David Andress, a professor of modern history at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom, is facing backlash and public calls for his firing after a post in which he justified the stabbing of two Jews in Golders Green on Wednesday.
“Blowback is bad, but it is also inevitable,” he wrote. “As is the fact, it will primarily hurt the innocent.”
“A world where Western powers and their allies can simultaneously do anything they feel like to others and face no consequences for their own populations does not exist,” he wrote.
Patrick McGhee, an honorary fellow at Durham University, said this reflects a pattern of antisemitism in universities. “This is the very sickness we witnessed after Oct. 7,” he said. “Academics who excuse or rationalize the barbarity of that awful day as an act of so-called ‘decolonization’ are guilty of utter moral and intellectual failure. The same is true here. We must rid academia of antisemitism.”
Andress has a history of anti-Israel rhetoric, including alleging in 2024 that the Israeli government allowed the Hamas-led massacre on Oct. 7, 2023, to happen.
Calls for the university to fire him circulated on social media. JNS sought comment from the school.
In 2023, the university investigated and suspended a professor, Amira Abdelhamid, for justifying Oct. 7 as a “legitimate struggle” and referred her to prosecutors. U.K. prosecutors dropped the case against him in 2024.
