Listening to UK government ministers, one could be forgiven for concluding that the sole purpose of the encampments now proliferating on campuses across the country is the harassment and persecution of Jews.
Their protest against genocide in Gaza and their demands that universities divest from an apartheid regime are all but obscured by the declarations of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, that antisemitism will not be tolerated and “we will not stand by as Jewish students suffer”. (Note not if but as).
Threats were made in advance to back a “police crackdown” and vice chancellors were urgently summoned to a Cobra-style meeting in Downing Street. Given the government’s pro-Israel policy, it was hardly likely to welcome the protests, but this knee-jerk resort to anticipating and decrying antisemitism – based, as with the national demonstrations, on the flimsiest of evidence – reveals a longstanding pattern…..more
