The Hamas death cult has taken over campus

Ever keen to remind us of their moral bankruptcy, the keffiyeh cult’s student wing was out en masse yesterday. In the UK and beyond, hundreds of thousands of ‘pro-Palestine’ students walked out of lecture halls and flooded the streets, marking the two-year anniversary of the 7 October pogrom. Not to mourn it, of course, but to demand more death and destruction, by calling for the annihilation of Israel.

Around a dozen British universities held Palestine rallies to coincide with 7 October – often despite the pleas of university administrators to reschedule. Several of London’s top institutions, including King’s College London, LSE, UCL and SOAS, marched through the city centre with flags and placards. Further north, students in Sheffield, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Strathclyde were also on the march. In Glasgow, protesters cosplayed as jihadists. Outside Edinburgh’s student library, the crowds yelled ‘shame’ – a quality painfully lacking among their own ranks. The supposed aim of these demos, as organisers for the Manchester University protest explained on Instagram, was to protest two years of ‘genocide, forced starvation, murder, ethnic cleansing, imprisonment, torture and settler colonialism’.

It is impossible to underestimate the cruelty of staging this spectacle on 7 October. Two years ago yesterday, a tsunami of armed men surged over Israel’s southern border to enact an hours-long campaign of slaughter, sexual violence and ritualistic humiliation. There are 365 days in a year, yet the pro-Palestine sect deliberately chose to beat their drums on this particular day, the day most painful to Jews. Worse, these students have made clear, they see this genocidal pogrom not as a tragedy, but as a valiant act of resistance. ‘Honour our resistance. Honour our martyrs’, read an Instagram post from the Glasgow University Justice for Palestine Society. It invited students to ‘celebrate the glorious Al-Aqsa flood’ – the name given by Hamas to the 7 October massacre. To dismiss this as well-meaning ignorance would be far too generous now.

‘I think freedom will be achieved when the Israelis go back to where they were born’, said a Muslim student in London in an interview on LBC, sounding almost nonchalant. When asked if she understood ‘why Jewish students might feel uncomfortable’ with that view, she was nonplussed. ‘I mean, I understand… but I don’t think that their feelings are valid.’

How emboldened must a young person be to say these things on camera, with her university lanyard hanging around her neck? What does it say about the climate on our campuses? These are the same students who are told constantly to watch their words, that campus is a safe space for minorities and the marginalised. Every minority, it seems, except Jews.

Haya Adam, the president of the SOAS’s Palestine Society (who was expelled back in August following a harassment claim), said she thought yesterday’s actions ‘went brilliantly’, and that ‘anyone with any ounce of humanity’ should have joined in. One wonders if Adam saw the same displays of ugliness that the rest of us did. Her appeal to ‘humanity’ is particularly baffling, given that these rallies not only took place on 7 October, but less than a week after two British Jews were killed during an Islamist terror attack.

Indeed, it’s not just Jews in the Middle East who young Britons don’t seem to care about. The victims of the Manchester synagogue attack on Yom Kippur last week haven’t given them much pause for thought either. Seán Hickey, head of content at PoliticsJOE (a political commentary channel popular with students and luxury belief-holders everywhere), proudly exemplified this a couple of days ago. ‘I think you would’ve gotten away with turning around and saying “Oh, well, you can’t go and do a Palestine protest after this terrorist attack on the Jewish community in Manchester”’, he said. ‘You could have got away with that maybe two years ago. But I don’t think you can anymore.’ Yes, imagine that, taking a day off calling for an intifada, out of respect for dead Jews.

Hickey also thinks it ‘unfair’ to conflate the situation of British Jews with the State of Israel, suggesting that Jews are mistaken or being hysterical to think there’s something menacing about these demos. Perhaps it’s too uncomfortable for the pro-Pally set to acknowledge that demonising Zionism cannot really be separated from demonising Jews in general. Indeed, 65 per cent of British Jews self-describe as Zionists and 88 per cent regard Israel as the ancestral home of the Jewish people.

‘I fear for my children, my grandchildren’, said Ivor Rosenberg, a security guard caught up in the horror at the Heaton Park synagogue. Even before the Manchester attack, 80 per cent of Jews admitted to being scared to display their Jewish identity. Jews have long been warning us about the bigotry and bloodlust that drape themselves in a keffiyeh – and how the oldest hatred is now disguised beneath supposed humanitarian concerns.

Is this what it means now to be ‘woke’, ‘anti-racist’, a warrior for ‘social justice’? Celebrating the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust? If it is, then count me out.

Georgina Mumford is a spiked intern.