Would you share a house with someone black? Even to pose the question, let alone to say no, is to invite – quite rightly – the accusation of racism. But it’s a different matter when it comes to Jews. The Union of Jewish Students (UJS) has today published a report on campus anti-Semitism in Britiain. Of all the statistics that show the sheer scale of the hate that Jewish students face, the most chilling is that one in five students (20 per cent) say they wouldn’t share a house with a Jew.
Campus anti-Semitism has been a problem for decades. It was a perennial when I was editor of the Jewish Chronicle, between 2008 and 2021. But it has transformed in recent years from a worrying issue that needed to be dealt with to a critical problem that is out of control.
As the report shows, glorification of terrorist groups which target Jews is prevalent and goes unpunished. Half of all students (49 per cent) say they have seen Hamas and Hezbollah glorified on campus, and 47 per cent have seen the 7 October attacks justified. One in four students (23 per cent) have witnessed behaviour that targets Jewish students because of their religion.
Today’s students are tomorrow’s cabinet ministers, business leaders, intellectuals
The UJS confirms the picture that anyone who visits a university campus can see with their own eyes. Jew hate is everywhere, in the form of support for Hamas and Hezbollah and placards denouncing ‘Zionists’ (in other words, Jews, given that the overwhelming majority of Jews believe in the right of Israel to exist). The UJS findings also fit in with the wider picture reported every six months by the Community Security Trust, which shows anti-Semitism rising – albeit not with the same level of intensity and prevalence as on campus.
But campus anti-Semitism is a special concern because what happens on campus today happens everywhere tomorrow. Today’s students are tomorrow’s cabinet ministers, business leaders, intellectuals and establishment more generally. That’s why these findings are so deeply disturbing. Not only do they provide yet more evidence of the normalisation of Jew hate; they also signal where we are heading. And for Jews, that is not a good place.
This has not happened by accident. While the Gaza war following the Hamas massacre of 7 October 2023 may be the proximate cause of the acceleration in Jew hate, that is only superficial. The real cause is the decades-long Russian and Chinese strategy of destabilising the West through academia.
The USSR spent time and money developing and pushing intellectual poison such as postmodernism and moral relativism. If, as postmodernism holds, there are no universal truths and is no objective reality – no such thing as good or bad, only different and equally valid – then terrorism is not terrorism but resistance. (It is same thought process with sex and gender.) Nor was 7 October a massacre but, rather, an uprising. And those who assert this are, by definition, superior in intelligence and understanding and on ‘the right side of history’.
Putin – a former KGB officer – has continued this strategy with more modern tactics such as troll farms, utilising social media as an unprecedented opportunity to promote Russia’s destabilisation agenda.
China is even more successful at this through TikTok. Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at New York University, has written that TikTok is like the Chinese Communist party having ‘implanted a neural jack into every under-30’. It is classic psyops, he wrote:
In the Cold War, both the US and the Soviet Union engaged in covert actions aimed at fomenting internal strife. Radio Free Europe, a CIA-backed initiative, broadcast pro-democracy messaging into the Eastern Bloc to encourage dissent. In the second world war, Nazi Germany dropped leaflets on American troops that highlighted racial injustices in the US, hoping to demoralise troops and incite racial tension. Every nation has done, or is doing, this… actively.
A recent Google study found that the average TikTok user spends at least 10 per cent of their waking hours on the app, and it is the main search engine for 40 per cent of that age group. The message they receive is unrelenting: Israel is the villain behind most of the world’s ills and Jews are powerful and cannot be criticised without repercussion. (Another message is that trans women are women and those who disagree are evil.)
It would be comforting to think that what happens on campus is just students behaving stupidly and that they will grow out of it when confronted by the real world. The problem with that is that the real world is increasingly being shaped not in opposition to their hatred and bigotry but in support of it. We are heading to a dark place.
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