Niall Ferguson on the bond between Palestine supporters and the authoritarian Left

welcome and thank you for for being here um I thought we'd start off by talking about the increasingly bizarre world of Academia I think to most people I mean it's it's a huge concern I think to a lot of people you know parents of students students themselves including particularly Jewish students of course I think a lot of people look on in bafflement you know the academy should be the home of the free exchange of ideas it should be the home of uh you know academic of intellectual advancement and instead we're seeing it apparently increasingly in the grip of dogma of of ideologues um and of bigotry and of course the world's oldest bigotry in particular um but as a historian uh you have the blessing of being able to see the precedent and the causes and the trends that have led to this moment today um could you explain to people what the hell's going on M well it's not easy I'll have a I'll have a go uh Jake first it's great to be here and to be part of this this webinar uh it's very important to me that we have this discussion about 10 years ago I began to become aware of a kind of disturbing tendency in the elite us universities uh at that time I was teaching at Harvard I taught at Harvard in the history dep and the Business School uh uh for uh 12 years and uh and most of that time I I really found it stimulating and the students were terrific my colleagues were terrific it was an exciting time in my life but then something began to change uh and and it was it was around 2014 uh when my my wife aan hery Ali was first invited to commencement at brandise and then disinvited uh in a kind of calculated humiliation and and this was our introduction to council culture uh which had already begun to affect conservatives uh on various different campuses uh but it was our chance to understand better what was going on and what was intriguing to us was that there was this odd combination of radical leftists and islamists who had sort of joined forces to accuse my wife aan hery Ali of islamophobia and to you know publicly as shame her by by disinviting her and I remember uh when I started to encounter this same strange Unholy Alliance at Harvard itself thinking how how how odd these bad fellows are what on Earth is the radical left doing aligning itself with islamist groups and so we began to to talk and and write about this problem and uh and and indeed I I encountered it again when I moved to Stanford we we moved to Stanford partly for security reasons uh in 2016 for security reason yeah because it it was clear that that uh my wife and and indeed our our our family were not safe in in Cambridge Massachusetts we were too easy to find and in the wake of the shedo massacre we were strongly advised to relocate so we did we moved to California but the same kind of phenomena were visible at at Stanford too and uh the more I delved into this the more I began to realize that there was a fundamental and systemic problem in the elite American universities and it manifested itself uh in various places radical students were the obvious kind of newsworthy place uh but in fact more important were the professors who saw themselves as political activists and even more importantly administrators diversity equity and inclusion officers and title n officers and this a real army of these people in American universities now whose role it is effectively to police speech and it reached the point that uh this strange combination of of elements was creating an almost totalitarian atmosphere on the University campus the president of of Stanford who's since been forced to resign told me that he received on average one email a day calling for some member of the Stanford Community to be fired for something that they had said and of course the things that were being policed were allegations of of racism of of bigotry against African-Americans or of homophobia islamophobia of course U anti-Semitism was almost never mentioned at that time that that somehow didn't rank there with the intersectionality uh targets of of preference and I remember thinking that that in itself was a little odd so it's a kind of very long story short we've been saying for years there's something rotten at the heart of Academia uh the the the fundamental separation between scholarship and politics has broken down that there are groups of people who see the university as a political vehicle the events of 2020 made this even more visible black lives matter was a cause that University presidents felt the need to align themselves with the dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard Claudine gay wrote a Manifesto to the faculty of Arts and Sciences saying that their role henceforth would be to combat racism that would be the purpose of her leadership and to urge anybody who's on to mute because otherwise we'll get the most hideous feedback just as I'm reaching the climax of my story the the the thing that happened after October the 7th this year was that the scales fell from the eyes of people who had not been listening who had been saying to me O'Neal you're exaggerating it universities are always rather liberal it's just that you're conservative um and now those people who hadn't really been near the campus for 10 20 30 years realize what's been happening because it's now clear that there's a massive double standard that is applied at Harvard and it's applied at the other Elite universities uh that the it the university reserves the right to police any speech that can be deemed offensive even hurtful by some minority groups but when it comes to attacks on Jews when it comes to attacks by terrorists on Israeli civilians then Free Speech suddenly is permitted on campus then the first amendment suddenly applies and it's possible for student groups and others to chant support for Hamas publish their support for the actions of Hamas denounce Israel as if it's somehow responsible for these hideous Terror