LONDON — While a unilateral Israeli cease-fire has at least
temporarily brought some calm to the recent conflict in the Holy
Land, the same cannot be said about the tensions on the campus of
the London School of Economics.
Since students returned to campus to begin the Lent term earlier
this month, supporters of the Palestinian cause have organized
protests, rallies, and (hilariously) an occupation of one of the
main lecture halls on campus. The Students Union also passed a
resolution condemning the Jewish state.
The “Defend Gaza, Condemn the Israeli Massacre” resolution
stipulated, among other things, that of the “The knowing
endangerment of civilians is illegal, immoral and unacceptable
and that our Union has a moral obligation to stand against such
action whenever it occurs.”
The knowing endangerment of civilians is, of course, the modus
operandi of Hamas. Anybody want to take bets whether the LSE
Students Union has upheld its “moral obligation” to condemn that
terrorist organization for its endangerment of civilian life? Or
for that matter, how many resolutions has the LSE Students Union
passed condemning the numerous dictatorships around the world
that routinely brutalize civilians? It should be noted that the
resolution does not mention Hamas rocket attacks against Israel
even once.
Third-year international history student Joseph “Seph” Brown was
the “proposer” of the Students Union’s anti-Israel resolution.
Articulate, smart, and seemingly well read in the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Brown is a member of the Palestine
Society and the Anti-Racism officer of the Students Union. An
impressive fellow, he is the type of politically active person
LSE is famous for producing. While he won’t say that he plans to
be a politician one day, you get the sense he hasn’t rule out the
possibility. Unfortunately, Brown has a terrible propensity to
explain away evil.
“I just want to make one very clear statement,” Brown tells me,
taking some time away from his occupation of the Old Theatre to
meet with me in an old pub. “I do not support Hamas’ tactics and
I am not a Hamas sympathizer or a member.”
Okay. But as the Anti-Racism officer, I asked him, would he
condemn an organization like Hamas, which has this genocidal
clause in its constituting charter: “The Day of Judgment will not
come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when
the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees
will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and
kill him.”
Brown bristled at the clause and while he was happy to condemn
it, he was not willing to condemn the organization that was
founded upon it. “I would not condemn an organization which is
founded primarily not on the destruction of Israel, not on the
destruction of Jews, but on the suffering and the grievances of
the Palestinian people.”
Brown continued rationalizing away Hamas’s charter, suggesting
that it is no longer relevant, and repeating that while he
disagrees with some of its statements, he cannot condemn the
organization itself even as he ardently insists that he is not a
supporter or a sympathizer of the terror group.
“What I do know is that there are aspects of their constitution
which they have negated by their actions,” he protested. “This
one,” Brown said of the genocidal provision in Hamas’s charter,
“we will never be able to prove until they start trying to wipe
out every Jew on Earth.” Thanks for clearing that up.
Meanwhile, many Jews at LSE aren’t feeling very safe these days
according to Patrick Jones, the General Secretary of LSE’s Israel
Society. A third-year student at LSE, Jones hails from that
bastion of Jewish culture Wheeling, West Virginia. Before coming
to LSE, Jones told me, he “never cared a single bit about Israel
or anti-Semitism” because “growing up, anti-Semitism was
something in our history books.” At LSE, he discovered that
anti-Semitism wasn’t quite yet relegated to the dustbin of
history.
While pro-Palestinian students are freely penning articles
condemning Israel in the student newspaper, Jewish students
publish their opinion pieces anonymously out of fear for their
safety. According to Jones, there have been over a dozen
incidents of intimidation of Jewish and pro-Zionist students on
campus in recent weeks, allegedly ranging from verbal assaults,
to a student getting spit on, and to even one being pushed to the
ground.
Jones thinks that Brown has placed himself in a “sticky
predicament” as an active participant in the campus protests
against Israel while maintaining his position as Anti-Racism
officer. “What [Brown] has done, I believe, has already
spurred and reinvigorated the anti-Semitism that was lying
beneath the surface,” Jones said. “What he has done has only
stirred it up and that is what we are facing.”
As you would imagine, contributing to stirring up hate, even
unintentionally, is not the mission of the Anti-Racism office.
Unfortunately, even as hostilities calm down in the Middle East,
it is not clear that they are going to cool down on the campus of
LSE anytime soon.
