THE door rattled as the pro-Palestinian group, some of them masked and wearing their black and white keffiyeh scarves, tried to get in.
Outside they whispered: “He’s in there, we need to get him to open up.”
Behind the locked door, Miles, a Jewish student at King’s College London, thought only one thing: “If they get inside, they will hurt me.”
He texted the university’s security who were meant to be keeping him safe.
A little while earlier, he was co-hosting an event with Faezeh Alavi, an Iranian dissenter of the ruling mullahs in her home country. The event was titled From Conflict To Connection: Israelis And Iranians In Dialogue.
Faezeh, a follower of Islam who wears a hijab, faced hostility as she engaged in a conversation with pro-Israel individuals. A group of approximately 15 people began shouting “Shame” and chanting “Free Palestine” just 20 minutes into the discussion.
The university’s security ushered Faezeh and moderator Miles — he asked that his full name is not used — out of the room and the talk ended.
When Miles went into a separate room to pick up his things, he was followed by the hostile crowd with only a locked door separating them.
The attack on his discussion was just one of several incidents in British universities within the past few weeks.
This week, students at Manchester University began the “occupation” of a campus building with the support of some academics.
Campus wars
Dressed in T-shirts advocating for “Globalise the Intifada” — the Palestinian resistance against Israel — the group distributed keffiyeh scarves. Additionally, the university’s Student Union proposed a declaration stating that Hamas’ actions were warranted, while accusing Israel of violating international laws in response.
Last week, academics at the London School of Economics hosted a talk on how Hamas, a proscribed terrorist group, is “widely misunderstood”.
And on Tuesday, University College London banned “fascists and Zionists” from a talk featuring a UN official who has been called anti-Semitic by a number of European countries.
When pro-Israel activists protested outside, eggs were thrown at them.
Anti-Semitism dressed as an intense hatred of Israel has become rife across society since the Hamas massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023. Now a new film, October 8, looks at some of the reasons why.
And it is truly chilling. It tells the story of how a radicalised group of Islamic extremists, egged on by hostile states, have for decades infiltrated social justice movements worldwide to spread not only the delegitimisation of Israel but also hatred of the West.
The experts I spoke to think America is a dozen years behind the UK. It’s been much more extreme in the UK for a long time.
Wendy Sachs, October 8 director, producer
While the documentary focuses on the American experience, particularly the violence of its campus wars, the issue very much affects the UK too, says its director and producer Wendy Sachs.
In fact, she believes, in many ways things are even worse here.
She said: “The experts I spoke to think America is a dozen years behind the UK. It’s been much more extreme in the UK for a long time.”
While the far right has historically been more of a problem for Jews in America, Wendy says she saw this left-wing/Islamist mesh “bubbling up” after the 2016 US presidential election, such as when Jewish lesbians were barred from a “dyke march” for wanting to brandish placards of the Star of David and the leadership of the anti-Trump Women’s Movement were accused of anti- Semitism.
“In the UK, this has been going on for longer and there was the big problem with Labour anti-Semitism, but I think in both countries we now see what is going on,” she said of the protests, which mirror each other but which actually started first on UK campuses before being taken up in America last spring.
She added: “The theme of the film is how we got to this moment when Hamas are being celebrated as freedom fighters rather than terrorists.
“And we want to show that this isn’t just an anti-Jewish movement but it is anti-West. What we are seeing in the UK and the United States is that this is Islamist extremists targeting the West.
“They want to tear down our democracies.”
Wendy was inspired to make the documentary after the shock of seeing people in New York celebrating the Hamas attacks on October 8.
There were similar celebrations outside the Israeli embassy in London. By October 9, more than 30 Harvard University student groups had signed a letter claiming Israel was “entirely responsible” for the massacre.
The film is co-produced by Will & Grace actress Debra Messing, who says on camera: “The terrorist attacks happened multiple times and I think that’s why the content penetrated the psyche of every Jewish person who felt that this was a genocidal attack intended for them.”
Having seen the October 8 celebrations, she says: “I just thought the entire world had turned upside down. Israel hadn’t responded yet and I immediately felt we were in trouble.”
She says she could see that the people celebrating the attacks by Hamas, which is also proscribed as a terrorist group in America, were even aping the Jihadi organisation’s language and iconography.
She says: “The attack by Hamas on October 7 was called ‘the Al-Aqsa flood’ [Al-Aqsa is what Muslims call Jerusalem’s Temple Mount] and we then saw Students for Justice in Palestine create a movement to ‘Flood the streets for Palestine’.
Human rights
“So they were literally taking something that was used by a terrorist group to actually perpetuate violence and adapting that into their imagery and protest content.”
On both sides of the Atlantic, an upside-down red triangle, used on Hamas propaganda to denote a target, has also been adopted by pro-Palestine agitators, particularly on the streets of London.
Perhaps the documentary’s greatest revelation is how long the campaign has been planned.
The film includes a secret 1993 FBI recording of 25 Hamas leaders — many of them also students at US universities — at a Philadelphia hotel in which they talk of plans to “infiltrate American media outlets, universities and research centres”, their main aim being to present Hamas as “palatable”.
The recordings show in detail how they realised they could sway the American left by using the language of human rights.
Lorenzo Vidino, an extremism expert at George Washington University in Washington DC, who first told Wendy about the recordings, says of the Hamas planners: “They knew how to speak to Americans in a language they could understand.”
They even had workshops to enable them to infiltrate both right- and left-leaning audiences, and in 2023 that coincided with a separate “woke” moment within the global left which divides the world into oppressor and oppressed and is obsessed with post-colonial theories.
Groups such as Hamas have been playing the long game here, planting the seeds so that by October 8 they were ready to go.
Wendy Sachs, October 8 director, producer
The documentary examines how groups such as SJP were able to harness willing and naive students as well as some of their teachers to get involved in violent protests.
And SJP is now over here — including being involved in the action at King’s College two weeks ago.
They openly associate with home-grown Islamist groups such as Cage, which last year Michael Gove, the then Communities Secretary, said should be defined as extremist. It is clear that they and other groups at our universities are not only targeting Jews but also anyone deemed pro-Israel — even Muslims such as Faezeh.
Since October 7, 2023 research by charity the Community Security Trust has recorded a 117 per cent increase in anti-Semitic incidents on UK university campuses, with attacks ranging from hitting and spitting at Jews, tearing off their skull caps and Star of David necklaces, to taping bacon to their doors.
Donald Trump has threatened to withdraw funding from US universities which do not do more to stop anti-Semitism and to deport foreign nationals who have led the campus wars, while in the UK the problem very much continues.
Wendy said: “Groups such as Hamas have been playing the long game here, planting the seeds so that by October 8 they were ready to go.
“We know there is a problem. The question is, what are we going to do about it?”
- October 8 will be available on platforms including Prime Video and Apple + from April 1.