terrorist atrocities and what we saw last week when the president of Harvard as well as the president of pen and MIT testified was this double standard in action because those three people at no previous point in their careers had stood up for academic Free Speech had said the First Amendment applied on their campus but suddenly it did apply because it was attacks on Jews that were under discussion and I found that simultaneously Rev in and affirming of all that I have believed and argued in the last 10 years and you mentioned claudi and gay who wrote A Manifesto in support of black lives matter in 2020 promising to to enact some you know Dee rooted change in University as a result was one of those who then was unable to be clear that calling for the genocide of Jews was a bad thing only when it tips over into action which presumably would be the the act of genocide that would be bad but calling for it we can live with it well it's interesting what happened actually because they they clearly had been briefed by University lawyers who sort of explain to them perhaps they hadn't been aware of it before what the position is in the United States with respect to free speech and what the First Amendment says is protected speech and what is not it's quite distinctive in the United States and there's a clear body of law on this which says that you can say all kinds of hateful things if you just say them uh but there are there are thresholds that you can't cross and you can't cross into explicit threats particularly if they're targeted at individuals and you can't cross over into harassment uh and so all that they did in those hearings was to sort of parot what they had been briefed to say by the lawyers but there were two problems problem number one the first amendment actually doesn't apply to a private university like Harvard unless Harvard decides that it does apply I remember being told by senior professors we act as if the first amendment applies here I remember thinking no you don't I no that to be honest but but the second problem was that for someone like claudian gay suddenly to make a stand on the finer points of First Amendment law when everything she had previously done was entirely at variance with that was just massive hypocrisy um so it's not that she was saying things that were technically untrue about free speech in the United States you can indeed say uh certainly on government property uh you know from the river to the Sea pistan you can say that you can chant it um that that's protected speech um you can also presumably stand in public spaces and say Dreadful things about other racial groups that you might wish to wipe from the map this is protected speech Free Speech means people get the right to say obnoxious things just as in the 1930s Nazis pro-nazi groups marched through the streets of New York chanting pro- Hitler slogans that was protected speech then but the the thing is that this is a complete shift in the position of University leaders there's been anything but free speech at Harvard in the last few years in fact the foundation for individual rights and expression run by my friend Greg Luan ranks universities in the US by the amount of Freedom they allowed and in the most recent rankings for this year Harvard came dead last it was the the worst University in America for free speech according to fires rankings so the idea that this was the land of the First Amendment this was the way the campus was run was just fanciful it's really the only word for it is hypocrisy isn't it where a world in which microaggressions are a big problem but actual macroaggressions can be overlooked in fact how Jacobson put it recently he said that it seems like the massacre of Jews was not small enough to be a worry yeah um but let's let's move it on from from there to think about I mean to try to answer this question how can people who are so bright um so well educated the the finest that Western Society has to offer be not so not just so stupid but also so downright Prejudiced and racist um in terms of the precedent from history this isn't the first time this has happened again that's right and I just published uh in the Free Press Barry Weiss's excellent uh online periodical a piece pointing out that there was another time in history when the best universities in the world uh suddenly descended into anti-Semitism and I I was thinking of the German universities in the 1920s and 1930s now if you go back to the 1920s it's very striking that universities like konigsburg or heidleberg or marberg were the best universities in the world everybody acknowledged that uh even at Oxford Cambridge people recognized that German scholarship was in a different League by that stage so people would quite often go from Cambridge to do their phds uh in Germany and certainly from the United States there was no question that when it came particularly to Natural Sciences Germany LED and Harvard and Yale and Princeton were distinctly in the second tier and yet if one looks at the history of the German universities in the 20s and the 30s there's something very striking and that is that they were early doctors of national socialism that German academics people with University degrees were more ready to embrace narcism than say workingclass Germans uh and this at a time when universities were a great deal more selective and elitist than than they are today and there's a really dismal history to be to be studied I remember studying it when I was writing a book called The War of the world that shows how this happened there's a wonderful book about the univers univ of marberg which describes how it was early to be anti-semitic early uh for the students to seek to ban and ultimately to ban a Jewish student fraternity this is in the 1920s uh early to vote strongly for national socialism uh as early as 1924 big votes for the nsdap and so what can we learn from this that was the forign of the Nazi the NCP was the official name of the the National Socialist German