Stop subsidising academic agitators to spread poison

We all saw it in America last year when the presidents of three of the world’s most prestigious Ivy League schools were exposed as either too stupid or too ideologically brainwashed to admit that calling for the death of Jews might reasonably be defined as “hate speech” and thus fall foul of their own codes of conduct.

I’m afraid to say these academic representatives were not the exception, but the rule.

For those currently weeping that a “fascist” and “literally Hitler” has just won the American presidential election for the second time, my view, as an academic and former anti-Trumper, is that his cabinet’s proposed defunding of racist, antisemitic teaching in American universities is “literally” the opposite of fascism. And that we urgently need similar measures in Britain.

Take this remarkable book launch to be hosted by one of our esteemed, publicly funded universities, LSE, next month: Understanding Hamas and Why That Matters. According to its blurb, the book features “a series of rich and probing conversations with leading experts” that examine Hamas’s “critical shift from social and religious activism to national political engagement” and “its transformation from early anti-Jewish tendencies to a stance that differentiates between Judaism and Zionism,” among other subjects.

Now cast your minds back over a year ago to October 7, and every day since, when Israeli and other civilians have either been killed in Hamas terror tunnels or starved, tortured, raped and exchanged for hundreds of fanatic murderers. Think about the GoPro videos Hamas took of their crazed killing spree; their proud boasts back home to families about how many Jews they’ve butchered with their bare hands.

Now think about how, since the 1960s, Western higher education has been infiltrated by a steady stream of “experts” paid for by Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Islamic Republic of Iran and other nefarious actors, to spread claims against Israel and promote the term “Islamophobia” – originally coined by the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1970s, the same Muslim Brotherhood funded and supported by Nazi Germany during the 1930s and 1940s.

Yet the LSE Middle East Centre desperately clings to the university’s Code of Practice on Free Speech:

“We endeavour to provide a platform to facilitate discourse on contemporary matters by encouraging critical debate, within the law, where the views of all parties are treated with respect.”

The views of Christians, Jews, and other religious people do not appear – at time of writing – to figure in this event, nor do they figure much in academia generally.

For instance, a session at the National Union of Students conference voted this year to ban its Jewish student group. Calls to “globalise the intifada” sprang up on university campuses around Britain – a call which the largest university lecturers’ union (among others) also backed.

We must urgently save academia from such racist, anti-inclusive incitement to violence. We must stop subsidising substandard degree courses on which paid agitators get to spread their poison and we must 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.

Our esteemed halls of learning have become, in the words of Professor James Orr “ivory asylums” that seem to care more about the diversity of immutable characteristics than diversity of opinion and genuine intellectual debate, let alone the truth of empirical evidence, historic fact and contemporary data.

And so, Black Lives Matter, except in Africa where black Christians are being decapitated and young girls kidnapped as sex slaves.

LGBTQ+ rights matter, except in Islamic countries that execute homosexuals (in Yemen you can be crucified for being gay).

And women should always be believed, unless they’re Jewish, in which case even videos of grotesque sexual torture, videos made by their torturers themselves and posted by them live on social media, must be Israeli propaganda.

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

George Orwell, 1984

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This article is by a UK university professor who wishes to remain anonymous