🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
The following is adapted from Brendan O'Neill's new book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilization. Buy it on Amazon here.
We live in an era when you can be canceled on campus for saying women don't have penises, but you'll be fine if you say "Kill all Jews."
We live in a time when asking a student where they are from is considered a racial micro-aggression, but hollering "Globalize the intifada" in the aftermath of an intifada in which a thousand Jews were slaughtered is apparently okay.
We live in a culture in which students will demand access to "safe spaces", complete with Play Doh and bean bags, if a speaker they hate turns up on campus. And yet these same students who fear words like the rest of us fear death will happily cheer the invasion of Israel and the murder of hundreds of its citizens.
No "safe space" for Jews, it seems.
This was one of the most unsettling revelations in the aftermath of Hamas's pogrom against Israel on October 7 last year: that snowflakes have a secret genocidal streak.
That student activists who wail about feeling "erased" if you fail to use their preferred pronouns don't seem to have much of a problem with the literal erasure of hundreds of citizens of the Jewish State.
Overnight, students who had bristled at such "micro-aggressions" as "Don't you want a family?" (it is an act of unforgivable "heteronormativity", apparently, to assume everyone wants a family) were gloating over the massacre of entire families in southern Israel.
It was just two weeks after the pogrom that students at George Washington University projected the slogan "Glory to our martyrs" onto the exterior of a campus building. That is, glory to the mobs that had invaded the Jewish nation to rape, kidnap, and massacre innocents.
This is a university whose list of micro-aggressions include asking an Asian person to help you with a math problem (that's an act of "implicit bias", apparently) and using the phrase "When I look at you, I don't see color" (this mini-outrage "denies a person of color's racial/ethnic experiences," it seems).
In the aftermath of the pogrom, George Washington was rocked by protests that were straight-up pro-Hamas. At one, the mob chanted: "We will honor all our martyrs!" This is a university where the nickname of the sports teams—"Colonials"—had to be changed because the student body found it so offensive. Earlier in 2023, pre-October 7, the campus community demanded a "reckoning" with the "fraught history" of this hurtful nickname. And yet just months later, they were honoring Hamas.
Students who had felt wounded by a word were taking pleasure in the literal wounding of Jews.
Other student activists descended on the offices of the New York Times to decry its "reporting [of] Hamas rapes." The student activists of the Palestinian Youth Movement took over the Times' lobby and damned the paper for spreading "lies" about Hamas carrying out sexual assaults on October 7.
These are the kind of progressive students who for years bemoaned "unwanted sexual advances." Yet now they were providing moral cover for an army of anti-Semitic rapists. It seems being badly flirted with by a drunken jock is an intolerable instance of "rape culture," but the violent degradation of Jewish women by the bigots of Hamas can just be written off as a "lie."
In the wake of October 7, students at the University of Pennsylvania invited to their campus a "solidarity activist" who had tweeted "Glad Hamas killed that bitch" in response to a photo of a 22-year-old woman who was murdered at the Nova music festival. The kind of campus activists who had once taken such fright at a man's hand on their shoulder were now rubbing shoulders with a man who had saluted the barbarous slaying of a young Jewish woman.
At Harvard University, on October 7 itself, 31 student societies published a letter saying Israel was "entirely responsible" for all the "unfolding violence." Even as women and children were being murdered, these privileged Ivy Leaguers were absolving the murderers of responsibility and saying Israel is "the only one to blame."
These are the kind of students who rage against "victim-blaming." It is an outrage, say progressive activists, to say "the victim rather than the perpetrator bears responsibility for an assault." And yet that's precisely what those Harvard poseurs did—blamed Israelis for their own brutalization at the hands of an invading army of racists. It was the low politics of "She was asking for it" dolled up as progressive activism.
After October 7, every rule of political correctness was discarded on campuses. Suddenly, you could be as offensive as you like, so long as your target was the Jewish State or the Jewish people.
At the Gaza encampment at Columbia University, a placard branded the Jewish nation the "pigs of the earth." Jews were told to "Go back to Poland." A protester in a keffiyeh held up a sign with an arrow pointing at a group of Jews and describing them as Hamas's "next targets."
Campus activists who had wrung their hands over the micro-aggression of asking someone where they're from were now essentially wishing death on Jews.
Jewish students at Penn were told to go back to "f**king Berlin where you came from." Penn acknowledged a rise in outright antisemitism, including the daubing of "swastikas and hateful graffiti" on university property, as well as "chants at rallies ... that glorify the terrorist atrocities of Hamas." It felt, wrote Noah Rubin at the New York Post, that our "elite schools" had turned into "Hamas University."
The rise of "Hamas University" after October 7 confirmed that Jews, and Jews alone, are denied access to the "safe space." They are denied the protections of political correctness that other groups—African-Americans, Muslims, and trans people—are heartily afforded.
It is discrimination in its purest sense: Where other minority groups are force-fielded from every slur, however imaginary, Jews are expected to suck up being insulted, harassed, and told that their homeland is a nation of "pigs" that deserves to be destroyed.
Understandably, some responded to this racist discrepancy by calling for the safe space to be thrown open to Jews, too. For Jews to be shielded from hate in the way other students are. That would be a mistake. For the surge in campus antisemitism is not a glitch in the safe space ideology; it's a function of it. It is confirmation that the safe space, far from bringing calm to campus, in fact nurtures grievance, hatred, even violence.
In the very act of promising students protection from "transgressive" people, the safe space also puts those transgressive people in the crosshairs. In the very act of depicting certain ideas as the potential eraser of your entire identity, the safe space incites fear and loathing of those ideas. And, by extension, of the people who hold them.
It was the very ideology of progressive censorship that condemned Jews to a new round of racial hatred, by branding them a privileged group whose Zionist beliefs cause offense and even hurt to less privileged groups.
Rather than demanding the inclusion of Jews in the safe space, we should call for the liberation of all students from this infantilizing zone of paranoia and intolerance. Gentile and Jew alike will benefit from the withering away of the progressive hysterias of the 21st-century campus.
Brendan O'Neill is the chief political writer of spiked. His new book, A Heretic's Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable, is available now.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
