Bridging Hatred: How Two Forms of Antisemitism Converge on College Campuses

Another morning, another flood of emails. Lately, my university inbox has become more than just a stream of class updates and administrative notices — now even this simplest of tasks has been hijacked by antisemitism.

Statements from the Student Union condemning Israel’s “Genocide,” “Educide,” “Domicide,” and a list of other bogus terms pile up on my inbox screen — one after another.

And even though I delete the emails, antisemitism follows me in every hallway (filled with anti-Israel posters) and cubicles filled with antisemitic stickers. It is completely inescapable.

This phenomenon reminds me of something Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks once said, when he compared antisemitism to a “virus” that has “survived over time by mutating.”

Beyond that, antisemitism has permeated groups you’d never expect to withstand being in the same room, let alone aligned in a common cause, with each other. The surprising nature of the spread of antisemitism between the far left and Islamist groups, has been called the “Red-Green Alliance.”

This alliance is simply proof that sometimes the enemy of my enemy is —  still just an enemy. However, the current resurgence of the latest variant of antisemitism — created in the wake of October 7th — has clearly found fertile ground in Western schools and academic institutions.

According to CAMERA, an organization set up to fight anti-Israel narratives and disinformation, the roots of this deranged ideology begin in a very expected place: Nazi Germany, which spent an enormous amount of resources into spreading antisemitism internationally.

With the eventual disappearance of the Nazi regime in Germany, the mantle of exporting antisemitism has now been picked up by (among others) authoritarian regimes globally. The Soviet Union, for instance, worked closely through Uganda’s Idi Amin to encourage Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat to rephrase his endless waves of terrorism against Israeli civilians as acts of heroism, part of a necessary “liberation movement.”

In time, these propagandistic slogans developed intellectual roots as revolutionaries in Iran, notably Ali Shirati, pioneered a synthesis, combining Marxism’s oppressor/oppressed paradigm with a political interpretation of Shiite Islam. This positioned Islam as uniquely responsible for championing the marginalized.

Unsurprisingly, Iran has developed into one of the most major exporters of this “New Antisemitism” — funding a web of initiatives aimed to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist and dehumanize its people.

The influence of these Islamic regimes extends across Europe and North America, deeply embedding itself within Western academic institutions. This phenomenon has received far less attention compared to the coverage of China’s Confucius Institutes on campuses, despite Qatari and Iranian interests exerting a much greater financial and ideological impact.

A groundbreaking 2008 report revealed the scale of this influence, when research uncovered that Islamist regimes had injected $462 million into just eight leading UK institutions, including prestigious universities like Oxford and Cambridge. Subsequent investigations have painted an even more alarming picture, with reports suggesting that Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood have secretly channeled over $13 billion into American universities between 2001 and 2021.

The consequences of this influence is not so surprising. British academics have increasingly demonstrated a lack of moral clarity on the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Some of this their Marxist roots, where other efforts could be attributed to foreign funding. And when they support terrorist groups on college campuses, they often go without consequences. Their “oppressor vs. oppressed” ideology makes them sympathetic to terrorism.

Many students have followed the lead of these teachers, with anti-Israel protests on UK universities becoming a near daily occurrence — costing UK universities at least £1 million in management already, and spreading hate to new generations of students and the general population.

And sadly, the impact of this rise of a new antisemitism has resulted in Jewish students fearful of expressing their Jewish identity on campus, with figures showing as many as 70% of Jewish students actively concealing their Jewish identity in UK universities.

As for me and the flood of hate in my email inbox, my problem won’t be resolved until we start to tackle antisemitism within our universities, and our media institutions seriously and denormalize this spreading hatred.

Isaac Grand is Masters Student in Law at City, University of London, and a CAMERA on Campus Fellow.

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