Workers Party that's what it was all was called so what what's the explanation here I think there are two things the first is that Highly Educated people uh can be highly wrong the idea of eugenics was regarded as cutting Ed science around around the world in the early 1920s and it was one of many ideas that German academics uh picked up and ran with all kinds of so-called racial science flourish in the German universities uh in the 1920s uh in the early 1920s German academics were publishing books with titles like life not worthy of living to justify the uh euthanasia of the mentally ill so that's part of the answer that bad ideas in fact can be just as successful as good ideas uh in uh in intellectual communities such as universities but there's a second part of the story which is I think worth bearing in mind there's a kind of way you can instrumentalize ideology in the academy at the time I'm talking about German Jews and and these were not necessarily observant Jews but people who the Nazis defined as Jews they might be married to Gentiles they might have converted Christianity but in racial terms they were Jews played a very significant part in German Academia in fact there were leading figures in nearly every discipline that you could mention um at that time so for those who adopted Nazism this was a terrific career opportunity to get rid of Rivals often intellectually Superior Rivals uh as as happened because very early on after Hitler comes to per a laws passed that essentially expels not only all Jewish civil servants uh from employment but all Jewish professors because in the German case professors were in effect civil servants so this combination of toxic ideas that nevertheless had academic legitimacy and the career opportunity presented by the ideology explains the downfall of the German universities now I think it would be almost impossible for the academic activist leftists who predominate at institutions like Harvard uh or Yale or Princeton or Stanford today to recognize themselves in what I've just described to you because they would say but wait The Dread German professors we're right-wing but we're leftwing which makes us morally Superior we would never engage in the kind of things that they engaged in my response to that is really are your universities so different let me tell you a story that I heard just a few days ago uh the son of a good friend of mine uh who may even be watching uh uh is currently a graduate student at an Ivy League uh University I won't say which one uh and just a few days ago he went to his assigned desk uh in a university building uh to his computer and under the keyboard was in capital letters a note that says Zionist written in red and green letters and that is at one of the world's foremost universities now what is the difference between that and what was going on at St MarBorg or what was going on at kbur in the 1920s and 1930s I don't think there's a profound difference the reality is that the radical left as much as the radical right in the inter War period has legitimized anti-Semitism and while some people will say oh there's a distinction between our criticism of Israeli policy in Gaza and anti-Semitism that distinction is lost on campuses it is absolutely clear to me that the line is blurred and it's deliberant blurred by some groups with obviously malicious intent well let's look a little bit into the the roots of this weird convergence that you alluded to earlier of the hard left and islamism uh in one of the starting points perhaps uh is in the 60s when um pal Palestinian militancy uh was born out of the anti-colonialist movement so it took a great one of its prime examples was Algeria where the French occupation for what 120 years was was brought to an end by a terror Campaign which provoked a brutal French response which saps Public public support for the French and in the end they left this Death By A Thousand Cuts approach we can see that inspiring the Palestinian Playbook which was from the hard left originally was then boosted by islamism and radical uh religion which we see today it's interesting isn't it that anti-colonialism is one point of similarity between that militancy and the hard left today can you just explore how the two schools of thought came together and are now almost indistinguishable in some ways but it's helpful to go back in in time let's go back 50 years to another surprise attack on Israel uh the yam Kapur War which almost exactly within a day uh uh the the the event uh that happened 50 years before October the 7th now at that time the Palestinian cause was largely seen as a cause of the radical left it was nationalism but combined with Marxism with the hope of Soviet support or support from countries in the Soviet block and this Playbook was being used all over the world at that time just about anybody who could present themselves as engaged in a Liberation struggle against colonialism uh Had A Shard backing from Moscow and if not Moscow then Havana uh so this was a very different world from the world that that we know because at that point political Islam was a relatively dormant Force 1973 if looks through uh the papers of uh a figure like Henry Kissinger he almost never talks about Islam uh only occasionally is it noticed that that's kind of part of say the Libyan regime that was established in in the revolution in the late 1960s it's only after the Iranian Revolution of 1979 so six years later that it becomes clear that there's this new ideological force in play and that is is radical po itical Islam and that it's actually hostile to the Marxist leninists they all get completely wiped out by Communist Regime in in in Teran so there's an interesting uh tension at that time between those who want to pursue Sharia to establish either a Sunni or Shia political theocracy and those who are still hoping that the revolution will come with uh support from Moscow well with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 91 that kind of option