With many despairing academics packing it in, who will solve the problem of the universities?
Even before the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, he argues, campus anti-Semitism was rife across the West. Following the attacks, 56 per cent of Jewish students in the US said they felt they were in personal danger on campus; 13 per cent of students at large said that the Jews deserved any physical attacks they experienced; and 10 per cent called for their genocide.
Expressing such views anywhere in a democratic country is reprehensible, but the fact that this is openly tolerated at universities is profoundly troubling. 'Gaza Solidarity Encampments' originated at New York's Columbia University in April last year, setting a pattern for 150 similar encampments at US colleges and universities. Anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic slogans blared out from first light, anti-Israel posters and flyers were displayed and the functioning of university life was generally disrupted. Within weeks, 36 similar encampments had been established in the UK, including at Bristol, Cambridge, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Oxford, Warwick and University College, London.
Nelson rightly champions the qualities that have underpinned universities at their best: 'Truth, reason, argument, inquiry, collegiality and freedom of thought.'
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Spectator
18 minutes ago
- Spectator
The mixed legacy of Zbigniew Brzezinski, strategist of the Cold War
In the autumn of 1938, within nine weeks of each other, two boys arrived in New York, fleeing the gathering storm: a 15-year-old Jewish German and a ten-year-old Catholic from Poland. Both would repay the mortal debt they owed by dedicating their lives to the Land of the Free. The older boy was, of course, Henry Kissinger, later Grand High Poobah to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. The younger was Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security adviser from 1977 to 1981 and the subject of a magisterial biography bythe Financial Times'sWashingtonsupremo, Edward Luce. From the first, Zbigniew Brzezinski (pronounced 'ZbigNieff BreshinSki', as Carter helpfully informed his team) sat in Kissinger's shadow, always a step or two behind the great Bavarian. Their first encounter was at Harvard in 1950 when Zbig's first-year lecturer handed the reins to his protégé, described by Zbig as a 'youngish, somewhat rotund… scholar with a strong German accent'. The Pole disliked the sub's penchant for 'Germanic philosophers'. 'Not my meat,' he recalled. 'I rather impolitely rose and left.' The two circled one another for decades. Alternately respectful, cordial, even playful, they also briefed against each other with the spite only arrogant, erudite rivals can exhibit. To Kissinger, Zbig was a 'total whore who has been on every side of every argument'. Brzezinski saw in his senior 'an unprincipled politician, and a political chameleon who only cares about staying visible in US public life and returning to power'. As Harry S. Truman once said: 'If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.' That Kissinger is more remembered is partly due to his being an 'Olympic gold medal-winning flatterer', according to Luce. 'Even with me he would say things I knew to be patently untrue about how he always read my column first thing every morning.' For his part, Zbig favoured abrasive argument. He would 'specialise in decapitating people he thought were fools'. And he chose to leave the greater part of his story to be told by Luce, who has had unrestricted access to a voluminous corpus of diaries, letters and papers. The result of this bequest is a landmark study unlikely to be equalled. This is a high-definition account of one of the great – and most neglected – postwar statesmen and strategists, who helped to shape the end of the Soviet Union. From 1950 on, when he was a mere Masters student, Zbig could see that the simmering nationalisms within the USSR were its Achilles' heel. As a proud Pole, he knew only too well that non-Russian peoples in the Soviet Union retained deep national feelings that would not tolerate Moscow's imperialism indefinitely. His rivals and colleagues, Kissinger included, pursued détente, thinking the Reds would inevitably catch up and overtake the US. But Zbig saw clearly how the massive Soviet hulk was vulnerable to degeneration. His 'systematic bent of mind' pushed Carter to weaponise human rights against the USSR, normalise relations with the Chinese – leading to the opening of listening posts on the Sino-Russian border – and to provide support to Afghan rebel groups following the 1979 Soviet invasion, leaving the Russians bogged down in an unwinnable war. But nowhere was his historic calling more apparent than in Polish affairs. Zbig saw the profound potential of Lech Walesa's Solidarity trade union and used American might to protect and nurture it. In this he was aided by a countryman, one Karol Jozef Wojtyla (aka Pope John Paul II), who became a lifelong ally (Brzezinski had 'P' for 'Pope' added to his White House phone). So it was that in 1980, with the Soviets poised to invade Poland, the two powerful Poles conspired to defend the homeland: Zbig by having Carter issue public and private threats to Leonid Brezhnev; John Paul II by quietly beseeching Solidarity to avoid any action that might give the Soviets an excuse to advance. Years later, the CIA director Robert Gates would conclude that it had been the 'fragile seeds' sowed by Brzezinski that had done for the USSR. If Zbig was responsible for Carter's greatest foreign policy legacy, he was also central to its greatest failure. Having mistaken the Iranian Ayatollah for a 'non-violent Shiite version of Mohandas Gandhi', he advocated successfully for the US to admit the ailing and displaced Shah. It was a decision which precipitated the storming of the US embassy in Tehran and an awful hostage crisis which ultimately destroyed the credibility of Carter's administration. That there have been such very long tails to the Carter presidency's calculations and miscalculations – in eastern Europe, Iran and Afghanistan – speaks loudly of a time when big brains played big dice on the Cold War Risk board of the world. Luce's exceptional study vividly revives the memory, strategies, tactics and foibles of one of the greatest players of that lethal game.
Spectator
20 minutes ago
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Recognising Palestine isn't a path to peace
The children of Gaza are enduring horrendous suffering. The control of aid has been restricted. Innocent lives have been set at nothing. Ruthlessness well beyond the terms of realpolitik has put hundreds of thousands at risk. The people responsible deserve global condemnation. But instead it seems they are to be rewarded. It is Hamas which is responsible for the suffering in Gaza. The terrorist organisation has, for years, used its thugs to control international development assistance to enrich its leaders and subdue the population. Its murderous – indeed, genocidal – intent was made manifest on 7 October 2023 when it unleashed an assault on innocent Israelis which resulted in the biggest single loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. In many cases, Hamas fighters sexually assaulted their victims and gleefully celebrated their deaths. The organisation's leadership exulted in the slaughter and declared that if they could, they would kill and kill again until they had eliminated the Zionist entity. Since that attack, and the Israeli response, Hamas has demonstrated disdain not only for Jewish lives, but also Palestinian ones. By placing command posts in hospitals, putting children deliberately in harm's way and continuing to use food aid as a weapon against its own people, Hamas has shown they are not noble liberators but barbaric murderers. And the West's response to this butcher's bill? To give Hamas the political victory of recognising a Palestinian state. This week the chair of parliament's foreign affairs select committee, Emily Thornberry, was the latest MP to call for British recognition of a Palestinian state. She reflects the views of dozens on the Labour benches – and, it is feared, even the instincts of the Prime Minister himself. Later this month, France and Saudi Arabia will co-chair a conference that aims to obtain recognition of a Palestinian state. Last year, Ireland, Norway and Spain joined more than 140 other members of the United Nations in formally recognising Palestine's statehood. According to Thornberry, it is 'just a question of when' Keir Starmer does so. Before the Prime Minister contemplates any such step, he might do well to study the7 October Parliamentary Commission Report compiled by the UK-Israel All-Party Parliamentary Group chaired by Lord Roberts of Belgravia. To read it is to be reminded of who will cheer loudest if Hamas's atrocities are rewarded with diplomatic recognition. The people responsible for the indiscriminate massacre of 378 Israelis at the Nova musical festival, shot down as they were fleeing for their lives, will be jubilant once more. The terrorists who carried out the gang-rape and mutilation of female victims, filmed for the perpetrators' twisted glory, will rejoice again. The men who shot an unborn child in her mother's womb and murdered a 92-year-old Holocaust survivor before taking 250 men, women and children hostage will have new cause for celebration. The answer to such evil should not be the granting of global respectability but a determination to prevent such atrocities from happening again. That is what Israel, almost alone, is seeking to achieve. Its military campaign is based on the far-from-unreasonable desire to liberate the hostages and permanently eliminate the death cult of Hamas. For its troubles, it enjoys not sympathy and support but a wilfully blind campaign of condemnation. Recent reporting of Israel's continued distribution of food aid to Gaza has ignored the reality of aid distribution in the past, when Hamas would confiscate the support offered by the international community and use it to reward compliance and punish internal opponents. It is to the shame of some aid groups, and certainly of the United Nations' organisation UNRWA, that they made themselves the accomplices to this oppression. The reason Hamas has sought to disrupt, often violently, Israel's aid distribution is because it has been robbed of a tool of political control and a source of illicit finance. Israel's defence forces have made errors in this conflict, sometimes grievous ones. But there is a world of difference between the citizen army of a rule-bound democracy fighting a counter-insurgency campaign while seeking to rescue hostages in urban settings and a terror group that regards every innocent life lost as another propaganda win. Israel's actions in setting back Iran's nuclear weapons programme and obliterating Hezbollah's military structures have made the world safer. It has dismantled much, but not all, of the Hamas command structure. If it can further reduce the ability of Hamas to ever again conduct operations like 7 October, it will have also helped prepare the ground for a more sustainable future for the whole Middle East. A path to genuine peace relies not on the knee-jerk recognition of Palestine, but on the extension of the Abraham Accords. Saudi Arabian recognition of Israel and a broader partnership between pragmatic Arab states and Jerusalem would lay the ground for a future Palestinian state, guaranteed and supported by its Arab neighbours. If the leaders of the West truly want the best future for the Palestinian people, they will want Hamas defeated not garlanded. Choose the latter, and Islamists everywhere will know that in our hearts we are not prepared to defend democracy against barbarity.
