Do chants and slogans lead to harassment and violence?

Some of it was pretty clear cut – a leaflet quoting the fabricated Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for example, a conspiracy theory purporting to detail a Jewish plot for global domination.

But some of it was less clear. A leaflet being handed out by one group carried the headline “intifada till victory”, and a stunt being run by the stall holders next to them involved students carrying around cardboard guns – a stunt often seen during Israeli Apartheid weeks on campus to “visualise the way in which Israel uses checkpoints to prevent and restrict Palestinian freedom of movement.”

There was some debate about the leaflet given its distribution’s proximity to the other stall – and even more of a debate over the “Mock Israeli Checkpoint” demonstration. The steering committee held up the actual conference for hours while it debated it – but that debate was pretty futile.

What mattered was that once I’d been dispatched to cause the stunt organisers to realise that whether “allowed” or not, in the context of the activity of those stood next them in the exhibition area of the Blackpool Winter Gardens, waving guns around while “dressed like an Israeli” was bound to upset. They binned the costumes and guns. Nobody was happy. The event resumed.

There’s another good example of what we might call the “conflict over context” surrounding student activism in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war floating around in the press this morning.

On Tuesday the Telegraph reported that education secretary Gillian Keegan had called on universities to report students and lecturers to the police if they displayed support for Hamas.

To illustrate the story, it went on to suggest that there had been a series of incidents where left-wing Palestine supporters have “celebrated the bloodshed”:

In the latest scandal, Marxist, Communist and Palestine societies at eight British universities have scrawled “intifada till victory” slogans on posters, which Jewish students have condemned as a “thinly veiled call for violence”.

It’s crucial to note that there’s no evidence that Keegan herself has directly argued that the phrase “intifada till victory” represents the glorification of terrorism – but that’s the simplistic implication.

Today the Telegraph remixes the story, adding in the suspension of University College London’s Marxist society on the basis that its “anti-Israel posters call for violence”.

It again calls out the group’s use of “intifada until victory” – although it’s probably just as notable that the paper reports posters displaying “an image of a soldier pointing a gun at someone waving a Palestinian flag.”

The Marxist Student Federation (a new one on me) has denied that the “intifada till victory” slogan calls for violence – president Fiona Lali argues:

The communists on campus are resolute that we have a duty and it is our right to organise in support of Palestine. That means we want to fight our own imperialist government, which is complicit in the ongoing massacre of Palestinians.

The Socialist Party (which supports socialist student groups across campuses) argues that students should be able to to discuss and debate the “way forward” for Palestinian liberation without fear of punishment or surveillance:

We do not think that a Hamas-led military offensive can be a substitute for the mass struggle of the Palestinians, under their own democratic control, which is necessary to end their oppression. But we think that students should have the right to discuss this question and others.

And Socialist Appeal has taken on the “intifada til victory” slogan head on:

[The Telegraph] published an article linking our slogan for “intifada until victory” with support for Hamas and potential antisemitic violence. This is a grotesque slander. The article implies that anyone using this slogan could face up to 14 years in prison. This is a barefaced lie. An intifada is a mass uprising by an oppressed people. Its literal meaning is a “shaking off”.

They go on to say that they’ve sought “specific legal advice” on the slogan, where they quote David Renton (a Barrister at Garden Court Chambers) as saying:

Using the word “intifada” is not incitement to violence.

Of course they don’t say if Renton has a view on the whole slogan, they don’t tell us what else Renton might have said and they don’t tell us whether Renton had a view on the contexts in which it might be said.

Meanwhile in its letter this week to SUs and universities, the Union of Jewish Students demands a “zero tolerance” approach to support for Hamas and greater protection and support for Jewish students, with its letter carried across the media today:

We have seen a number of incidents on campus including posters calling for ‘intifada until victory’, Students’ Union officers supporting the terrorist activities of Hamas on Twitter, academics tweeting celebration of the murder of 1,000 Israelis and protests on campuses claiming that the horrors committed are ‘lies’ fabricated by Israel.

Whether the phrase, in context, amounts to antisemitism or the glorification of terrorism is one thing – but further complicating things is the news that today Robin Simcox, the UK’s counter-extremism commissioner will use a speech to say that it is “time to confront reality” about the nature of the extremist threats posed by Hamas and Iranian networks operating in the UK:

Too often, support for Palestinian rights has translated into rhetoric supportive of Hamas… too many in positions of prominence have praised them or their leadership, or sought to rationalise or excuse their acts of terror.

Dave Rich, director of policy at the CST, told the PA news agency:

Yet again we see a spike in anti-Jewish hate incidents amongst people who are supposed to be the most educated in our society. It is accompanied by a wave of student support for Hamas’s so-called ‘Resistance’, which took the form of an antisemitic pogrom. Universities need to provide Jewish students with the support and protection that they need and deserve and crack down on this anti-Jewish hatred swiftly and firmly.

Amid claim and counterclaim about context, the “problem with X is that it can lead to or mean Y” thing is also a familiar one (see also campaigns about “lad culture” and the debate in the 2010s on whether thet “led to” rape and sexual assault).

In the wake of the 2010 “underwear bomber” revelations (Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had been involved in UCL’s Isoc) there were endless debates about both speakers and societies that some argued provided an environment in which antisemitism and the promotion of violent extremism could flourish – but where the speakers and event did not in and of themselves reach any bar for a ban.

For obvious reasons, plenty of others argued that such allegations were a barrier to their free speech and represented a kind of Islamophobia.

Notably, the Times reports that Simcox’s speech today will note that while some Hamas supporters have been arrested for celebrating the terror attack, the majority have been “careful” to ensure their public displays of support fall…

…just below the legal threshold for hate crime, glorification of terror, or public order offences.

…and argues that that means they are:

successfully exploiting one of our proudest British values — free expression — to pursue a shameful extremist agenda, the normalisation and promotion of antisemitism.

Again, others would argue that that framing denies them their free speech. But as I’ve been saying all week, if Simcox is right the difference between now and the early 2010s is that the Westminster government has spent two years arguing for and securing enhanced legal protection for speech unless it clearly reaches the legal bar for harassment or the promotion of terrorism/violent extremism – adding in the “right” to hurt or upset others in the process.

Put another way – one of the often used quotes in debates over campus culture is Stephen Sedley’s:

Free speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative provided it does not tend to provoke violence. Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having.

But as I’ve always snapped back – how exactly are universities and SUs supposed to work out if a slogan or speaker is “designed” or intended in the long-term to provoke violence rather than just agreement, passion or offence?

To try to calm things down, in the late 2000s and early 2010s when I worked there, NUS was funded to support students’ unions to have constructive conversations with student groups about the way in which their protest or debate might impact other students – finding ways to carefully balance free speech and protection from harm.

By the end of the decade – partly because the funding had come from “Prevent” – the scheme was denounced by NUS, and the government could barely believe that previous iterations of the Home Office and BIS had engaged NUS to do that work.

I expect that UJS is right when it says in its letter to universities and SUs that:

It is of paramount importance to brief university staff and lecturers about their responsibility to create safe spaces for students and leave their politics at the front door. Lecturers and university staff should be sensitive to the emotional distress many of their Jewish and Israeli students are currently facing.

I’m not convinced by the “leaving politics at the door” bit for sorts of obvious reasons – but being sensitive to the emotional distress of other students surely makes sense. The question is what sorts of frameworks and support will encourage it rather than pushing people to their legalistic and rules-based corners.