Opinion
Shockingly, I’m not shocked by NUS culture
The sacking of Shaima Dallali is a positive sign. But elsewhere the picture remains bleak
November 3, 2022 10:12
3 min read
The sacking of Shaima Dallali is a positive sign. But elsewhere the picture remains bleak
November 3, 2022 10:12Earlier this year, the NUS instructed Rebecca Tuck KC to investigate whether it has a culture of antisemitism, after revelations in the JC and strong criticism from previous NUS presidents.
She has not yet reported, but this week the NUS sacked its president for gross misconduct. Tuck has since been denounced as a Zionist and therefore part of a conspiracy to punish anyone critical of Israel.
In 2018 Shaima Dallali wrote a puff piece about Yusef al-Qaradawi, saying that he works to be a “moral compass for the Muslim community”. Those who remember Ken Livingstone cuddling Qaradawi at City Hall know what his “opposition to Israeli oppression” looks like. Qaradawi preached that “throughout history”, antisemites were the instrument by which God punished Jews and that the Holocaust was divine punishment. He incited his congregation: “Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers.”
Delegates to NUS conference should have known about her politics when they elected her in March 2022. They were already an issue because Lowkey, an anti-Zionist conspiracy fantasist, had been invited to address the “Liberation conference”.
It does not feel shocking to me that the NUS President has apparently been sacked, nor that a speaker was invited to an anti-racist conference to teach people that those who refuse to disavow Israel are evil racists. What is shocking is that this is no longer shocking.
Perhaps I am professionally too close to antisemitism to be cheered by a victory. NUS does seem to be acting against antisemitism. It has pledged to “rebuild in an inclusive way”, so that it can “fight for all students”. Taken at face value that is an admission of the seriousness of the situation and a pledge to act radically.
And Lowkey did not speak at the conference in the end; that was also a battle won.
There have been others. Jeremy Corbyn did not become prime minister, Labour apologised for its antisemitism and its new leader says all the right things — and indeed looks set to stand a candidate against Corbyn at the next election. Antisemites are finding Labour a hostile environment; they are leaving the party.
But at the same time there are many other indicators that antisemitism is well entrenched in public life. How much effort has Sir Keir made to persuade Luciana Berger to return to the party she was bullied out of or to accept the Labour nomination in Finchley and Golders Green for the next election? He hasn’t even changed the rules to make that possible.
In May 2021 loyalty pledges circulated on campuses, declaring that supporting a boycott of Israel and believing Israel to be inherently racist were foundational to scholarship and to morality. David Miller, once a sociology professor, and Chris Williamson, once a Labour MP, are now employed by the Iranian regime to make antisemitic propaganda videos, while the hundreds of academics who defended them against the “Zionist witchunt” have not felt the need to reassess their solidarity. Some students may have had their coursework marked unfairly on the basis of the anti-Zionist thinking of lecturers. Al Jazeera’s attempt to portray allegations of antisemitism as a scam has been embraced as truth by many. Universities refuse even say whether or not things said by lecturers, and complained of by Jewish students, are antisemitic.
Shama Dallali is treating her sacking as an Islamophobic attack. This antisemitic understanding, that the elected president of NUS has been deposed by racists, is widely accepted. It is based on the foundation that NUS, its independent inquiry and the Jewish students who called for it, are all part of a plot to stop anybody who has radical politics from holding a position of influence.
And our own populists continue to blame everything on a north London, cosmopolitan, globalist, privileged, educated, liberal elite that cannot understand the real Britain.
Populism, with its irrationality, its scapegoating and its conspiracy fantasy, is not over. The world economy might be in trouble, the cost of living crisis is biting and a European country is fighting a totalitarian threat.
The rise of the far right in Israel will be portrayed as evidence of “Zionism’s” unique badness but we are seeing the rise of extremism everywhere. It is also evidence of Israel’s vulgar ordinariness — or its ordinary vulgarity. But it is also related to the particular pressures on both Israelis and Palestinians that result from their appropriation as globally symbolic morality tales.
The picture with respect to antisemitism is hard to read. There are storm clouds but there are also shafts of sunlight. We should prepare for the approaching storm. But if we get sunshine instead, I’m happy to be remembered as somebody who worried too much.
David Hirsh is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology, at Goldsmiths, University of London and Academic Director of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism.