An important report by Alex Chalmers on antisemitic anti-Zionism and the scandal of Oxford University Labour Club (OULC) has just appeared at Fathom. An excerpt:
In a way, the antisemitic incidents I witnessed in OULC are less troubling than the culture which allowed such behaviour to become normalised. It is common to encounter antisemitic individuals in all walks of life, but the mass turning of a blind eye that has come to characterise vast parts of the Left is chilling. As antisemites can double up as vocal critics of Israel, there is a marked tendency on the Left to view them as fellow travellers whose hearts are in the right place – so their rhetoric passes the test of social acceptability.
The ‘justice’ over ‘peace’ attitude was dominant in OULC. Complex geopolitical questions were reduced to crude Manichean binaries: it was ‘socialist’, for example, to support Hamas because they are the ‘oppressed’ fighting the ‘oppressors’. In this frame of mind, it is ‘socialist’ to support an antisemitic organisation which seeks Israel’s destruction, helps ISIS in the Sinai, and abuses Palestinian civilians, using them human shields, stealing their medical supplies, persecuting gay Palestinians, intimidating journalists, attacking free trade unionists, and using concrete donated for the constructions of schools for Palestinians to construct terror tunnels to attack Israelis. This is, as Nick Cohen says, a Left that has lost its way.
Read Alex Chalmers’s full post at the Fathom website.
