HATRED ON CAMPUS
How secret recordings show chilling rise of anti-semitism after horrific October 7 massacre was 30 years in the making
How anti-Semitism has spread across UK university campuses with disturbing links to radical Islamist agendas
THE door rattled as the pro-Palestinian group, some of them masked and wearing their black and white keffiyeh scarves, tried to get in.
Outside they whispered: “He’s in there, we need to get him to open up.”
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Behind the locked door, Miles, a Jewish student at King’s College London, thought only one thing: “If they get inside, they will hurt me.”
He texted the university’s security who were meant to be keeping him safe.
A few minutes earlier he had been hosting an event with Faezeh Alavi, an Iranian critic of the mullahs who rule her country, in an event called From Conflict To Connection: Israelis And Iranians In Dialogue.
Although Faezeh is a Muslim who wears a hijab, the mere fact that she dared to be talking to pro-Israelis was enough for the rampant mob of around 15 to start screaming “Shame” at her and chanting “Free Palestine” 20 minutes into the talk.
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The university’s security ushered Faezeh and moderator Miles — he asked that his full name is not used — out of the room and the talk ended.
When Miles went into a separate room to pick up his things, he was followed by the hostile crowd with only a locked door separating them.
The attack on his discussion was just one of several incidents in British universities within the past few weeks.
This week, students at Manchester University began the “occupation” of a campus building with the support of some academics.
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Campus wars
Wearing T-shirts saying “Globalise the Intifada” — the Palestinian uprising against Israel — they handed out keffiyeh scarves while a motion by the university’s Student Union insisted that the actions of Hamas were justified and that Israel was breaking international law by fighting back.
Last week, academics at the London School of Economics hosted a talk on how Hamas, a proscribed terrorist group, is “widely misunderstood”.
Riot cops charge pro-Palestine protesters at University of Texas as Greg Abbott vows to ‘continue until crowd disperses’
When pro-Israel activists protested outside, eggs were thrown at them.
Anti-Semitism dressed as an intense hatred of Israel has become rife across society since the Hamas massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023. Now a new film, October 8, looks at some of the reasons why.
And it is truly chilling. It tells the story of how a radicalised group of Islamic extremists, egged on by hostile states, have for decades infiltrated social justice movements worldwide to spread not only the delegitimisation of Israel but also hatred of the West.
The experts I spoke to think America is a dozen years behind the UK. It’s been much more extreme in the UK for a long time.
Wendy Sachs, October 8 director, producer
While the documentary focuses on the American experience, particularly the violence of its campus wars, the issue very much affects the UK too, says its director and producer Wendy Sachs.
In fact, she believes, in many ways things are even worse here.
She said: “The experts I spoke to think America is a dozen years behind the UK. It’s been much more extreme in the UK for a long time.”
While the far right has historically been more of a problem for Jews in America, Wendy says she saw this left-wing/Islamist mesh “bubbling up” after the 2016 US presidential election, such as when Jewish lesbians were barred from a “dyke march” for wanting to brandish placards of the Star of David and the leadership of the anti-Trump Women’s Movement were accused of anti- Semitism.
“In the UK, this has been going on for longer and there was the big problem with Labour anti-Semitism, but I think in both countries we now see what is going on,” she said of the protests, which mirror each other but which actually started first on UK campuses before being taken up in America last spring.
She added: “The theme of the film is how we got to this moment when Hamas are being celebrated as freedom fighters rather than terrorists.
“And we want to show that this isn’t just an anti-Jewish movement but it is anti-West. What we are seeing in the UK and the United States is that this is Islamist extremists targeting the West.
"They want to tear down our democracies.”
Wendy was inspired to make the documentary after the shock of seeing people in New York celebrating the Hamas attacks on October 8.
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There were similar celebrations outside the Israeli embassy in London. By October 9, more than 30 Harvard University student groups had signed a letter claiming Israel was “entirely responsible” for the massacre.
The film is co-produced by Will and Grace star Debra Messing, who also stars in the documentary alongside experts on extremism, American politicians and Jewish students who bore the brunt of the campus activity.
She was shocked to see the celebrations on October 8. ‘I just thought the entire world had turned upside down,' she tells the documentary. 'Israel hadn’t responded yet and I immediately felt like we were in trouble.’
Debra could see that the people celebrating the attacks by Hamas – which is proscribed as a terrorist group in America as well as the UK – and were even aping the Jihadi organisation’s language and iconography.
Debra found herself the subject of threats for speaking out. Images of her and an upside-down red triangle above her head - used on Hamas propaganda to denote a target - spread across social media. The inverted triangle has been adopted by pro-Palestine agitators on both sides of the Atlantic and has led to some arrests in London.
She says: “The attack by Hamas on October 7 was called ‘the Al-Aqsa flood’ [Al-Aqsa is what Muslims call Jerusalem’s Temple Mount] and we then saw Students for Justice in Palestine create a movement to ‘Flood the streets for Palestine’.
Human rights
Perhaps the documentary’s greatest revelation is how long the campaign has been planned.
The film includes a secret 1993 FBI recording of 25 Hamas leaders — many of them also students at US universities — at a Philadelphia hotel in which they talk of plans to “infiltrate American media outlets, universities and research centres”, their main aim being to present Hamas as “palatable”.
The recordings show in detail how they realised they could sway the American left by using the language of human rights.
Lorenzo Vidino, an extremism expert at George Washington University in Washington DC, who first told Wendy about the recordings, says of the Hamas planners: “They knew how to speak to Americans in a language they could understand.”
They even had workshops to enable them to infiltrate both right- and left-leaning audiences, and in 2023 that coincided with a separate “woke” moment within the global left which divides the world into oppressor and oppressed and is obsessed with post-colonial theories.
Groups such as Hamas have been playing the long game here, planting the seeds so that by October 8 they were ready to go.
Wendy Sachs, October 8 director, producer
The documentary examines how groups such as SJP were able to harness willing and naive students as well as some of their teachers to get involved in violent protests.
And SJP is now over here — including being involved in the action at King’s College two weeks ago.
They openly associate with home-grown Islamist groups such as Cage, which last year Michael Gove, the then Communities Secretary, said should be defined as extremist. It is clear that they and other groups at our universities are not only targeting Jews but also anyone deemed pro-Israel — even Muslims such as Faezeh.
Since October 7, 2023 research by charity the Community Security Trust has recorded a 117 per cent increase in anti-Semitic incidents on UK university campuses, with attacks ranging from hitting and spitting at Jews, tearing off their skull caps and Star of David necklaces, to taping bacon to their doors.
Donald Trump has threatened to withdraw funding from US universities which do not do more to stop anti-Semitism and to deport foreign nationals who have led the campus wars, while in the UK the problem very much continues.
Wendy said: “Groups such as Hamas have been playing the long game here, planting the seeds so that by October 8 they were ready to go.
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“We know there is a problem. The question is, what are we going to do about it?”
- October 8 will be available on streaming platforms from April 1 in North America but is still awaiting a UK distributor.
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