Ugly bigotry lurks behind campus woke warriors

Even before the bodies of the Jews massacred by Hamas were cold, members of the fashionable left were taking to the streets to damn Israel.

Demonstrators hold Palestinian flags as they march through Brooklyn Bridge during a rally in support of Palestinians in New York. Picture: AFP

I thought the K-word had disappeared from our world. It has been years since I heard it.

You know the K-word. It’s that curt, violent, four-letter word that neo-Nazis use to refer to Jews.

It’s a word of staggering ugliness. Few words make me bristle and squirm as much as the K-word. I can only imagine how Jews feel when they hear it.

I won’t say it here. The K-word is as inappropriate in a family newspaper as the N-word would be. But it turns out I was wrong. The K-word is not gone. It lives on, in all its horror. Only today it isn’t just shaven-headed neo-Nazis who spit out this slur – it’s the woke, too. It’s the self-styled social-justice warriors on our painfully PC campuses.

This week, a horrifying video went viral. It was filmed at Concordia University in Montreal. Jewish students had set up a stall to raise awareness about the Israelis kidnapped by Hamas during its anti-Semitic pogrom of October 7.

Before you knew it, the stall was surrounded by “pro-Palestinian” students. They seemed strangely offended by the young Jews’ efforts to draw attention to the barbaric activities of Hamas’s racist terrorists. Amid the swirling anger with the awareness-raising Jews, something unconscionable occurred. One of the woke, her face twisted into a mask of hate, said: “You f..king k...”

Not Zionist. Not Israeli. Just k....

It was a mask-off moment. It provided a grim glimpse into the bigotry that lurks behind the fashionable left-wing loathing for the world’s only Jewish nation.

Since October 7, raging against Israel has become all the rage in leftish circles. Even before the bodies of the Jews massacred by Hamas were cold, the woke were taking to the streets to damn Israel. To condemn the Jewish state as the author of all ills in the Middle East. To say, essentially, that Israel had it coming.

That vile cry of the K-word in Montreal felt like the gone-off icing on the poisonous cake of today’s Israelophobia. Of course, not every youth who protests against Israel would use such a nakedly racist term. Many activists have good intentions – they want an end to war.

Yet the hip fury with Israel has unquestionably contained flashes of bigotry, even racial hatred. And in an irony that will make heads swivel in confusion, much of this hate has come from those who love bigging up their anti-racist credentials. Campuses, especially, have become hotbeds of what we might call politically correct anti-Semitism.

At Tulane University in New Orleans, a Jewish student who tried to stop protesters from setting fire to the Israeli flag was beaten on the head with a flagpole.

At the Cooper Union college in New York, Jewish students had to be barricaded into the library to protect them from a fuming anti-Israel mob.

At New York University students chanted “We don’t want no Jew state”. Students at George Washington University projected the words “Glory to our martyrs” on to the wall of a university building. The “martyrs” this refers to are the men who invaded Israel on October 7 to massacre civilians, including babies and elderly people.

So woke students who demand a “safe space” to hide from offensive words are fine with heavily armed men intruding into the ultimate safe space – the family home – to rape and murder those inside.

Meanwhile, woke agitators have gleefully torn down posters of kidnapped Israelis.

Here in London someone drew a Hitler moustache on the faces of two Israeli toddlers who were kidnapped. It is hard to think of anything more offensive.

Leftists have marched alongside Islamists who have shouted “God’s curse be on the Jews”.

One of London’s big demos against Israel was organised by groups that have links with Hamas.

How on earth do we explain this – that radicals who pose as implacably anti-racist are now marching with the associates of a virulently racist organisation that just carried out the worst act of anti-Jewish slaughter since the death camps?

Many have railed against the hypocrisy of the woke: the #MeToo warriors who have little to say about Hamas’s grotesque brutalisation of young Israeli women; the anti-fascists who seem fine with the fascism the world witnessed on October 7; those who took the knee for George Floyd but who have stood upright and made excuse after excuse for the mass murder of Jews.

To my mind, though, it’s not hypocrisy – it’s the true nature of wokeness finally exposed. We can now see, clear as anything, the racism, even the rank cruelty, that lurks in identity politics.

It is not a coincidence that the most visceral Jew hate has been seen on campuses. For that is where the new racialism and its ugly hierarchies are most influential. Identity politics has infused a new generation with the belief that people are privileged and thus deserving of scorn or oppressed and thus deserving of sympathy.

And according to this infantile moral binary, this new racialist sorting system, the Jews are the most privileged. They’re at the top of the pile. They’re the most deserving of our scepticism, even our anger.

The open celebration of October 7 is the vile logical conclusion to a radical politics that strips certain groups of their humanity by branding them “oppressors”.

What has become clear over the past four weeks is that Israel has become the whipping boy of Westerners who have lost faith in their own societies.

Young people educated to loathe their own civilisation have come to see Israel as the archetype of that civilisation. As the modern, plucky, supposedly “colonialist” embodiment of everything the West stands for – or used to stand for. Their rage against Israel is a continuation of their rage against modernity itself.

Those of us who quite admire Western civilisation now have a solemn duty: to confront the irrationalism of Israelophobia and the vile bigotries it has whipped up.