Fades and the marxists become far less influential I mean they're still around the radical leftists but they're much less influential in the real world where did they go Academia that's where they can still assign Edward S that's where they can still teach about colonialism and the terrible uh uh crimes of of Western Empires and the heroic struggles of oppressed peoples so they are there teaching their classes assigning Edward s's uh orientalism uh and and meanwhile uh the islamists are working out how best to achieve their objectives uh and their subtle infiltration of uh University life instead of revealing a contradiction between the old secular left and the new islamists actually produces the Unholy Alliance I I mentioned before now you might say surely queers for Palestines a kind of absurd and contradictory position and if you were gay and you did go to Palestine Hamas would not exactly welcome you with open arms they welcome you with open arms in order to throw you off a high building but on campus these contradictions seem not to count for anything there's a complex ideology that has evolved on American campuses which is a strange synthesis of the old left and the new left uh islamism multiculturalism and its distinguishing characteristic is its ability to hold in some kind of relationship to another quite different groups as long as you can claim some kind of victimhood relative to white supremacy relative to the Colonial pressive regime relative to of course uh phallocratic male uh cisgender uh hierarchy then you're good uh and so this is how the game is played and and there's a ranking and if you're African-American transgender person you're very near the top of the hierarchy uh if you're a white uh male you're very near the bottom the surprising thing is that not only are dead white males like me near the bottom there are other groups that turn out to be near the bottom too East Asians Harvard's been discriminating against Chinese and Chinese American candidates for years because they're really underrepresented relative to their test schooles and the undergraduate body that's kind of a surprise and then Jews and this is the point that that really brings us us together that there is a kind of curious double standard where the history of the Jews their fate as a minority that's been subjected to all kinds of Oppression not just by white Empires but by other Empires too that's somehow forgotten uh and in a strange kind of way the IDE ology of intersectionality says our Jews are sort of not just white they're kind of super white and I think this is where the Marxist pieace comes in because what you notice is that the left has retained over more than a century a sense that capitalism and the Jews are intertwined and who he who attacks Finance Capital also has to attack the Jews and that I think is the key to what we see here there's a kind of Revival of some very old and toxic tropes that I remember first studying when I was writing the history of the Roth CHS more than 20 years ago fascinating I've got to say that's the first I've heard of the term phcy don't forget that there are all kinds of fake new words that have to be learned and this is part of the way radical ideologies work as Victor clemer pointed out in Dres and all those years ago if you want to impose your ideology on people make up some weird words and force people to use them with a strange ritual like well we didn't introduce ourselves with preferred pronouns did we at the beginning of this well shock horror I mean that's actually regarded as a terrible faux par at some universities today shove it um well let's move on to the uh to to to geopolitics and one question I wanted to ask you as a as as a you know one of the world's e histor historians is about hope for the survival of the state of Israel there's this idea that's around that a Jewish Kingdom or a Jewish state has never survived more than about 80 years in the past in that territory um what signs of Hope do you see now that we'll go beyond 80 years and maybe another 80 and another 80 uh into the future well I'm going to surprise you by being more optimistic than than I think you expect in many ways the situation 50 years ago was was worse in that there really wasn't any any country in the neighborhood that was interested uh in recognition uh or indeed the survival of Israel whereas what's happened in the last two months has come after a prolonged period in which Israel's relationship with its Arab neighbors was clearly improving we mustn't lose sight of what was achieved with the Abraham Accords and what may still be achieved between Israel and Saudi Arabia I sense from conversations with uh Saudi friends and others in the region that the events of October 7th have only temporarily uh derailed maybe deril this putting too strongly paused the r crall between uh between Jerusalem and rehad and I I think we should recognize also that Iran has become over the last 10 years really significantly isolated relative uh to the Arab uh States especially in the gulf and so I I think strategically Israel's position is not as bad in the region as it was 50 years ago and I think that that may continue to improve uh in in the coming years especially if uh there's a change of government in Washington let's not forget that part of what happened on October the 7th was a consequence of the Biden administration's effort to revive the Iran nuclear deal which took the pressure off Iran allowed it more economic uh breathing space and with that breathing space it was able to channel more resources to its proxies uh in the region uh if Donald Trump's reelected uh Which is far from inconceivable one consequence will undoubtedly be a return to the path of the Abraham Accords and a return to pressure on on Iran Israel's biggest problem I think is that globally it has relatively few friends uh and one can see this in voting patterns at the UN General Assembly uh one can see this in the outright hostility not just of uh Iran but