Britain's Pedagogy of Hate

Last week the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph, two national British newspapers, published articles regarding student fanaticism on UK campuses, an extremism which the government believes poses a threat to England's national security. The papers report that education secretary, Ruth Kelly,

"ordered vice—chancellors to clamp down on student extremists following the July 7th London terror attacks." They also draw attention to an academic study showing that thirty British institutions are now infested with "extremist and/or terror groups."

Thirty different institutions.
 
I am not the least bit shocked. During the last eight years at the University of London, I've witnessed numerous college events which unabashedly expressed hatred of the West and a violent loathing of Israel that would make Klansman David Duke proud.
 
Let me give you an example. Just feet away from the July 7th London bombings, my college magazine last March published an article entitled "When Only Violence Will Do," written by one Nasser Amin, an Egyptian lawyer who was not even enrolled at the college.

To give you a taste of what has been acceptable on prestigious English campuses lately, I shall quote a few paragraphs from this veritable article of hate, whose premise is that Israeli civilians are fair targets for killing.
 
On one page, the author asserts: "Violence, rather than feebleness, generates power for the oppressed." With that classical fascist philosophy, he informs London University students of the following.

The oft repeated view that Israeli victims of Palestinian violence are mainly 'innocents,' as Sheikh Yusuf implies, faces the easy objection that those who benefit from the immoral actions of a colonial state in which they have chosen to reside cannot be considered as innocent. They are personally complicit in national wrongdoing, exacerbated by the fact that all Israeli adults, including the women, serve in what is indubitably an imperialist—terrorist organization, the IDF. By choosing to raise their children in a colony at war with an indigenous people, the Israelis jeopardize the lives of these genuine innocents, who deserve to be protected from the crimes of their parents.

Including the women and children. Having Jewish family on my father's side, I am probably not the most objective guy to interpret this passage, yet I cannot but take this to mean annihilation for every last Israeli, some of whom are now studying at the University of London and, to be sure, could suffer violence by an unhinged student who reads these vile words.

What justifies such genocide? Evidently this:

People who are in a wretched state, being deprived of basic moral justice, because of the ongoing deliberate actions of others, have a right to violence against them, if no other course of action is as likely to meet their objective of improving their predicament.

Being "in a wretched state" is, of course, a highly subjective judgment. Nevertheless, it is standard British academic apologetics for Palestinian homicide—bombers, September 11th and now the advocacy of genocide on English campuses.

But if some British students thought such subjective rationales merely excused the killing of Israelis, then they must have been shocked to find, after July 7th, that it was being used to explain the murdering of English citizens, too. "These suicide bombers are desperate people," pontificated Bashir Ahmed , uncle of one of the London homicide—bombers. "They are not getting their rights. They can see that their brothers are not getting their rights, so they take extreme action." That England is one of the foremost liberal societies in the world doesn't matter, that England confers far more rights on its Muslim citizens than any Middle Eastern society is utterly irrelevant.   
 
Elsewhere in the college article, it says,

Rational consistency demands that if some Jewish colonies are wrongful, then all Jewish colonies are wrongful and all ought to be dismantled, not just those established after the arbitrary year, 1967.... Too many fail to recognize that pre—67 Zionism is just as iniquitous as post—67 Zionism. There are many in our world who are Zionists yet fail to recognize it. They ought to be exposed.

Exposed. What does that mean? Is it a coded message that anyone who believes in the right of Israel to exist within the 1967 boundaries, which is the position of the United Nations, is a Zionist and therefore a proper candidate for murder? Presumably, under this lunatic rationale, one could justify the London slaughter on July 7th, since many of the victims were probably "Zionists" who failed to recognize it.
 
What can one say about such insane hatred in England's universities? Personally, I am disgusted, not so much on behalf of Israel as on behalf of England, not so much for Jewish students as for all of England's students. I don't know if Education Secretary Ruth Kelly can do anything about Britain's campus extremism, but I do know that this fanaticism is an insult to the liberal legacy of Jeremy Bentham, the philosophical founder of the University of London.

UPDATE: My friend Gavin Gross, an officer at the Jewish Society at the London University's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), kindly pointed out in an email to me that I, along with other writers on the subject, have made a now—common factual error. In "Britain's Pedagogy of Hate," I say that Nasser Amin, the author of "When Only Violence Will Do," was an Egyptian lawyer and an outsider to the University of London, as was reported when his belligerent and upsetting article came out. It is a shame to discover, however, that Mr. Amin was actually an MA student in politics at SOAS, and thus a perfect example of the campus extremists about whom Education Secretary Ruth Kelly is concerned.

Jonah Avriel Cohen is a professor of ethics at Kaplan University, an online university for working adults, and can be reached at JAC1974@gmail.com