You haven’t really made it in life until you’ve addressed the Oxford Union. That’s how I feel upon reading the flattering invitation to debate the proposition, ‘This House Believes Modern Youth Activism is Primarily Performative’, which tells me that I am ‘a sharp and independent voice’ with ‘a historically informed perspective’ who challenges ‘orthodoxies across the ideological spectrum’. Unfortunately, the 200-year-old body cannot cover the airfare from Washington to London, let alone an honorarium. But with an appeal like that, how can I say no?
As an undergraduate, I was a member of the Yale Political Union, which, like the Oxbridge institutions on which it was modelled, is a boot camp for future politicians. Fortunately, there are no politicians on the front benches this evening. Among my opponents are a member of the Revolutionary Communist party, a Harvard student, Zander Moricz, who challenged Florida’s controversial ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill while in high school, and a lawyer named Jolyon Maugham, about whom I know little beyond his Twitter tussles with J.K. Rowling. Only after the debate am I told about his most notorious exploit: murdering a fox with a baseball bat in his garden, wearing a kimono. It sounds like an answer in a madcap quiz.
With the odds so heavily against me, I decide to compound my inevitable defeat by focusing on the protest movement that, for the better part of two years, has consumed the world’s youth: Palestine. If you protest a war but don’t condemn the terrorist organisation that started it, I tell the hall, if you vilify the military methods of the country that was attacked but not those of said terrorist organisation that put civilians in harm’s way, if you decline to call upon that organisation to release the 251 hostages it took (an act that would have immediately ended the war you so strenuously claim to oppose), you are at best a useful idiot for, and at worst a willing accomplice of, religious fascists. This raises more than a few audible hackles, but I’m only getting started.
Despite chanting the genocidal phrase ‘globalise the intifada’, I continue, it appears that the youth who claim to be for Palestine aren’t willing to put their bodies on the line like the terrorists whose tactics they justify. We should of course be grateful that they aren’t blowing themselves up on double-decker buses or launching rockets into Golders Green, the logical ends of globalising the intifada. But their hypocrisy confirms that their protest is, as the proposition states, primarily performative.
George Abaraonye, last seen revelling in the death of a man, Charlie Kirk, whom he stood across the despatch box from just a few months before he was gruesomely murdered, derides me as an ‘Israel shill’ but unwittingly proves my point by also arguing in favour of the proposition. Activists are indeed performative, he says, and need to start shaking things up. Another speaker calls me a crotchety old man. Maugham lambasts the British government for violating ‘the right of students to disrupt speeches’. No wonder the man files so many frivolous lawsuits.
As a graduate of Yale, I have a natural aversion to Harvard, and my prejudice is confirmed when young Master Moricz asks me after the debate: ‘Why did everyone hate you?’ It’s a question I often ask myself. It’s later brought to my attention that the day after the debate, his name was added to the list of ‘notable speakers’ on the union’s Wikipedia page alongside the Dalai Lama, Albert Einstein and Queen Elizabeth II. I’m reminded of what Henry Kissinger said about academic politics being so vicious because the stakes are so small.
The great British tradition of free speech is in full flower on Saturday, with Tommy Robinson’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally taking place just a stone’s throw from a demonstration avenging ‘Nakba Day’, when five Arab armies failed to murder the nascent Jewish state in its crib. I know I’m near the nationalist march when I encounter a woman with a Union Jack wrapped around her like a cape squatting to micturate on a street corner. The first thing that strikes me about the attendees are their faces: these are working people who have seen difficult times. When I later mention this to a friend, he shows me a video from the rally in which a woman calls out another woman for having a ‘right lefty look on her face’. To be fair, she did.
Among the sea of Union Jacks and Israeli, American and ‘TERF Island’ flags, one sign stands out: ‘Starmer: Not conducive to the public good’. The mood of cheeriness and good humour is interrupted for a short vigil in honour of Charlie Kirk, who, according to the lyrics of a song sung from the stage, ‘died a martyr’. This in stark contrast to the pro-Palestine demonstration, where protestors chanted of Robinson, ‘Shoot him in the neck like Charlie Kirk.’ And yet it was only the Unite the Kingdom rally that Keir Starmer condemned.
The last time I visited the UK, in 2021, support for the Green party was negligible. Today, having swapped the green of environmentalism for the green of Islam, it threatens the very future of Labour. Moreover, the leader of Britain’s de facto Islamist party is a Jewish homosexual. As the American baseball legend Yogi Berra apocryphally said upon learning that Dublin had elected a Jewish mayor: ‘Only in America!’
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