The Jewish Chronicle has published a blistering essay by a non-Jewish academic about the alarming levels of anti-semitism she encounters on a daily basis at her university. It’s an anonymous piece because she doesn’t want to be targeted by ‘anti-Zionist’ loons on her campus, but every bit rings true. It begins:
As a non-Jewish lecturer at a major university, I can confirm that British academia is structurally racist against Jews. The penny finally dropped as I was second-marking a piece of undergraduate writing in which Jews were openly compared to scurrying vermin, spreading disease.
The student’s illiterate use of grammar, nonsensical punctuation and mixed metaphors would surely have embarrassed Goebbels. But Hitler’s arch propagandist would just as surely have approved of the spirit of the piece. Not that this was a uniquely awful specimen of the kind of “work” I’ve had to face as first and second marker of a large cohort of students since the horror of October 7th.
A different piece, produced by a student in the same year group, accused its readers, in the foulest language, of complicity with “genocide” and of “sleeping” while the IDF killed innocent civilians for target practice.
The obvious Jew-hatred of these pieces of writing were one thing. But then there were the comments of the first academic who had marked them, which praised the “Jews-as-vermin” piece as a moving indictment of Israeli “colonisation” that displayed a fine philosophical turn of phrase and a carefulness of language. As for the “genocide” piece, my colleague reassured the student that his message was deeply important.
This, in a nutshell, is the problem: not the fact that immature, 20-year-old students have been brought up on a diet of hating the West, hating Jews and unashamedly milking their self-declared victim status, but the fact that this pernicious nonsense is actively encouraged, praised and taught by the academy – and has been for decades. Ever since the late 1960s, higher education in the West has been infiltrated by a steady stream of nefarious actors, who claim victimhood and make allegations of “Islamophobia” on the one hand and spout racist hate speech against Jews on the other. The ultimate bait-and-switch.
The academics in question may not be paid agitators but they nonetheless fall over themselves to support one kind of non-white student (any kind of Muslim) over other kinds of minority non-white student (Jews or Christians from Africa, Israel, or elsewhere in the Middle East), no matter the hypocrisies involved.
I ask myself, for example, how the academic who had praised the diatribes would have responded to a piece of coursework in which Muslims in Britain were depicted as diseased vermin? Would said student have been given a first-class mark, as was the proposed grade here? The answer, for those of you asleep at the back, is no: the student would have been hauled up before an anti-racism panel and referred to Prevent before you could say “parody”.
Yet when I suggested a lower grade for the student in question (based on the woeful quality of the piece, rather than the racist slurs) and commented that the work that was uneducated at best, offensive at worst – which, after all, was my job as their tutor – my feedback was removed by the university lest there be negative public repercussions. As a compromise, a high 2:1 was awarded instead.
In my decades as a lecturer, I’ve often seen the bigotry of low expectations masquerading as positive discrimination, which no one in my line of work seems to care is still unlawful in the UK. But since October 7th, a new low in racist cognitive dissonance seems to have become commonplace.
Teaching people that “Palestine” was originally Muslim until it was colonised by Jews is so wrong, factually and historically as well as morally, that even as a non-Jewish academic, I can no longer keep quiet.
Worth reading in full.
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