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Western universities have a lot to answer for.

All over the Western world, especially since the horrific October 7 attack, we have seen universities pushing radical Islamist and pro-Hamas hate speech. Radicals have set up tent cities and occupied classrooms as they shout ugly anti-Israel chants. All the while, Jewish students feel increasingly threatened and unsafe on their own campuses.

Examples of this are legion. One of the most recent and despicable cases involves an American academic who spoke at a pro-Palestine rally in Sydney a week ago. Khaled Beydoun of Arizona State University actually said October 7 was a day of “considerable celebration, considerable progress and considerable privilege”!

Not only have the Australian sponsors not called this out, but the American university where he teaches at has said there was nothing wrong in what he said, and that it is all good because it is “free speech”. As one media outlet reports:

Beydoun was also quoted as saying at the rally, “I want to talk about some good things because it’s a good day, and we’ve got to mark some of the good news that comes about that we often times neglect.” In response to inquiries from Sky News Australia, a spokesperson on behalf of Arizona State University said, “The university is aware of the professor’s remarks and is respectful of the First Amendment privileges associated with academic freedom and free speech.”

Countless examples of ugly anti-Semitism have been the norm at so many Western university campuses. And very few of those in charges have lifted a finger to bring this to an end and ensure that all students can safely go about getting the education they have paid for.

Hypocrites

In his new book, English commentator Brendan O’Neill has spoken to this matter in some detail. I have already penned two articles on his brief but valuable volume, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation (Spiked, 2024). My earlier pieces can be seen here: (1) (2)

Chapter Seven of his book looks at how so-called safe spaces at campuses are certainly not of any use for Jews being targeted by the militants. Indeed, the double standards of the radical left is apparent to all. Consider his opening paragraphs:

So, we live in an era when you can be banished from a university for saying women don’t have penises, but you’ll be fine if you say ‘kill all Jews’. We live in a time when asking someone where they’re from is considered a ‘racial microaggression, but hollering ‘Globalise the intifada’ in the aftermath of an ‘intifada’ in which a thousand Jews were slaughtered is apparently okay. We live in a culture in which students will demand access to ‘safe spaces’, complete with colouring books and bean bags, if a speaker they hate turns up on campus. And yet these same students who fear words like the rest of us fear death, will happily cheer the invasion of Israel and the murder of hundreds of its citizens. No safe space for Jews, it seems.

This was one of the most unsettling revelations in the aftermath of the 7 October pogrom: that snowflakes have a secret genocidal streak That student activists who wail about feeling ‘erased’ if you fail to use their preferred pronouns don’t seem to have much of a problem with the literal erasure of hundreds of citizens of the Jewish State.

Overnight, students who had bristled at such ‘micro-aggressions’ as ‘Don’t you want a family?’ – it is an act of unforgivable ‘heteronormativity’, apparently, to assume everyone wants a family – were gloating over the massacre of entire families in southern Israel. (p. 114)

He continues: “The student world’s overnight shift from craving safety to praising pogroms was extraordinary. For years, student activists were known, and often pilloried, for their hyper-fragility. For seeking sanctuary in safe spaces when such ‘dangerous’ speakers as Christina Hoff Sommers or Ben Shapiro showed up. For hiding in specially designated safety zones, complete with Play-Doh, colouring books and calming music…” (pp. 118-119)

He goes on to speak about what Noah Rubin of the New York Post had noted: the fact that our elite schools are becoming ‘Hamas University’. O’Neill writes:

The dark irony of ‘Hamas University’ is that it was the handiwork of an activist class that has spent recent years fretting over the ‘alt-right’. Every time a Proud Boy or a Milo Yiannopoulos arrived on a campus, student radicals would say: ‘There is no room for fascism.’ Yet just years later this same station of self-styled ‘anti-fascists’ had nurtured a truly fascistic climate. One in which Jews were told to go back to Europe, swastikas were painted on walls, and there was dreaming everywhere one looked of the coming destruction of the Jewish nation. (p. 121)

Grow Up

So what is a response to all this? Do we need safe spaces for Jews on our university campuses? O’Neill disagrees with that as a worthwhile solution:

That Jews on campus are so forcefully expelled from the ‘safe space’, that they are denied the protections of political correctness afforded to black students, Muslim students, trans students and others, his flagrant bigotry. In the early 20th century there was an unacknowledged Jewish quota that limited the numbers of these supposedly problematic people who were permitted to attend universities like Harvard. Now there is a baldly stated ‘Jewish quota’ for how many of ‘them’ can enter the safe space and be forcefielded from slurs about Poland and chance for the destruction of their national homeland: that is, none. No Jews enjoy access to this sacred zone.

And yet … the solution is not to have a more egalitarian ‘safe space’ but to dismantle the ideology of this safe space entirely. The true fairness we need in the modern university is not the fair inclusion of Jews in the systems of psychic protection, but the exclusion of all students from such gravely infantilizing policies. Far from demanding the right of entry for Jews into this culture that reduces students to the level of overgrown children who require 24/7 shielding from sore words and hard ideas, we should demand the liberation of all from this ideological trap in which the price of safety is your autonomy. (pp. 123-124)

Related to all this is the issue of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion). I just recently wrote about the pernicious nature of this.

O’Neill also sees it as being hugely problematic:

It was these ideologies’ ruthless sorting of every ethnic group according to their ‘privilege’ or ‘oppression’ that led to the fresh targeting of Jews. It was their construction of an unforgiving moral narrative in which certain groups are historically oppressed, and thus must be afforded recognition and resources, while others are historically privileged, and thus must atone and apologise, that made Jews the ultimate outgroup…

The DEI ideology drives this dehumanisation. DEI is the organisational framework of virtually every campus in the West. It is presented as a pro-equity regime whose aim is to foster a culture of fairness, especially for historically underrepresented groups. But in truth, it’s a racial sorting mechanism that favours certain groups at the expense of others. (pp. 124-125)

He closes the chapter with these words:

Post-7 October, we witnessed just how violent the supposed ‘safe space’ can be. We saw the ugliness and intolerance of this new ideology of censorship. It became clear that in the very act of promising students protection from supposedly transgressive people come up the safe space also puts those transgressive people in the crosshairs, exposing them to severe forms of both social and physical reprimand.

In the very act of depicting certain ideas as a threat to your entire sense of self, as the potential eraser of your whole identity, the safe space incites fear, hatred and even violence towards those ideas. And, by extension, towards the people who hold them. The rise of racism, intolerance and brutality on progressive campuses after 7 October confirms that when you educate the young to fear difference and disagreement, you encourage them to hate those who are different than those who disagree.

The best push back against this carnival bigotry is a full-throated defence of the thing that both pogromists and their Western sympathisers hate: freedom. Freedom of conscience, freedom of thought and freedom of speech. That might mean the world were people are free to say ‘Kill all Jews’, but it also means a world where many more of us are free to say: ‘No. Never again.’ (pp. 126-127)

The irony, of course, is that universities are supposed to be places where free inquiry, and the open exchange of thoughts and ideas, are fully welcome. But in the West that is becoming ever more rare and unlikely. Those who do not fit into the new approved narrative find themselves in very dangerous territory indeed. That is especially true of Jews.

Thank you, Brendan O’Neill, for being a voice of sanity in this clearly insane world.

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Republished with thanks to CultureWatch. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.