of of other countries aligned with it I also worry about the generational shift that we began by talking about Young Americans must be said young Britains are a great deal more hostile to Israel and sympathetic to the Palestinians than was true even 10 or 12 years ago and that's a shift that I think has to be partly due to what's been going on in universities so I think Israel's International position is not especially good its relationship to younger Generations in the English speaking world is disturbing but regionally I think this position is actually better than it was 50 years ago uh and so my hope is that as long as the United States remains committed to Israel's survival and its security then another 80 years are something we can count on let me add one thing in my view it is a moral obligation for everyone in the Western World regardless of whether they're Jewish or not to ensure that there is never another Holocaust and what we saw on October the 7th was like a trailer for a second Holocaust it was as if to say if we had the chance this is what we would do to all Israelis because what in practice from The River To The Sea means is not just that Israel disappears from Maps it's that Israelis are killed or mass that everybody in the western world who knows anything about history knows that those people who would carry out a holocaust are capable of everything and my grandfather's fought uh in two world wars I grew up with a conscious conscious sense that this was the worst thing that had ever happened the Holocaust and we have this moral imperative never so let it happen again young people need to understand that I feel as if I've uh made a mistake in not teaching for the last seven years because it feels as if that message has has somehow been overridden by the uh anti-colonialist version of History so I think we have to remind people of that powerful moral obligation to ensure that there never is another Holocaust and we've been given a warning on October the 7th that there are people who would carry such a [Music] holoc sobering words well thank you very much I try to get some questions up if I can oh have you got them I've got you got them okay um so um you happy for me to read them out yeah let me have a look so I can so I can get the get the best ons my chance to grab some water yes go yeah there we go um um and if I can just say if people do have questions please uh put them on the chat on the Q&A uh and Neil here is will be and and J will be more than happy to answer any questions that anybody has there there are two questions here to to get started with um the first is about coverage of the Gaza conflict um as compared to the coverage of the war against Islamic State and other Wars I mean to me this has been a a fascinating and deeply disturbing thing to see because the campaign that we took part in alongside the Americans and the Iraqis and the Kurds against Islamic State was really no less brutal than the campaign in Gaza I'm thinking particularly of the battle in mosul of 201617 that killed between 11 and 40,000 civilians began with a Siege and an aerial campaign that a br that brutal street fighting with against an enemy that was embedded amongst civilians it's not all that different but back then not a single person came onto the streets and we can see and that's just one example there many other examples what do you make of the of the role of the media in all of this in in in creating ultimately the the major movements of public opinion which then translate into International political pressure which had a implication in the real world of Israel's ability to defend itself I I find it concerning that major mainstream news outlets so quickly shifted uh from documenting and describing the atrocities of October the 7th to essentially presenting the Hamas case uh that Israel was carrying out uh war crimes or ethnic cleansing or even genocide against the civilian population of Gaza and uh I've discussed this with uh some BBC journalists I've said that at times uh the today program on Radio 4 uh seemed uh to be quite distinctly skewed towards covering the Palestinian side uh of the story uh the same of course can be said of of the New York Times and other outlets I've stopped listening to National Public Radio in the United States because I find the bias so infuriating and I don't think there's any justification for this as you say uh Hamas has a conscious strategy of embedding itself in uh densely populated uh civilian settlements that's a now A Familiar islamist Playbook uh the network of tunnels is crucial to its uh mode of operation uh hospitals are clearly used uh as nerve centers as command centers uh human Shields are standard uh in the way that these uh organizations such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operate and one's simply being duped uh as a a media Outlet as a journalist if one is fed the story uh that what we're seeing here are terrible acts of inhumanity by the Israeli Defense Forces U they can't win because if they get people moved out of the zone of conflict that's ethnic cleansing if they don't then it's genocide and that that kind of coverage is inexcusable and as you say it's at odds with how other conflicts have been been covered you could maybe say that hamas's PR people are better than Islamic State's PR people uh but I think that's really uh uh a pretty good example that you just you just gave and I could go further uh you know many civilians have been killed uh in brutal Urban Warfare in Syria uh and I don't remember demonstrations uh Palestinians including Palestinians but I don't remember the demonstrations in the streets of uh of London or on the campuses of the United States uh on those occasions so there is a double standard and it's in ible the only way you can possibly report on this campaign is that Israel has been confronted by an implacable and ruthless enemy that has carried out brutal uh murder and kidnapping uh and hostage taking and the idea that somehow