must move to ban the IRGC immediately. If universities fail in their duty of care towards Jewish students, then serious steps could be taken to address that. Legislation should hold social media platforms accountable for the hate they host.
The CST can no longer find any trigger point for antisemitic incidents because it seems that people no longer even need an excuse. Things are heating up. We haven’t hit the boiling point but it is time we turned our attention to the chefs.