A mob of students waving flags and shouting slogans chases a Jewish leader from a university. She is bundled into a car and flees for safety.
Are we talking about a horde of brownshirts at a Berlin university in 1938? A mob of skinheads in Moscow? Islamic students in Iran?
How about left-wing students at the London School of Economics. On the anniversary of Kristallnacht — I kid you not.
Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotovely was chased out of a university debate by angry LSE students and activists waving Palestinian flags.
The crowd attempted to rush the Ambassador as she fled her controversial debate on the future of the Middle East at the university clutching flowers.
This was no mere spontaneous outbreak of anti-Jewish hate, either. Rather, the violence was planned and encouraged.
It emerged that activists from LSE Class War posted an Instagram story ahead of the debate urging students to rush the stage.
It read: “Whoever smashes the Ambassador car window (Lincoln’s Inn Field), gets pints. Let’s f*en frighten her.“18.25 we’re storming in. Let’s make her shake. F the old bill.”
MSN
Rather than ashamed, the “LSE for Palestine” official statement boasted that “a group of courageous LSE students” had chanted the anti-Semitic war-cry of the anti-Semitic BDS movement. “This university belongs to us.”
Antisemitic, you say? That’s a bit strong. The baying crowd that surged around Israeli ambassador Tzipi Hotovely last night, forcing her from the building under the protection of nervy security guards, would hardly think of themselves as such. They were pro-Palestine university students, fighting ‘settler colonialism’ and ‘Israeli apartheid’. In their minds, they were simply supporting the oppressed, sticking up for the underdog.
But look a little closer and you’ll see what I mean. Among the Palestine flags and placards were other, less easily recognisable banners that revealed a more worrying undercurrent: those of groups like Kata’ib Hezbollah, a radical Iraqi Shi’ite paramilitary group funded by – you guessed it – Iran.
Some of the placards also featured a group called Innovative Minds, a pro-Iran organisation that has carried at least one tribute to a suicide bomber on its website. An article it published referred to a killer who murdered 19 Israelis outside a nightclub as a ‘martyr’. Another piece claimed that Israel had no right to exist and should be ‘dismantled’. Back in 2016, as the Labour antisemitism scandal raged, John McDonnell caused outrage when he was found to have linked to the group on his blog.
Spectator Australia
As Orwell wrote in “Notes on Nationalism”, the Nazis might have made open expression of anti-Semitism unacceptable in polite society, but that in reality, anti-Semitism in Britain “appears to be widespread, even among intellectuals, and the general conspiracy of silence probably helps exacerbate it”. Orwell blamed “conservatives” (oddly, ignoring the fact that one of the great Conservative PMs was Jewish), but admitted that “people of Left opinions are not immune to it”.
In fact, far from immune to anti-Semitism, it has become endemic in the British left. The mainstream left went to the last general election with a leader that even his own party admitted was an anti-Semite. The UK left is trying in vain to maintain “the conspiracy of silence”: even when Labor groups convene to solemnly swear that they ain’t no Jew-haters, Jews are harassed in the street outside.
As slavishly apish of foreign trends as always, the antipodean left is little better. Scratch a “pro-Palestine” leftist and it’s not long before the Jew-hating stain comes through.
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