Israel should do nothing that it should simply shrug its shoulders and say well I guess we had it coming is totally Preposterous and and there's no British government that ever existed that would respond that way to comparable attacks on British citizens so I I just find it bizarre I mean I I I can't really get my header around the way in which this uh this conflict is being is being misrepresented and it I think testifies to how successfully the proponents of this ideology that we've been discussing have taken their ideas from University campuses and implanted them in major new organizations yeah it feels to me that when Britain for example uh defends ourselves whether it's against Nazi Germany or against Islamic State it's a war when Israel defends itself it's a genocide that seems to be the only difference it's just difference of labeling and it doesn't strike uh people who use this terminology as it should as grimly ironic that they should be using that term genocide about a Jewish State um so I think we we need to uh ask the people who run New organizations to think very carefully about the coverage uh that they're giving this conflict there are notable exceptions this is not an across theboard story and thankfully we still have a free press which means that the other side of the story can be uh told but we haven't mentioned it social media is another particular area of concern and in some ways it's more influential uh than mainstream news organizations I'm perturbed to say the least by the way that Tik Tock massively skews its coverage uh away from uh pro-israel content to Pro Palestinian content and this skew is just indefensible uh and yet you can't help but wonder if it's quite deliberate uh on the part of the Chinese owners of of Tik Tok so we we're in a very new landscape in which uh it's possible for a foreign power the Chinese Communist party to exert considerable influence over the way that teenagers in the english- speaking World think about an issue purely by making sure that the algorithm selects content that is pro Palestinian and don't uh grades content that's prois yeah it feels like like we and particularly young people are swimming in propaganda in a way that's utterly unprecedented in history and we don't even see it because we're older and we can't we don't use Tik Tok and we don't know what they're what they're looking at I mean my kids show me this stuff sometimes and it was exemplified by that uh vir viral spread of the letter to America by OS B narden there were videos of kids saying I never realized that OS Barden had it right I mean what's going on yeah well in fact on leads me on to the second question which she provided James which was what can we do about it there's been a sense I think that after October the 7th it was like a flare going up and Illuminating a battlefield you see where everybody is standing we see that few fewer people are standing on our side than on the other side even people that we expected to be on this side side on that side it feels like um a sort of u a mobilization in some way in a broad sense like a fight what do you think people can do what what what can what tools can we draw what attitudes can we have what how can we begin to try to push back against what feels like a wave of hatred well I've been impressed by the way uh in the United States major donors to Elite universities have uh belatedly but last said enough uh I'm no longer going to support my alma Mata if this is the way that it's run and so that's an illustration of what can be done now we're not all wealthy donors so if you're a donor stop the donation but I just want to point out that many years ago I I gave a lecture at the association of uh alumni College trustees actor uh saying that there needed to be a taking pledge uh not just the giving pledge but the taking pledge and that donors whether on a large scale or on a small scale should have some due diligence in the process and if they're giving money maybe out of sentimental reasons to the place where they studied but that place has become uh an a kind of activist institution committed to ideologies that they deplore they should stop giving uh and so that that taking of the money away is an important signal uh which should have been sent long ago because I think if this had be been started earlier then we might not have got quite this far down the road to ption what else can we do well I think one of the the great challenges uh that characterizes our time is the difficulty of having civil discourse uh this is a problem that I encountered just last week uh I was in Texas uh at an event at which my friend Barry Weiss was going to speak uh at the University of Texas uh at Austin the great Public University there and uh as Barry stood up uh to begin her remarks uh a crowd of uh I presume students as I doubt they'd have got in otherwise at the back of the auditorium stood up and began chanting uh and shouting and later beating drums uh in an attempt to disrupt the event I'm glad to say this process didn't turn violent and eventually were prevailed upon to leave the auditorium though they continued uh their demonstration outside but this makes it difficult because the heckler's uh veto is being used more and more events get disrupted threats get made uh events get canceled because organizers are afraid of that kind of uh that kind of activity and so the the very business of saying listen to me I want to put the other side to you has got harder I've been very struck over the last 20 years by just how difficult it is to have a debate with the kind of people who stand up and chant they're not interested in debate they're not really interested in knowing that much about the issue they clearly derive pleasure from their uh uh version of hooliganism but to my mind actually football holigans are preferable I I I honestly prefer to hear the chance of football holigans than to hear these equally mindless chance in support of the Palestinian cause uh you'll know