The case of George Abaraonye, the incoming Oxford Union president who rejoiced in the assassination of Charlie Kirk, has provoked fierce debate about free speech at Oxford. Abaraonye considered the murder of the 31-year-old father of two, whom he had met at an Oxford Union debate, to be a cause for celebration. On a WhatsApp group he posted several messages cheering the assassination and on Instagram he crowed: ‘Charlie Kirk got shot loool.’
Now messages from student group chats linked to the Oxford Union reveal that those who objected to Abaraonye’s conduct have themselves been subjected to threats and intimidation designed to silence them. I’ve seen messages from two group chats created for incoming Oxford students, including one dedicated to those who have expressed an interest in joining the Union when the academic term begins on 12 October.
One incoming student who questioned Abaraonye’s conduct was told that he needed to ‘learn to shut the fuck up because someone will teach you’. A member of the group chat joked about killing the student’s mother; another said that he deserved to have his phone number leaked. When he argued against the murdering of political opponents, he was told to take his ‘defences of racism’ out of the chat.
Other members of the group made disgraceful comments. One said that Kirk would be ‘looking up at us’, implying he would be in hell. Another compared him to Hitler. One said that they did not ‘feel bad’ for his widow. Many explicitly endorsed political violence. One said: ‘I can only hope that some of the more cowardly fuckers get scsred [sic].’ Another said it’s ‘sadly optimistic to believe that we will ever achieve our ends through merely kind gesturing and begging nicely’. One member mentioned how they would celebrate the death of Tommy Robinson.
Some of the sources I spoke to inside the group chats were frightened about their safety if their identity was unmasked by fellow students. One said that if they were killed like Kirk, they would expect the other students to gloat about it in the same way.
Another source compared the chat with a ‘lynch mob against any conservative thought’. They said they were thinking about cancelling their Union membership and had discussed a boycott with others: ‘I thought it was a free speech society but apparently only if you think conservatives should be shot.’
‘I thought it was a free speech society but apparently only if you think conservatives should be shot’
Oxford has a responsibility to ensure that it maintains a peaceable learning environment where students are not intimidated by extremists making threats of violence. This must be applied evenly across the political divide. So far, both the Union and the university have issued statements distancing themselves from Abaraonye’s comments. The Union has also condemned ‘racial abuse and threats’ which have allegedly been levelled at him. I approached the Union and the university for comment regarding the messages from students celebrating Kirk’s assassination and intimidating conservatives, but at the time of going to press neither had responded.
If an Oxford Union president had celebrated, say, the murder of Jo Cox in 2016, would the responses of these institutions have been quite so equivocal? Would the student have kept his or her place at university, or indeed the position of president?
While it’s noble to want to extend liberal principles to the radical left in universities, the truth is that leftist philosophy has become so extreme that many students now advocate violence as a means to an end. A long-standing caveat to freedom of speech is that incitement to violence and celebration thereof is beyond the pale in a civilised society.
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