What Happened When Oxford Anti-Semites Were Exposed to Facts

By Seth Mandel

Wednesday, December 11, 2024

 

The British journalist Jonathan Sacerdoti has done the public a tremendous favor by releasing the video of his remarks at the recent Oxford Union debate on Israel and genocide. Oxford also released the video, but there’s a minor difference: In the Oxford version, available on their official YouTube page, the sound is cut at key moments.

 

Therein lies a tale perhaps as illuminating as the debate itself.

 

The esteemed Oxford Union held one of its famous debates on whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Arguing against the proposition were Sacerdoti, Israeli-Arab commentator Yoseph Haddad, the attorney Natasha Hausdorff, and the ex-Hamas figure Mosab Hassan Yousef. I’ll get to the opposing team in a moment.

 

By now, news reports have made clear that the debate descended into madness as Sacerdoti’s team couldn’t even get through their statements without obscene screeching from the audience, and at one point Haddad—the target of constant abuse throughout the event—was asked to leave the hall for defending the honor of the hostages held by Hamas.

 

The whole thing was so embarrassing for Oxford and the Jew-baiters in the crowd that Oxford simply cut the audio out of parts of the debate it posted online. So Sacerdoti posted the uncensored video.

 

The point here is not just the behavior of anti-Israel maniacs at the union or the fact that Sacerdoti, representative of the pro-Israel side of the public debate more broadly, showed grace and respect while standing his ground. It’s that the parts that drove the crowd to the brink of insanity were merely Sacerdoti’s reciting of statistics—i.e., facts. The mob’s contact with reality produced a chemical reaction that ought to be studied for decades to come.

 

About eight minutes in, Sacerdoti notes, in objection to the idea that Israel is purposely starving Gazans: “Israel has provided 700,000 tons of food to Gaza during this war. That is a daily average of 3,200 calories per person.”

 

To which a woman in the audience yelled: “You sick motherf***er!”

 

I don’t know if I’ve seen an exchange that so perfectly encapsulates the public debate over this Israel-Hamas war.

 

In the official Oxford Union video, you don’t get to hear that response at all. That is when the sound is cut out for 110 seconds, the length of time it takes the presiding official to regain order and allow Sacerdoti to continue.

 

This eruption was not caused by Sacerdoti saying something provocative or even delivering his opinion. It was his recital of statistics that sent the crowd into convulsions of fury.

 

Two lessons here. First, the inability to handle fact-based debate isn’t limited to American universities, but there are important differences across the pond. In America, the progressive instinct to shut down free inquiry can only go so far, because we have constitutional protections for speech. Britain has no such constitutional protections. It has relied on a culture of speech and debate exemplified by what the Oxford Union once was, and may one day be again. The ability to debate is a cultivated skill in the UK. The law will not preserve free speech in Britain; the people must do so, and the trend lines aren’t encouraging.

 

Second, as promised: The makeup of the side of the debate that argued for the motion that Israel is an apartheid state guilty of genocide shows what Sacerdoti and his teammates were up against. The “yes, genocide” team included novelist Susan Abulhawa, who refers to Jews (though sometimes uses the “Zionists” euphemism) as “spawns of Satan” who “aren’t human,” complained that Jewish immigrants to the Middle East are “garbage,” and who claims that “‘the Jews’ as a united single nation or people is fiction.”

 

Alongside Abulhawa was Mohamed El-Kurd, who has accused the Jewish state of holding “an unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood” and repeated the classic blood libel that Jews literally harvest and eat the organs of non-Jews.

 

Is it possible to argue against Israel’s actions without employing terminology that would make Goebbels blush? Sure. But the message from the Oxford Union, and academic and cultural institutions throughout the West, is that there’s no need to.