During last September’s freshers’ fair at Royal Holloway, University of London, two students got into a brief verbal tiff that became subject to the administration’s immediate alarm. Our characters: Brodie Mitchell, a self-described non-Jewish Zionist, and Huda El-Jamal, the female president of the Friends of Palestine Society who is of Palestinian descent.
Mitchell says El-Jamal taunted him – ‘Here’s the wannabe Jew’ – and questioned why he wasn’t wearing a yarmulke. Referring to the keffiyeh El-Jamal was wearing as a headscarf, Mitchell taunted back: ‘You’re wearing a tea towel over your head.’
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A monstrous exchange, we can all agree. Naturally, Royal Holloway suspended Mitchell for nine weeks – nine weeks! – the better to investigate ‘alleged conduct that could be considered hate speech’. The university placed strict restrictions on the second-year student to prevent him from interacting with his classmates and thus presumably infecting the innocent with his vile bigotry.
If we’re going to be touchy, why not be consistently touchy? Why was remarking on the young woman’s headgear deserving of suspension, while her remarking on the young man’s lack of headgear got a free pass – when in this context both adornments are politically charged? Could it be that Jews, wannabe or otherwise, are open season, whereas the most casual swipe at The Faith That Shall Not Be Impugned is a matter of the utmost gravity?
Also: assuming that a 60-second mutual slag-off between undergrads is properly the business of university higher-ups, what is so derogatory about this exchange? Even calling Mitchell a ‘wannabe Jew’ is only injurious if you’re an anti-Semite. Otherwise, yearning to join a great Abrahamic faith seems a defensibly noble aspiration. As for wearing a tea towel – so? Granted, this quip was not the soul of wit, but wearing a tea towel would hardly constitute the height of humiliation. I like tea towels. Why, as they double for napkins, I have a whole collection of some 50 colourful tea towels, about which I feel warmly and which I strain to associate with ridicule or disgust. Were you to fling the biting aspersion, ‘You big, fat tea towel!’ I imagine you’d trigger less affront than bemusement.
I’m reminded of the ostensibly notorious column in which Boris Johnson wrote that Muslim women in burkas ‘look like letter boxes’, which became a staggeringly big issue in the 2019 general election and justified countless accusations that he was an ‘Islamophobe’. But no one in the aggrieved media ever stopped to consider whether that analogy was even faintly malicious. In fact, I got into a spat on Question Time that November with two veiled women in the audience over just how unacceptably defamatory the image rated as – because to me, on a scale of 1-to-100 on the insult-o-meter, that offhand simile lay rather on the ‘1’ side.
I pointed out that as far as I knew in the English-speaking world comparisons to elements of domestic architecture were not standard pejoratives (e.g., ‘Cornice-head!’ or ‘Your face looks like wainscotting!’). Ditto, then, slight mischaracterisations of fabric – though a keffiyeh, especially the cotton variety when folded neatly into thirds, could make a quite respectable tea towel.
We’re all familiar with stories of homeowners forced to demolish sheds, barns or whole extensions due to violating some niggling planning permission rule. We’ve all read about punters whom council apparatchiks caught dropping an apple core in a park, or pouring two tablespoons of cold coffee down a roadway drain, who were hit thereafter with larcenous fines more suitable to non-custodial sentences for knife crime. In a report last week, a north London doctor has accumulated nine points on his licence for driving just over the 20mph limit. More small-mindedness: likewise last week, British immigration boarded a boat loaded with supplies for those Chagossians camped on one of their islands hoping to keep the territory British. After rifling through every box and document, the officers seized (under what authority?), among many other items, mosquito nets, bed linens, a solar water still, an ice machine and sunglasses. So next time I fly to Heathrow, I’m leaving my shades at home.
British authorities have long displayed a penchant for pettiness, rigidity and even spitefulness
Eternally obsessed with rules and tiny infractions thereof, British authorities of all stripes have long displayed a penchant for pettiness, rigidity, unreasonableness and even spitefulness. But customary institutional pettifoggery combined with progressive ideology results in a Red Bull of hypersensitivity. Quaff this potent cultural cocktail and you are perfectly cleansed of a sense of humour – in addition to becoming superhumanly intolerant, when we’re eternally lectured that toleration is the supreme British ‘value’.
Thus, clearly unaware that their new rules are inane, much less funny, DEI do-gooders at an NHS teaching hospital are discouraging staff from saying ‘raining cats and dogs’ and ‘the early bird catches the worm’ to avoid offending non-native patients, as the idioms ‘may not translate well across other cultures’. This po-faced, princess-and-the-pea delicacy extends even to the readership of a parish church magazine in Devon, in which an amateur poet just dared to publish: ‘Boatloads of illegals flooding to our shores,/Step this way for hotel rooms and benefits galore…/ Everyone who’s come that way, the story’s all the same,/ If it costs so much to get here – why not come by plane?’ Having also written one line unflattering to fat people, she’s been banned from the magazine, and not for her weak sense of rhythm, either.
As for tea-towel-gate, in the olden days that dialogue would have been classed as ‘banter’, esteem for which was once far more of a proper British ‘value’ than tolerance. Thankfully, Mitchell took Royal Holloway to court for levying unfair disciplinary measures, and the school just settled for an undisclosed sum. Regrettably, he has conceded that his tea towel riposte was ‘poorly expressed and inappropriate’, as opposed to my formulation: ‘totally harmless and trivial’. Worse, police have submitted a file about this egregious expression of raving racial malevolence to the Crown Prosecution Service, in case the CPS would like to prosecute Mitchell for hate crime. What a shock.
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