How anti-Semitism breeds on university campuses

Julie Burchill I 19 May 2024 I The Spectator Australia

It’s often said that anti-Semitism is a shape-shifter, seen best in the way that the right-wing have painted the Jews as rootless revolutionaries and the left-wing have portrayed them as rapacious capitalists. It’s also grimly notable that – unlike prejudice against many other ethnic groups – it’s been equally appealing to the young and the old, the over-privileged and the under-privileged, the educated and the uneducated. But we’re now at the weird point where the young, over-privileged, educated are the drivers of anti-Semitism on the campuses of this country.

Jew hatred in academia is nothing new

Jew hatred in academia is nothing new. The first book burnings in Nazi Germany were organised in 1933 by students on university campuses all across the country. Quota systems – limiting the number of Jewish students allowed into universities – were widespread in European and North American countries during the 19th and even into the 20th century. McGill University in Canada kept theirs in place until the late 1960s. The GI Bill took care of this rubbish in the USA, when returning American soldiers going into further education took objection to a less violent version of the very racial purity crusade they had been fighting against on their own campuses.

Our own history is chequered. In 1264, a man rudely recorded as ‘Jacob the Jew’ sold the land which Merton College, Oxford, was built on, but Jews would be barred from becoming students at Oxford until 1856. The casual anti-Semitism of the English upper-classes pervaded well into the 20th century (even a reasonable woman like Agatha Christie could have a character say in a 1932 novel ‘He’s a Jew, of course, but a frightfully decent one’) and made many Jewish students swerve the leading universities. The aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust at last put anti-Semitism beyond the pale in Britain – but when it did reemerge, it was on university campuses in the 1970s. After a 1975 United Nations resolution declaring Zionism to be a kind of racism, student unions began banning Jewish Societies on the grounds that universities would give ‘no platform for racists’ – a phrase originally coined to ban the likes of the National Front. As with the popular use of conflating swastikas with the Star of David on the Saturday hate-marches now, one senses a sadistic pleasure that?progressives?derive from putting Jews and Nazis in the same box. It’s pretty much gained pace ever since, the Hamas pogroms being the latest incident in which Jews are demonised for not colluding in their own destruction, and for fighting back against it.

Though the British left defines itself as anti-American – to the point of routinely choosing the side of the US’s enemies, no matter how illiberal and homophobic, as we recently saw with the Houthis who happily kill ‘queers’ wherever they find them – it’s amusing that it will inevitably trot along like a wheezing, devoted pug at the heels of what passes for the American Left, which is generally a bunch of silly rich kids hoodwinked by a bunch of sinister criminals; think Manson Family without the sex. Tomiwa Owolade examined the dire consequences of this where race is concerned in his brilliant book?This Is Not America?and now ‘our’ students have similarly?herded themselves ?into ‘Gaza solidarity camps’ across the land.

It must be horrible to be a Jewish student right now and have to run the gauntlet of shrieking Violets and rabid Ruaris when you’re trying to get to?lectures. No wonder the Union of Jewish Students issued a statement earlier this month saying that Jewish students are suffering from ‘the continuous torrent of antisemitic hatred on campus’ since the Hamas pogroms of 7 October: ‘While students have a right to protest, these encampments create a hostile and toxic atmosphere on campus for Jewish students…we will not stand for this hatred. It’s time that universities took their duty of care to Jewish students seriously.’

Despite the usual twaddle from the Pals of Palestine about how peaceful their protests are, such events are taking place against a backdrop of a?22 per cent increase in university-related anti-Semitic hate incidents reported over the past two academic years. But I also can’t help but find the Tent City students (the Unhappy Campers, we might call them, or the Yappy Campers) as comical as they are nasty; ‘grotesque’ probably says it best.

We are now facing the folly of Tony Blair’s ambition for further education for all

For starters, they’re thick, and thick people who think they’re smart are invariably hilarious. The same goes for posh kids who think they’re revolutionaries; the posher the university, the more likely you are to find these camps. The reason is simple: at regular universities, the students are more likely to be occupied doing evening jobs to pay their way.?(Like starting a career in journalism, you?probably?need to be financially supported by Mummy and Daddy these days in order to have the time to protest.)

Students who live under genuinely tyrannical regimes often exhibit great bravery – contemporary Iran comes to mind – but this lot are just so?lame. Students at Newcastle asked for donations of hot-water bottles, blankets and ground sheets after just one night under canvas; having surveyed the splendidly hardy young Geordie pleasure-seekers, near-naked in the bleak mid-winter of the Bigg Market, I think we can safely say that these are not natives.

Over at Oxford, students yelled ‘One, two, three, four, occupation no more. Five, six, seven, eight, Israel is a terrorist state’; I’ve heard more wit and originality on the terraces of a second division football match – and these are meant to be the best minds of the upcoming generation. It’s like an updated sitcom about the dirtiness and delusion of students –?The Dumb Ones??– waiting to happen.

It’s all about the brains, in my opinion; the thick children of the ruling class have always known that they can’t keep up with this most superbly over-achieving of immigrant groups. Thus no sooner had the musty right-wing prejudices against Jews been overcome, with the end of quotas, than what I’ve previously coined ‘Fresh’n’Funky anti-Semitism’ was there to take the weasel wheel under the guise of being pro-Palestinian. Though anti-Semitism has elements of ordinary racism, it also has the unique quality of incorporating envy and resentment at the way this particular minority group have had to overcome unspeakable obstacles yet have still succeeded. It’s the hatred of the stupid for the smart. Having been banging on about white privilege for the past five years, how will posh Gentile students explain their own failure to get the jobs they want even after such expensive educations? It’ll be the Jews’ fault, of course – as always.

As for the protests, they may come to a natural end; as Yascha Mounk wrote?here :

With the Israeli military advancing in Rafah, the protests may grow in size and become more unruly in the coming days and weeks. And yet, it seems unlikely they will last forever. That’s partially because university leaders have grown surprisingly willing to call upon the police to end illegal encampments. But it’s mostly because, in a few weeks, the academic year will end at many universities – and most student activists don’t want to cancel the exciting trips they have planned or to forgo prestigious summer internships.

As we saw when the double-barrelled big-shots of Extinction Rebellion flounced out of interviews after being confronted with Instagram proof of their air-miles, nothing comes between these stuck-up air-heads and their ‘hollibobs’.

To sum up, though I am immeasurably glad that people put themselves through all those years of further education to become useful things like teachers and doctors, I’ve never had a high opinion of students. To most of us of working-class origin, the very word student conjures up a clown who believes itself to be too good to go out and earn their keep like the rest of us, but is probably just too lazy.

We are now facing the folly of Tony Blair’s ambition for further education for all. It’s plain to see that?young?tradesmen and apprentices do?something both more useful, more secure – no plumber is ever going to lose their job to AI – and more lucrative than the average Media Studies student?kicking about in a dead-end job while waiting for the world to recognise their unique talent. The universities – often throttled by foreign money from countries with less than democratic modes of government – have increasingly revealed themselves over the past decade as places where ideas and debate are shut down. Those tents may look like noble protests to their inmates, but to us in the real world they look like the mental Skid Row that the contemporary left-wing academic mind has become.?But as those campus book-burnings warned us, this won’t be the first time that citadels of education and enlightenment have served as cradles of ignorance and hatred.

Author: Julie Burchill