Howard Epstein – AS THE IVORY TOWERS COLLAPSE
Ah. Life at uni. Idyllic and carefree.
One’s time at university is supposed to offer the last years of carefree existence before entering the bear-pit of working life. As they say, in the world of the bear, it’s a dog eat dog. But in uni and college (or, as the Americans say, “school”), one is supposed to have an existence no more demanding than one of study, polemics, a Little weed and snooker.
No more! So much has changed – and especially for Jewish students – that it is hard to internalise how far it has deteriorated.
First, consider the “Snowflake Syndrome”, the theory that students need protection from (for example) a playwright who died over 400 years ago. Take Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare. Students, who as a species have been known to take over and sit in at college administration buildings, run societies with initiation ceremonies that cannot be described in a family newspaper and attend all-night raves with alcohol, drugs, and all other imaginable forms of licentiousness, cannot be permitted to open the tragic romance without being warned of its sexual and suicidal themes.
As for Macbeth, they now need trigger warnings of “scenes of war, violence, and death including execution, suicide, violence against children, murder and domestic, emotional and physical abuse”. Hopefully, the callow ones do not open newspapers, for there they would be confronted by stories of every one of those offences committed almost daily somewhere in the country, and occasionally by serving police officers.
Well, some students need to be warned to brace themselves against threats not merely from the pages of a book but potentially coming at them personally in the most violent ways. Those are the Jewish students, now unlikely to look back on their years of study with anything but the bleakest and most fearful memories.
Take those at Leeds University, for example. A student group, recognised by Leeds University Union, has been urging students on Instagram to “make it clear to the university we will not stand with a genocidal chaplain on our campus”. The Jewish students at what has been for years the destination of choice for many, are understandably nervous as to what may come next, for according to the Daily Mail, their Jewish Chaplain, Rabbi Zecharia Deutsch, an IDF reservist, has been forced into hiding with his family following death threats.
Leeds, it should be noted, has form. In 2022, a Jewish sociology student’s coursework was wrongly marked as a “fail”, because it did not blame Israel “for the crimes of Hamas against Palestinians”. She brought a legal claim against Leeds University, ultimately receiving an undisclosed sum, without admission of liability, in the “commercial settlement” of her claim. Some may think that speaks volumes.
In Birmingham, last week, a “Stand With Gaza workplace day of action” was joined by trade unionists in media and education, civil servants and students. Birmingham Students’ Jewish Society said that “protesters harassed Jewish students and called for ‘death to Zionists’.”
After the horrors of 7 October last, a joint message was issued by the Jewish and Muslim Chaplains of Manchester University: “We must stand together and speak out against any forms of divisive discourse, rising instances of discrimination or hate, including Islamophobia and Antisemitism.”
That should have been emulated all over the UK but there is no evidence that it was not a lone act of solidarity. Rather, the evidence is that fear stalks the corridors of the ivory towers: fear of irrational aggression, of exclusion, of physical attack and worse. Apparently, the snowflakes have been replaced by a new genus of students unlikely to quail in a stage performance or play-reading: ignorance, prejudice and hatred of fellow students.
The irrationality should be plain to the objective observer: only one demographic flies jet airliners, their tanks brim-full with kerosene, into buildings to kill thousands of innocents; only one demographic blows up a concert hall lobby at the end of a pop concert, resulting in the violent deaths of teens, mostly indigenous British teenage girls; only one demographic grooms other such victims such that they may rape them, apparently with impunity, over many years; only one demographic subjugates, as a fundamental way of life, its womenfolk; and only one demographic declares a world caliphate, in which the most revolting ways of killing other human being are practised, including the burning alive in a cage of a Jordanian Air Force pilot and the beheading of many others, whist enslaving all those minorities unlucky enough to fall under their control. There us only one such demographic – and they are not the Jews. Nor are they Christians, Hindus or Sikhs.
How long has this denial of reality in the West to continue? For how long must one minority be allowed to seek to smother our desire to live in peace and harmony? When will the politicians, the establishment, the security forces, and the mainstream media grasp the monster by its horns, by demanding of Moslem communities that they condemn what everyone else sees as criminal conduct. And that failure to do so will not end with prejudice and violence against Jewish students.
It was in the universities of Germany that anti-Jewish racism festered for over a hundred and fifty years before Hitler came to power. His obsession with the Jews cost him World War II (as I shall explain next time). By the time it was over in May 1945, Europe lay in ruins and, apart from the six million who met their violent and premature ends in the Shoah, fifty million others – non-Jews – from Moscow to Calais had suffered similar fates.
Make no mistake: that is the path of anti-Jewish racism. It starts in the house of learning and ends in the abyss.
On 5 November 2023, the redoubtable Anthony Julius was published in The Times under the headline: “This is Britain’s antisemitism moment – and our institutions are failing to respond”. Universities are British institutions, and their proper response is overdue. The pushback against the irrational, unBritish aggression that they have been tolerating for decades must end or our way of life – tolerant, reasonable, moderate and British – is under threat and may itself end.
© Howard Epstein – February 2023 www.howard-epstein.com
