British lawmakers from the Conservative Party last week called on Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson to deport antisemitic foreign students.
In a letter to Phillipson, Laura Trott, the shadow education secretary, and Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, called for this step following “deeply troubling rise in anti-Semitic behavior ..., particularly on university campuses,” The Telegraph reported.
The authors contrasted what they characterized as inaction on antisemitic hate speech with the British government’s crackdown on rhetoric deemed offensive to gay people and people who identify as members of the sex opposite to theirs.
“Too many institutions that have spent years suppressing legitimate free speech and debate in the name of ‘diversity and inclusion’ have decided to turn a blind eye to genuine harassment and intimidation when it is directed against Jewish people,” the authors wrote. “Failure to act sends a dangerous message to Jewish students and academics that their safety is not valued, and to perpetrators that they can harass Jewish students and staff with impunity. ... We can, and must, do better. Enough is enough.”
In September, police briefly arrested comedian Graham Linehan for writing on X that if a man claiming to be a woman enters a female-only space, one should “make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”
According to data cited in media reports, U.K. police forces made more than 12,000 arrests in 2023 for such “offensive online messages”—roughly 33 arrests per day.
In May, six police officers arrested a retired policeman near London because he wrote on X that Muslim antisemites in the U.K. were “One step away from storming Heathrow [Airport] looking for Jewish arrivals.”
A Palestinian student, Dana Abu Qamar, who led a Friends of Palestine society at the University of Manchester, was stripped of her student visa in December 2023 but the decision was reversed on appeal on the basis of her human rights.
After thousands of Hamas-led terrorists invaded Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering some 1,200 people, abducting another 251 and perpetrating other atrocities that included rape, body mutilations and torture, Abu Qamar wrote on X: “We are full of pride. We are really, really full of joy of what happened.”
