The fall of the Oxford Union

October 7th massacres. The vast majority of the room remained still. Here was an Oxford Union audience which would have buried its head in the sand over the barbaric Palestinian terrorism of that dark day, without trying to prevent it at all.

Yoseph Haddad, an Israeli Arab who has dedicated his life to dismantling the apartheid lie, faced similar treatment. The international law commentator Natasha Hausdorf was hectored to finish her speech far quicker than her proposition counterpart.

Meanwhile, the proposition speakers trafficked in unforgivable and dangerous rhetoric. Miko Peled, a relentless anti-Israel activist, described the atrocities of 7 October as acts of “heroism.” I presume that includes the slaughter and kidnap of babies.

Novelist Susan Abulhawa demonised Jews as foreign colonisers, claiming their true homeland lay in Europe. Her later post on X branded me and Natasha “white colonisers”….

By the time the motion passed – 278 in favour to 59 against – it was clear that the entire event had been a sham. This was not a debate; it was a show trial, it seems to me, orchestrated by a deeply biased president and cheered on by a mob that had no interest in facts or truth.

This felt like a marker, the moment when the Oxford Union truly fell. Not just as a debating society, but as a symbol of intellectual freedom. The room that night was not filled with future leaders engaging in the battle of ideas; it was a mob baying for blood, intolerant of nuance, and utterly resistant to the values the Union claims to uphold….

As our driver sped us out of Oxford, my colleagues and I compared notes about what we had just experienced: it was no less than the fall of the Oxford Union.

The Union president Ebrahim Osman Mowafy was disqualified in June, but reinstated after claims that this had been motivated by "racism, islamophobia, and persistent bias". Hmm.

Sacerdoti's claim that this event marks the fall of the Oxford Union surely isn't overstated. It was a disgrace: a black mark against the university. The Union isn't the university, of course, and no doubt the vast majority of students have no idea and little interest in what's going on there. Still….a desperately grim sign of the times, as what used to be a place for aspiring politicians to practice their debating skills is taken over by zealots with an interest, not in debate, but in spreading their poisonous antisemitic ideology.