Israel Matzav: Jewish students fleeing University of Edinburgh in fear

Friday, December 07, 2012

Jewish students fleeing University of Edinburgh in fear

And those of you who are stateside thought things were bad on US college campuses.... Jewish students at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland are literally dropping out of school and fleeing the campus out of fear from 'pro-Palestinian protesters.'

Attacks have created a “toxic atmosphere” in which Jewish students no longer feel comfortable, a delegation of community representatives told senior Edinburgh University officials.

Among those who felt the need to leave was a former Edinburgh Jewish Society chair who dropped out of his course to study abroad, partly because of the fall-out from an incident in which Ishmael Khaldi, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s most senior Muslim diplomat, was mobbed as he spoke at the university in February last year.

That incident also allegedly affected a Jewish postgraduate student so severely that she was forced to seek an extension for her dissertation before cancelling an option to continue studying in Scotland. She also left for a different course elsewhere in Europe.

In the most recent incident at Edinburgh, in October, an address by Israeli ambassador Daniel Taub was disrupted by chanting students waving Palestinian flags.

The JC understands that the stress of responding to anti-Israel attacks and campaigns has divided the university’s JSoc, with some members so apprehensive about the issue that a separate group has now been formed solely to handle matters relating to Israel.

One source said JSoc had been “decimated by these events” with Jewish students left “arguing with each other” and “scared” to defend Israel on campus.

The claims emerged after representatives of the Jewish community met university officers last week to discuss their concerns.

Members of Scottish Jewish Student Chaplaincy and the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities told the university bosses that Jewish students had felt it necessary to “hide their Jewish identity due to the hostile atmosphere at Edinburgh” and were now seeking “secure and safe” space on campus.

Melanie Phillips adds:

So this is what it has come to. In the 21st century, British Jews are being forced to hide their Jewish identity out of fear for their personal safety -- because they support the state of Israel in its struggle to defend itself against genocidal attack.

This disgusting and surreal state of affairs has arisen from what can only be described as the madness that has all but consumed the British intelligentsia and media, which portray Israel – the target and victim of Jew-hating extermination – in the deranged propaganda terms set out by its Arab and Muslim attackers. The result is rampant Israel-hatred, Judeophobia and Jew-baiting which is either tolerated or actively promulgated by a so-called educated class – including broadcasters and many mainstream politicians -- which on this issue is in fact totally impervious to evidence or reason.

A case in point was one of the incidents described above, when Ishmael Khaldi was forced to abandon his invited address at Edinburgh University. He was called a Nazi and accused of representing an ‘apartheid state’ by a baying mob who unfurled Palestinian flags and screamed that the university’s Jewish society was a ‘religious club that supports violence and unjust behaviour’ before security officials hustled him away. The JC reported:

‘At one stage the mic was ripped from his lectern and a demonstrator shouted: “We don't discuss with the Ku Klux Klan, why should we discuss with this thug?”’

But Ishmael Khaldi is an Israeli Arab, a Bedouin from the Galilee who is an advisor to Israel’s Foreign Minister. He is thus living proof that Israel cannot possibly be an ‘apartheid state’. His treatment at the hands of the screaming Edinburgh University mob was therefore not merely an unconscionable outbreak of thuggery but defied reason itself. As does the whole way in which Israel is presented in British public debate.

This appalling Judeophobic violence on campus is also the direct result of the cavalier indifference of many university authorities to the Islamic radicalisation and intimidation taking place right under their noses.

Read it all.

More on England's radicalization in general here.

Labels: British anti-Semitism, Scotland