Spectator
20 minutes ago
- Spectator
The best deer deterrent? Radio 4
Behind the latest push for recognition of a Palestinian state – even though there is no agreement of what it is that might be recognised – is a sort of impersonation of the story of Israel. Palestinian activists want their own Balfour Declaration. President Macron wants France and Britain to come up with their own Sykes-Picot agreement, but pro-Palestinian. You might think that the clamour would have been shamed into silence by the massacres and hostage-taking committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023. On the contrary, these have somehow empowered the mimicry in wilder and more horrible ways. The genocide, we are now told, is being committed not by Hamas, but by Israel's response. The 'concentration camps' are being set up by Israel in Gaza. And back here in Britain, where it might seem to the unprejudiced observer that anti-Semitism is now almost literally running riot, it is 'Islamophobia' which is being defined as an enemy so great that only one of our many religions must be protected by law, despite the cost to free speech. 'Zionists', by which is now meant Jews (note this change of nomenclature between the Hamas Charter of 1988 and that of 2017), are painted as the murderous classes, so Britain must be 'de-zionised'. Does David Lammy realise where his new rhetoric is leading him and his party? One reason why nothing gets done in this country is that bureaucratic power lies in delay. A business or a private individual needs to get on because his time is his money: the bureaucracy's time is our money, so it has all the time in the world. This is an acute problem in relation to payouts for infected blood, the Post Office scandal etc. A faithful reader, Keith Miles, has an idea. Reverse the process, he says. Force the civil service to pay out £1 million to each acknowledged victim within three months unless it can be proved in that time that the money is not owed. Then the boot will be on the other foot. On Monday, the House of Lords agreed that the bill to remove all hereditary peers from the House of Lords 'do now pass'. The thing will not be complete until the Commons has considered amendments in September, but the death sentence has now been pronounced on the practice of more than 700 years. One or two speeches noted the melancholy historical significance of the change. The House is becoming a rump, though admittedly a large one. But I was interested by a rather more basic point made by the departing Earl of Caithness. When he had first taken his seat 50 years ago, he said, the daily allowance for attending the Lords was £4.73, which is £105.14 in current values. After Labour got rid of most hereditaries and brought in more of its own appointments at the turn of this century, the allowances 'increased hugely', the maximum daily allowance going up by 50 per cent. Today, peers can claim an allowance of £371 a day. As many of us have complained, Labour is jettisoning the hereditaries without reforming the Lords on a new basis, but I think we can be perfectly confident that, as it becomes predominant there, the allowances will rise higher still. The Nationwide, by far the country's biggest building society, is trying to be like a bank, and its customers are unhappy. Its chief executive, Dame Debbie Crosbie, earns £7 million a year and board candidates proposed by its members never get chosen. I suspect the members' fears are well founded. In the market town near us, all the high-street banks have closed, but the Nationwide branch continues. I go there from time to time because my mother is now too frail to manage the journey and so I transact her Nationwide account for her. My visits have impressed me with the social utility of the place. Almost every customer is either old or, like me, acting on behalf of the old. There is a lot of fiddling with spectacles and hearing aids and struggling with forgotten passwords. Old ladies try to sort out their late husband's financial affairs or transfer money to their daughter in New Zealand. Everything moves slowly. The staff are completely patient and, unlike the computer, very rarely say no. I can see why Dame Debbie might feel she has bigger fish to fry. And I agree with the members who therefore suspect her. What is a building society building by paying £7 million to anyone? In the early 1970s, I used to stay with a schoolfriend whose parents lived in Old Church Street, Chelsea. In the same street was the rectory of Chelsea Old Church which was, believe it or not, occupied by the rector, and parish children could play in its two-acre garden. Not long afterwards, the Church Commissioners sold it off. Now it is offered for sale by its non-dom owner who is fleeing the Reeves-Starmer Terror. The reported price is £250 million. I sometimes wonder if anything has done more than house prices to damage our social fabric. Although for professional reasons I feel I must sometimes listen to the Today programme, I almost never listen to anything else on Radio 4. This is a wrench for me since it was the staple of my parents and my boyhood but, like so many, I cannot stand being preached at. However, I keep in touch with the station because my wife has erected a sort of alarm to keep deer out of our garden. As the fallow or roe jump in, they trigger a burst of whatever is playing on Radio 4. My sister's partner uses the same contraption in their garden, but he tunes the alarm to Radio 2 and has much less success in frightening off the marauders. I wonder why. When I go past the alarm myself, setting it off, I do notice that most snatches of dialogue are, even now, conducted in the tones of educated men and women. Perhaps the deer are more in awe of voices 'born to command' than of popular songs.
