If I didn’t tell you professor Michael Ben-Gad was an Israeli, you could probably figure it out from his response to a hate-filled campaign to drive him out of his job at City St George’s, University of London. On Wednesday, a masked, keffiyeh-wearing mob stormed his lecture hall and helpfully filmed themselves doing so. Asked for his response to the intimidation tactics, Ben-Gad told Sky News: ‘Their video is on social media and it makes for difficult viewing. They captured me in profile. I need to lose weight.’
It’s a very Israeli response. The economics don is being targeted because, as an Israeli youth in the 1980s, he did his compulsory service in the Israel Defence Forces. Forty years on, he is seeing posters around campus with his face on a red-spattered background under the word ‘terrorist’. He has been accused of being a ‘war criminal’, a ‘Nazi’ and ‘part of the genocide in Gaza’. (When does he find the time to do his marking?) Ben-Gad says he has even been threatened with beheading, and students have sought to link him to the September 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, when a group of Christian Arabs murdered a group of Muslim Arabs.
Refreshingly, City St George’s management is backing Ben-Gad, and have called the actions of those targeting him ‘unlawful and repugnant’. Even more refreshingly, fellow academics are supporting him, with more than a thousand signing a letter condemning the ‘targeted harassment’ of him. Index on Censorship has denounced the students, too. If these are signs that the tide is turning against communist brats running riot on campuses, they are very welcome indeed. But none of this changes the fact that Ben-Gad, a well-regarded academic who has been with the university for almost two decades, has been subjected to intolerable harassment for no reason other than that he is an Israeli. Finally, the left has found an immigrant they don’t want in Britain.
Ben-Gad should not have to put up with treatment that, if it were directed to an academic of any other nationality, would see his campus swarming with BBC reporters and Prevent caseworkers. To put an end to this undergrad jihad, and to prevent further intimidation campaigns, universities should be placed under a legal duty to expel any student participating in organised harassment of staff or fellow students, whether by invading lectures, preparing or distributing materials, or mounting efforts to have a lecturer dismissed or a student expelled or disciplined for lawful beliefs, activities or other characteristics.
As for non-citizens, if you come here to study or as a migrant or refugee then choose to harass law-abiding academics — law-abiding anyone, frankly — your leave to remain should be revoked, you should be refouled to your country of origin, and never permitted to re-enter the United Kingdom. No exceptions, no excuses, no more soft-touch Britain.
Universities are ground zero for political extremism in this country, with some humanities and social science courses propagandising impressionable young minds in a manner that would be called radicalisation if the ideologies in question were even vaguely to the right of Zarah Sultana. Since these doctrines are far-left mainstays that preach the overthrow of capitalism, the downfall of the West, the destruction of the nuclear family, and racial and other identity-based victimhood narratives, they are considered solid pedagogical material.
Liberal academics will have to face up to this sooner or later. As long as the higher education sector continues to tolerate the junk disciplines of the illiberal left and to allow illiberal leftists to degrade rigorous disciplines with junk theories, academics will continue to be at risk from a petard that their colleagues have fashioned for them.
Michael Ben-Gad isn’t the first and won’t be the last academic targeted by the products of academic radicalism. The short-term answer is taking the thuggish little scrotes and, as appropriate, either booting them off campus or bundling them on a flight back home. Longer term, we need to disrupt — i.e. destroy — the extremism pipeline that originates in the universities and spews out its toxic contents onto society at large.
Comments