The fallout from the ‘Kill the Jews’ outburst at the Danny Ayalon talk last week has been absolutely spectacular.
Over 30 articles in newspapers around the world mean this has been the biggest Oxford Union story since Shakira, but for considerably less positive reasons. As with every story about the Union ever, most commentators have got completely the wrong end of the stick. Melanie Phillips is particularly strident in the Spectator, claiming that the event illustrates Britain’s (not Oxford, Britain’s!) ‘slide from enlightenment into darkness.’ Most of the stories appear to be sourced from the original Cherwell and OxStu stories and an obscure blog by an Israeli student in Oxford called ‘The Edge of Where.’ All share a general tone of horror at the supposed outrageous behaviour of the students.
Is this not perhaps a teeny, tiny bit of an overreaction? Obviously the student who made the ‘kill the Jews’ comment (if he did – he claims he was mistranslated) was utterly out of order and fully deserves whatever the police or the Israeli embassy decide to throw at him. Also, those students who interrupted Ayalon’s talk did Ayalon and everyone who wanted to listen to him a grave discourtesy – all speakers have the right to be heard. But the protesters were in the minority, and most of them, if rude, were at least making politically legitimate points, of the same sort that have been made by mainstream media commentators around the world.
The Oxford Union gets protests all the time, both inside and outside the chamber. So does any venue that hosts high profile politicians. Some of the protesters are rude, some hold particularly strong feelings, some are unreasonable, many say silly things, some fairly outrageous things. But the presence in Oxford of a dozen or so angry students is not symptomatic of a city wallowing in anti-semitism, nor of a nation’s decline. The only thing it demonstrated is that, in a university of over ten thousands students from all over the world, a small number of them are always going to be idiots. Yes, chuck them out of the room, but don’t blame the whole university for their actions.
