Britain has raised a generation of anti-Semites. It might be too late to fix
It’s not a new phenomenon, young people screaming righteous virtue while fomenting noxious beliefs that are anything but virtuous. In the 1930s, student enthusiasm for Nazism in German universities was essential fuel for the National Socialist movement. In Marburg, the local Nazi student organisation was obsessed with fighting Judaism and “Jewish finance capital”, while, as historians have shown, radical “Folkism” was a major trend among Germany’s students and graduates in the years leading up to Hitler’s reich.
A few decades later, the 1968 student protests in Germany would bequeath the Red Army Faction, aka the Baader–Meinhof Gang of “anti-fascist” terrorists who, in the name of the “anti-imperialist struggle”, committed murder and bombings. Other militant Left-wing groups, such as the Tuparamos in West Berlin, displayed an explicit hatred of Israel and Jews.
We are seeing echoes of a similar pattern in Britain now. The last few months point to a real risk of gross, potentially violent, anti-Semitism, becoming normalised on streets, campuses and beyond.
The young across the West now stand out as the most “anti-Israel” cohort. According to polling by YouGov in America last October, just days after Hamas’s pogroms, more people aged 18-29 sympathised with the Palestinians than the Israelis, while over 65s supported the Israelis by a margin of 65 to 6 per cent.
It wasn’t the only whopper. In December’s Harvard/Harris poll, 67 per cent of young Americans responded in the affirmative to the statement, albeit one that polling experts have condemned for its lack of clarity, that Jews “as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors”.
Meanwhile, according to December polling data, a third of 18- to 24-year-olds in the UK (alongside a sobering 30 per cent of all adults) agreed with the statement “Israel treats the Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews” – an important part of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism.
This is all happening while that very generation yell their iron-fisted progressivism, which they insist is moral virtue at every turn. They preach “intersectionality”, a philosophy which allows them to itemise oppressions – and which, for some, has become a tool with which to vilify Jews. Increasingly, these problematic attitudes are part of a ready-made package of beliefs.
For the young are also environmentally obsessed, so they chuck paint at artistic masterpieces and block roads and ambulances rushing to hospital. They struggle to get on the housing ladder so they hate “neoliberalism”, “occupy” public buildings and streets and protest against “capital”. And boy do they deplore racism, which is why they vandalise statues of “dead white men” and industrialists, tear down others, insist that material they dislike should be banned from university reading lists and demand that buildings be renamed. Their virtuous struggle requires fighting a sprawling enemy: imperialism, climate change, racism, transphobia, Islamophobia, capitalism, Americanism.
Yet since October 7, the anti-Israel element of this package has become, and remained, the centrepiece. As we have seen at our own universities in recent months, Jews associated with Israel risk being cancelled or de-platformed, and some have been left to feel physically threatened.
A Jewish chaplain at Leeds University was forced into hiding on police advice after it was discovered he had been an Israel Defence Force reservist. Pro-Palestinian protesters at Birmingham University were seen holding a “Zionists off our campus” banner and allegedly chanted “death to Zionists”. A Jewish student at Brunel University told the Jewish Chronicle that a Palestinian woman told her: “I’m an extremist, I’m proud of it, I don’t think your people should be alive.”
This nasty generational trend is the result of two obvious things. One is the tendency for young people to swing Left. The second is more particular to our times: the failure of Holocaust education, as woke intimidation and official cowardice make teaching about the unique horror of the genocide of Jews in Europe less and less politically appealing.
The idea among some appears to be that “too much” Holocaust education risks block out learning about the suffering of other groups – especially those who endured slavery in the Americas. This is misguided. But it is the fear of offending other communities within schools that is most concerning.
It must never be considered detrimental to “community relations” to teach about the suffering of Jews. Yet as far back as 2007, it was reported in The Guardian that schools had begun to avoid Holocaust education “because they are concerned about causing offence to Muslim pupils or challenging ‘charged’ versions of history which children have been taught at home”, citing a research conducted for the then government. To highlight just one shocking example, a history department in a northern city had avoided selecting the Holocaust as a GCSE topic for fear of confronting “anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial”.
Since the present pogrom begun on October 7th, the poisonous fruits of this educational and moral madness have become impossible to ignore – and Jews the West over are paying the terrifying price.
