Brainwashing students to hate Israel and Zionists

Jonathan 

Last week Bristol University Socialist Workers Students Society hosted Rob Ferguson of Jewish Voice for Labour to speak about ‘Corbyn, Antisemitism and Justice for Palestine’. Ferguson is a retired sociology lecturer. He says he is Jewish but he had no qualms about speaking in Bristol on Kol Nidre.

The meeting was part of a series of similar meetings arranged by hard Left Corbyn supporters, designed to deny Labour’s antisemitism problem, challenge the IHRA definition of antisemitism and vilify Israel. On the same day this was happening in London.

Indoctrinating adults with JVL lies is bad enough but when it comes to indoctrinating students, it’s poisonous. But that’s precisely what Ferguson did; no matter that he was careful not to cross the line into antisemitism. He told the students that the numbers calling themselves ‘Zionists’ has gone down (zero evidence for this); he spoke about the ‘oppression and dispossession of the Palestinian people’ (a nonsense); gave a completely one-sided history of the years between Balfour (1917) and the establishment of Israel in 1948; described Gaza as a ‘prison camp’; failed to even mention Hamas in his discussion of Gaza; described Israel as a ‘settler-colonial enterprise’; denied antisemitism by referring to it as a ‘weaponising ideology’ for the far right;  advocated ‘One State’ which is code for destruction of the world’s only Jewish state; wrongly assumed that the Right of Return is a given for Palestinians; and suggested (“seeing the process play out”) that hostility to Arabs on the part of some Israeli Jews is behind the ascendancy of parties on the far Right in some European countries eg the Sweden Democrats.