Blockinr IHRA means Jews to be seen as ‘evil’, says prof

IF UNIVERSITY College London (UCL) abandoned the IHRA it would create a “licence to treat every Jewish kid as an agent of evil”, a US academic and antisemitism campaigner has said.

Professor Michael Walzer, a leading political philosopher at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, told the JC that he was backing IHRA for UK campuses because a failure to do so “would send a very bad message to students and teachers… It would be a licence not only to treat the state of Israel as the embodiment of evil (I would be happy to join an argument about that) but to treat every Jewish kid as an agent of evil – which no university should allow.”

Writing in Fathom on Tuesday, Prof Walzer said that students’ experiences of antisemitism on campuses in the UK were “unlike anything I have experienced myself and far more nasty than anything I have read about on any American campus.”

Prof Walzer said those at the UCL who were arguing against the IHRA “do not seem to understand the urgency of the fight against the bullying and harassment of Jewish students”.

The academic was a key signatory of the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA), a definition proposed as an alternative to IHRA over concerns the latter limited criticism of Israel, but supports use of the IHRA in Britain.

UCL students and staff members are defending IHRA as “an important safeguard” amid growing harassment and intimidation of Jewish students.

In February, Jewish student leaders and former graduates of UCL reacted with fury to a decision taken by “a small group of academics” at UCL to reject the use of the standard IHRA definition of antisemitism.

Defying the decision by the university itself over one year ago to adopt IHRA, UCL’s Academic Board confirmed it had voted to call on the university to “replace” the working definition with “a more precise definition of antisemitism”.

It would send a very bad message to students and teachers’