perhaps you saw some of the clips that when questioned many young people have absolutely no idea of the meaning of the chants that they're uttering which river which sea you'll get some funny answers uh to those questions so I think we have a problem the old way of doing this was you have a debate whether it was at a dinner table uh or at the Oxford Union and that has got much much harder um though I don't think we should give up I've been furiously writing uh as of others trying to shape uh this debate doing uh webinars podcasts television interviews in the belief that we must never give up we must never stop making these arguments uh in fact we can only redouble our efforts and that's all we got I mean we don't really have uh the option as journalists or academics or uh investors to take up arms we've got words uh and we've got some financial leverage over the institutions that form opinion and we've just got to use those seems to me that the most important thing for Jewish students and Jews on campus in general is not to be afraid and not to allow yourself to become um to hide who you are to to hide your views and to act meekly because we know where that led us in the past and it feels to me as if the only way things are going to be turned around is if the people who are being targeted just refused to accept it yeah and stand up well when uh my wife encountered Council culture on the brandise campus it was a little disturbing given that brandise is historically a Jewish uh institution with a large Jewish uh student body but I very well remember uh one student Daniel M who who stood up uh for free speech and stood up for my wife and he was extremely courageous at that time despite the fact that the left effectively sent him to Coventry people wouldn't speak to him uh he was intimidated and harassed harassed uh and and yet he he never ever backed down and I I've often thought of Daniel uh in in recent times and of how we need more students like him who are prepared to face down the bullies and who are prepared to stand tall in the face uh of intimidation if universities were properly run there would be better protection for students like Daniel I thought at the time that brandise did almost nothing uh to back him up and and and protect his uh rights to free speech uh but but yeah I think you need that kind of courage and uh it's not easy I mean I I put myself in the position of a student who lifts up the keyboard and finds an offensive and obviously personally targeted message like that and I think what what is the right thing to do is it to pack up your bags and you know head head back to England or or do you take your uh grievance to a university that uh whose authorities seem strongly biased in the other direction it's very difficult I I look back in my own time as a student uh at at Oxford and and later as a young fellow in Cambridge and I realized how lucky I was because in the early 1980s there was pretty much complete free speech in British uh University campus in fact we could say quite outrageous things with a complete impunity it's tougher these days and I I feel for students who are on the wrong side of this kind of harassment I really do and I can only encourage them to stick together uh and not fall silent and not be intimidated there is a really powerful moral responsibility here and uh to look for support there are organizations out there that didn't exist 10 years ago uh that have been doing great work and I want to single out again the foundation for uh individual rights of expression by Greg lukanov there's also the academic freedom Alliance here in the UK there's the Free Speech Union we've been very busy creating a network of Institutions to uphold the most basic freedoms on University campuses and so one should not feel alone uh because there is no longer any reason to be isolated there are organizations that are designed to give you voice designed to give you protection to make you aware of your rights uh so don't just sit in in your room in despair take action and look for the organizations that are there to support you and that's a fact I mean I I often think of the um of the chapter of history that Hannah Aron describes in the second part of the vanality of evil where she goes through all the different countries in Europe and describes how they treated their Jews and Denmark is the one that stands out because when Denmark was occupied the Danish Authority said if anyone's going to wear a yellow star put it on us first resisted refus used to round up the Jews and Deport them and as a result the interesting part was that as a result of that the the Nazi overlords in Denmark also began to resist orders from Berlin and when Berlin wanted to round up they had to send fresh troops in to do it and so you can win the Battle of ideas by pushing back and standing up I'm not wanting to draw comparisons from between them and now but it's an inspiring chapter in history that shows to make those those comparisons and I would also add that uh if you look around uh univers I ities uh today it's worth asking where is the rise of Hitler taught uh where are the lessons of the Holocaust taught are there courses on the Holocaust and if not why not I mean that's a good question to ask because some of the great universities uh have increasingly uh diminished the significance of modern German history in their course offerings students kids of 18 1920 can't be expected to know as it were uh from their high school education what it was that brought Hitler to power and how that led that path led to asids so I think it would be a very good question for everybody on this call to ask about the university they went to what exactly are you doing to educate today's students about those fundamental lessons of German history and of European history because the Holocaust is not just a German phenomenon to me it's shocking how little one one sees of that kind of of course uh I can think of one University that that decided not to replace its