If There’s One Thing that Apologists for Israel’s Genocide Can’t Stand Its Free Speech
Susan Abuhalwa’s Speech to the Oxford Union – Unedited
On 28 November a debate at the Oxford Union passed the motion “This house believes Israel is an apartheid state responsible for genocide” by 278-59 votes. This set up a howl in the ruling class.
Their genocidal narrative about how Zionism made the desert bloom and how Palestine was an empty land before the Zionists colonised it was rejected by a vote of 4-1. They got just 21% of the vote at the world’s most prestigious debating society.
Oxford Union’s President when the debate occurred, Ebrahim Osman-Mowafy, resisted all attempts of the Zionists to stop or disrupt the debate. Not so his successor Israr Khan who like all collaborators knows his place in the racial hierarchy and bowed to the demands of the racists and Zionists to censor the recording of the debate. Instead Oxford Union deleted their original recording on Youtube and they uploaded an ‘edited’ i.e. censored version. The original can be found here.
No doubt the Zionists, led by the far-right UK Liars, sorry Lawyers for Israel, had various objections such as praise for the ‘terrorist’ Hamas. Hamas is always singled out as the bogeyman just like all anti-colonial resistance movements have been in the past. The only difference is that now proscription makes speech in support of such groups a criminal offence. Israel’s murder of 17,000+ Palestinian children, its mass rape and torture is according to the monsters who govern us the behaviour of a civilised society.
Susan Abulhawa on the rape and pillage of the Middle East by imperialism
Almost as soon as the result of the debate was announced the British press went into overdrive to discredit it. None other than Zionist hack Jonathan Sacerdoti, who himself participated in the debate and lost, was writing in the Spectator that
‘The chamber of the Oxford Union, that once-proud institution, has been breached by the forces of bigotry, hatred, and mob rule.’
Sacerdoti continued in the same vein:
The motion for debate was itself a grotesque provocation: “This House Believes Israel is an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide.” Apartheid and genocide are not just loaded terms; they are distortions when applied to Israel, as I planned to explain in my speech. That the Union had decided to frame this debate around them was bad enough.
The fact that the debate around Zionism and Israel is continually framed around Israel’s ‘right to self defence’ and ‘terrorism’ doesn’t bother Sacerdoti a jot. It is the fact that the debate on Zionism and Israel has gone beyond these establishment talking points to the real question of racial discrimination and apartheid that worries the Zionists.
The openly genocidal statements of Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu who invoked Amalek or the Labour Zionist President Yisrael Herzog who says all of the civilians in Gaza are a military target doesn’t bother Sacerdoti. To say nothing of numerous cabinet ministers who openly embrace talk of wiping out the Palestinians.
Israel’s professional propagandists like Sacerdoti are used to portraying themselves as the victim. What they don’t like is being seen in their true colours.
The Zionists chose as their supporting speakers a disgusting collaborator Yoseph Haddad who was kicked out of the debate for his aggression towards other members.
The other speaker for the Zionists, Mosab Hassan Yousef, was, as the Jewish Chronicle described him ‘a son of a Hamas leader who became an IDF informant’. It’s as if we had a debate on the Nazi holocaust and invited a Jewish informant who had betrayed Jews in hiding to the Gestapo to take part in the debate. The Zionists have no shame.
Reactions to Yoseph Haddad defacing Palestine murals in London
The Jewish Chronicle argued that the debate ‘descends into chaos as students shout down Israeli speakers’ but we can hear during Susan Abuhalwa’s brilliant speech constant Zionist attempts at interruption. It seems that the Zionists didn’t like a taste of their own medicine and so they have tried to alter what actually happened by getting their tame puppet Israr Khan, in whose hands the Oxford Union now is, to censor the parts they liked least of Susan’s speech. That is how Zionists work.
Of course when Tommy Robinson and genocide supporter Tzipi Hotoveli came to speak the Zionists had no objection. Racists are no problem, its Palestinians and anti-Zionists who are their enemies.
For the Jerusalem Post the debate was marred by heckling and shouting. These Zionists are very sensitive souls. Only they are allowed to shoot and heckle!
For the Telegraph the debate was no less than ‘sinister’. I imagine that anything that challenges the power of the genocidaires and war criminals who rule us is sinister. Only the bombing of hospitals and the starvation of civilians is civilised according to the warped values of the Telegraph. The Torygraph spoke of how Zionist dons
‘Baroness Deech, Prof Sir Vernon Bogdanor and the philosopher Prof Peter Hacker are among 300 signatories of an open letter decrying the “inflammatory rhetoric, aggressive behaviour and intimidation” witnessed during the event last Thursday.
And what did the Open Letter say? That there was a ‘failure on all counts’ to protect Jewish students from ‘antisemitism’ for ‘apartheid state’ motion.’ Notice the sly way that these dons of mischief conflate anti-Semitism and Jewish students? Calling Israel an apartheid state is itself anti-Semitic.
Since every human rights organisation in the world holds that Israel is an apartheid state then what these dons are doing is to deliberately endanger Jewish students by associating them with the Nazi-like behaviour of the Israeli state.
It doesn’t take the brain of a don to work out that an ethno-religious state must be racist by definition. A Jewish state wherein Jews have greater privileges than non-Jews cannot help but be racist. That is why neo-Nazis today love Israel.
Jewish Supremacism, discrimination and police violence are the lot of Israel’s Palestinian citizens. Bringing over a quisling like Haddad won’t change that fact. Even as I write the Knesset is debating legislation to debar Arab political parties altogether. Unless of course they consist of collaborators such as we saw at Oxford.
One wonders whether calling the Nazi state anti-Semitic 90 years ago would also have been considered ‘inflammatory’ against German students studying at Oxford. Perhaps an anti-Apartheid motion would have been inflammatory against White South African students too. The Telegraph singled out
Ebrahim Osman Mowafy, the president of the Union, who is an Egyptian Arab, of being “openly biased from the outset”, and “fostering an environment of unchecked hostility”.
What has Ebrahim’s nationality or ethnicity got to do with it? If someone had mentioned the Jewish background of a debate chair the air would be thick with cries of ‘anti-Semitism’.
What however is interesting is that even in the portals of a ruling class, the Oxford Union no less, the Zionists can’t win anything more than derisory support. What Israel has ‘won’ on the battlefield against Gaza’s population is being lost in the hall of public opinion.
Tony Greenstein
