From Ian:
David Collier: KCL – will someone please protect the Jewish students?
BESA: Mahmoud Abbas’s Speech: Who Was the Real Audience?
David Collier: KCL – will someone please protect the Jewish students?
Demonstrators as victims
It is also interesting to record how the demonstrators twist the events. They had chosen to come onto a campus to disrupt an event. The campus security tried, and partially failed to contain the protest. One demonstrator was not permitted inside because he held a megaphone. An instrument clearly designed (outside a door of an event) to disrupt. This became the tweet of the night:
So as Jewish students are huddled in a room, struggling to hear what their invited speaker against a background of vocal hate, the demonstrators portray themselves as the victims. In the footage, the security man explicitly references the megaphone (see under his arm). The person tweeting this is Ayo Olatunji, who is part of the UCL student union, and was part of the UCL protest and disruption in late 2016. More of a concern was this tweet by Ayo:
He claims he was denied, not because of his behaviour, his intent, or the need to uphold free speech, but because he is black. I saw this weaponisation of racism at Cambridge with Malia Bouattia, and recently being used at Warwick by Nicola Pratt. A truly divisive strategy. There is of course nothing about his colour mentioned in the footage.
The protestors have complained to the university. They are in ‘outrage’. Why? Just as I described their dissatisfaction at events at UCL two week ago:
‘They are disappointed that they are not allowing them to do what they want to do. To permit their demonstration, to deny the other, to allow them entry to the building, to let them disrupt the event, to deny the speaker the platform in the first place. They want to be armed with a security force to impose their demands. A fascist mentality. ‘
What of the Jewish students?
This is all intimidation. And it works. The university is not capable of fighting a war for the Jewish students, because this is not a battle of students. Palestine Solidarity Campaign advertise it, Friends of Al Aqsa live stream it, off-campus ringleaders turn up to assist in the organisation.
How many of those Jewish students who may have been intimidated by yesterday’s events, will not attend another meeting of its type? Will supporters of those Jewish students now look over their shoulder and say to themselves ‘it is not worth it’? How many of those who organised the event, will not organise another? Will invited speakers not want to come?
Intimidation works because it works through intimidation, not debate. Non-democratic forces are undermining our academic spaces. Values of equality, democracy, free speech are all under threat. When you have Jewish students forced to leave a room surrounded by haters screaming ‘shame’, alongside posts on Facebook calling these students ‘cockroaches’, then you have to accept you are in dangerous territory.
#Jews run the gauntlet from @jeremycorbyn @PSCupdates #JewHaters @KingsCollegeLon tonight. What’s changed from #1938 #Vienna? @SamGyimah @COLRICHARDKEMP @GuidoFawkes pic.twitter.com/934YYjYwPZ
— Jewish HR Watch (@jhrwatch) February 12, 2018
Our statement about the event we hosted tonight featuring former #Israeli Deputy Prime Minister, Dan Meridor. We must continue to protect free #speech on campus & defeat #intolerance.
— Pinsker Centre (@PinskerCentre) February 12, 2018
READ: https://t.co/ntT2Gfjxr9 pic.twitter.com/aPwgarxSg3
BESA: Mahmoud Abbas’s Speech: Who Was the Real Audience?
Mahmoud Abbas’s blatantly skewed account of the nature of Zionism and the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict should bring Israel’s policymakers and opinion shapers to enunciate anew the story they tell their own people and the world at large.
Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’s speech at the January 14 meeting of the PLO’s Central Council lasted two hours. Apart from the phrase “May your house be destroyed,” which became the headline for the speech, Abbas’s “historical” survey of the chronicle of Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has drawn most of the Israeli criticism. According to Prime Minister Netanyahu, the survey underscored the root of the conflict: “The Palestinians’ rejection of the existence of a Jewish state in any borders.”
For the Palestinians, too, particularly the younger among them, much of the speech must have sounded like a tiresome history lesson. Yet political speeches of this kind often have more than one audience in mind. In this case, Israeli society with its various factions and leaders, along with the international community, was the main audience. Appealing to fashionable legal and moral fads, particularly in Western Europe, Abbas again set forth the supposedly problematic aspects of Zionism. His “historical survey” undoubtedly fails the minimum test of facts, but it is uncritically accepted in many circles. This poses a real challenge to Israeli policymakers and opinion shapers.
By every historical account, the Zionist revolution – the incredible ingathering of the exiles and the establishment of the flourishing and highly successful state of Israel – is a unique and unprecedented phenomenon. Those who insist on viewing it as yet another immigration wave among the 20th century global population movements fail to grasp the real nature of this revolution. In this respect, Abbas touched the key issue that, in his eyes, made the Palestinians the main victim of Zionism: if the Jews yearn for a safe haven, and the international community wants to provide them with one, why does it have to be in Palestine, at the Palestinians’ expense? (h/t Elder of Lobby)




