professor of modern German history uh with another professor of modern German history but instead to have uh Native American women's history in its place I'm sure there's a role for Native American women's history but it shouldn't be instead of the history of modern Germany okay well we've got time probably for one more question I'll see if I can see if there's one on the chat um let's have a look hang on Q&A that looks like a likely place right um so we've done that oh this is where you got them from I see right [Music] um okay why don't we why don't we go with this one do you think that wokeism uh a wokeism bit of a divisive word but the problem is there isn't another word that you can use that's politer so do you think workism is a form of w Western self-destruction that when Rich societies become too complacent they eat themselves from within well for for those who wondering who wondering what workism is it's worth explaining that it's a sort of shorthand for all the different things that have been uh lumped together uh over the last 20 years uh you know there's the progressive left liberal politics that you might associate with Bernie Sanders but that's really quite separate from radical uh feminism and then radical trans rights which is sometimes anti- feminist and let's not for get critical race Theory which says that actually you should do racism but only against white people and then and I I could go on and the trouble about uh this whole uh agglomeration of ideas is that they are so inconsistent with one another that it's quite hard to describe in any other way other than through a word like wokeism woke is just one of these African-American terms that uh Progressive white people like to use I got woke in other words I sort of red pilled myself or whatever the color pill it is and I suddenly realized that the world really was just white supremacy and all the rest of it Bin Laden was right and Bin Laden was right gee I I can't believe it nobody ever told me about him so that that captures I think the the some level silliness of much of this um and yet it's it's it's absurd ideas that end up in a very toxic place yes it is self-destructive in answer to your question of Western civilization and it's designed to be the central Target of wokeism is in fact West civilization you can trace its Origins at Stanford to a campaign to get rid of courses in western civilization because they were just apologetics for imperialism so yeah it it is absolutely a sign of the decadence of our civilization that such an ideology should be current you know the reason it's current is that young people just can't imagine what it is to live in an unfree Society they have so great difficulty imagining life in Iran or for that in Gaza or for that matter in North Korea that they seem willing to create an unfree Society of their own around them on University campuses and this is a great failure of pedagogy because those of who study those of us who study totalitarianism should have done a better job of conveying to people how utterly terrible it is to be unfree how horrific it is to live in a totalitarian regime where you have to fear the secret police but you also have to fear your neighbors and even your own family because anybody could inform on you this huge failure of imagination is what makes workers impossible and in a way there's a vacuum left by the absence of religion perhaps that wokeism has has flowed into um and I think there's also a draining of authority away from figures like yourself and the replacement of that with Tik Tok well I never wanted Authority why I became an academic I I just wanted uh to study the past and try to communicate it its lessons to as large an audience as possible which was why I made a great many television films once upon a time I do feel a strong sense of failure at the moment if I'm honest a lot of my uh my work particularly in the middle of my career was was focused on learning the lessons of the 20th century and I don't think I can have done a very good job given where we find our ourselves but yeah I mean I think it's it's never it's never time to give up one always has to keep making these arguments and trying to get people to see what it is that distinguishes a free Society from an unfree Society and also to convey to them that it's easy to lose your freedom and actually that's part of what happened in the mid 20th century that that freedom was voluntarily given up Germans voted to be unfree they voted a dictator into power we have to learn those lessons again it seems uh and we have to learn them urgently my great fear is that we've allowed things to slip so so far uh that when you look at polling of people under the age of 25 they're quite prepared to embrace authoritarianism if you tell them that it'll deliver a solution to the problem of climate change so there's a need to radically reform the way we educate people in high school as well as in University about what Americans call Civics and and and Civics is about explaining what a free Society is and I think the only way you can really convey that is to convey also what an unfree Society is you like Tik Tok sure okay how would you like to live uh under Shian pings and the Chinese Communist parties rule how would you like that um you're susceptible to Russian propaganda let's go and see what life is like in in Russia we're not very good at making young people imagine themselves whether it's in Gaza or in pongyang and we need to get better at that because right now the agents of authoritarianism are making a great many gains in our public sphere and the Defenders of Liberty are on the Run wow chilling note on which to finish but also a call to action so thank you so much never give up as Lord wath the founder of the BBC used to say never give up him

Channel: The Jewish Chronicle

Views: 54,991

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Id: 8Um4Hq1HLWo

Length: 54min 15sec (3255 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 15 2023