Extremism appears to be more of a problem with the university’s present than its past
Two years ago, I wrote about the scandalous reaction of staff at the University of Edinburgh to the October 7th massacre. Whilst most people were expressing shock and outrage, a vocal minority in academia attempted to justify or excuse the actions of Hamas. A number of prominent figures teaching at Edinburgh were active on social media in the days following October 7th, retweeting or liking statements such as “did some people just think Palestine had to like file paperwork or something to be freed. this is what oppressed fighting the oppressor looks like”. Others publicly backed a statement from a Palestinian university which described the attack as “guerilla war tactics”. The two academics who endorsed this outrageous justification of mass murder, Dr Idil Akinci-Pérez, a Lecturer in Social Policy and Race, and Dr Kate Davison, a Lecturer in the History of Sexuality, have offered no apology, and continue to teach at Edinburgh. All this raises the question: does the University of Edinburgh think it acceptable to support mass murder?
Yet these essentially unhinged and ideologically extremist figures are granted extraordinary levels of power and influence
The vital context for this seemingly inexplicable stance by academics and their institution can be explained only by descending into the surreal world of postcolonialism. Undergraduates across Britain are, as we speak, working through summer reading lists that include Frantz Fanon. A black West Indian Marxist, Fanon is a fervent advocate of violence as a legitimate tool of liberation for “colonised peoples”. But more than just an advocate for colonial revolution, Fanon went far further, arguing that any crime, any atrocity, could be justified in the name of liberation. In Fanon’s fevered imagination, every interaction between blacks and whites is poisoned by the miasma of colonialism, and his writing conjures a feverish atmosphere of racial hypersensitivity that has been eagerly seized upon by modern progressive neurotics.
Yet these essentially unhinged and ideologically extremist figures are granted extraordinary levels of power and influence within academic institutions that are simultaneously terrified of criticism from the Left and desperate to appear progressive. This tendency, already well advanced, went into overdrive in the context of Trump, George Floyd and the pandemic. The same ideology that sees prominent academics tweeting in support of Hamas has animated an internal revolution, which I charted in my 2023 piece. That process has only grown and developed since then, with the Racism Review launched in 2021 published this month.
And who was leading this review? Another familiar figure: Professor Tommy J Curry, who was given a brooding photoshoot in the Guardian, where he was comparing the University with Jim Crow era America. Professor Curry wrote, in a 2017 article entitled “This Nigger’s Broken: Hyper-Masculinity, the Buck, and the Role of Physical Disability in White Anxiety Toward the Black Male Body”, that “the white woman cries out for rape”. Where does this extraordinary sentiment come from? Frantz Fanon, of course, who Curry approvingly quotes in his article: “Are we not now observing a complete inversion? Basically, does this fear of rape not itself cry out for rape? Just as there are faces that ask to be slapped, can one not speak of women who ask to be raped?”
This was published in a peer-reviewed journal, by a man who is a professor at a British university, and who is currently representing Edinburgh in the media. All of this raises an important follow up question: does the University of Edinburgh think that the white woman cries out for rape? As if this was not enough, Professor Curry has also said “in order to be equal, in order to be liberated, some white people may have to die”. Do comments like this make someone an authority on racism?
The “Racism Review” spans many aspects of the university’s supposedly shameful history, but perhaps the most extraordinary is the extensive denunciation of its links to the Balfour Declaration, the British state’s commitment to the support of a Jewish homeland. Of course this is also not new territory for Edinburgh, which made the decision in 2022 to invite Dr. Salman Abu Sitta to address students on the centenary of the Balfour Declaration. This despite Dr Sitta’s extensive history of making anti-semitic remarks, such as “The Zionist god of this Israel has an insatiable lust for blood. Its altar must be anointed by the blood of innocent Palestinians.”
As Ben Sixsmith has written, academics and commentators who dissent from left-wing orthodoxies have had a chilly reception at the University of Edinburgh. Left-wing radicals, though, are its moral guides. Why are individuals who endorse mass murder and minimise rape allowed to take a leading role in British universities? Why are they being given a free hand to shape policy and academic culture? Why are they not currently standing in the streets with boxes of their possessions?
