Britain’s Universities Have Forgotten That Words Can Legitimise Terror

The institutions most obsessed with the power of language become strangely relaxed when words are used to excuse actual violence

British universities have spent years telling us that words matter.

Words wound. Words exclude. Words reinforce power. Language shapes perception. Vocabulary can legitimise prejudice before prejudice becomes action.

Very well.

Then these rules must apply to terrorism too.

A hostage becomes a “prisoner of war”. A terrorist organisation becomes “the resistance”. Kidnapping becomes “capture”. The deliberate murder of civilians disappears into the more flattering vocabulary of “armed struggle”.

And suddenly the custodians of linguistic sensitivity discover ambiguity.

Who can really say what words mean?

Apparently, the people who insist that language can inflict violence become strikingly relaxed when language excuses actual violence.

That contradiction matters.

Especially after October 7.

The facts require no embellishment. The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry found that 252 people were abducted into Gaza on October 7, 2023, among them children and civilian men and women. It found reasonable grounds to conclude that Hamas’s military wing and other Palestinian armed groups committed the war crime of hostage-taking.

Britain has proscribed Hamas in its entirety since 2021.

Yet educational material promoted through a Cambridge-linked platform has reportedly described people abducted on October 7 as “prisoners of war”.

This is not an argument about an unfortunate choice of words.

“Prisoner of war” is a legal category. It does not become applicable to a civilian because an armed group has dragged that civilian across a border.

Call a hostage a prisoner of war and you have already changed the story.

The civilian has been quietly placed in uniform.

The kidnapper begins to look like a soldier.

The crime begins to resemble a battlefield detention.

Nothing about the event itself has changed. Only the vocabulary has. But vocabulary carries moral consequences.

Britain’s counter-terrorism system understands this perfectly well.

Prevent guidance defines radicalisation as the process by which someone comes to legitimise support for, or the use of, terrorist violence. It also recognises the importance of ideology, grievance narratives and environments in which extremist ideas acquire legitimacy.

The crucial word is legitimise.

Terrorism rarely begins with somebody waking up one morning and reaching for a knife.

First comes the argument.

Why this victim is not entirely innocent.

Why that civilian is somehow implicated.

Why the murderer is really a representative of an oppressed people.

Why the atrocity, once supplied with enough history, grievance and terminology, deserves to be understood differently.

Violence requires moral permission.

Language is one of the places where that permission is issued.

Which brings us to Cambridge.

Dr Farah Ahmed is an Assistant Research Professor in the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education. Cambridge records her involvement in teacher professional development and educational research. She founded the Islamic Educator Learning Community, or IELC, which works with educators teaching Muslim learners.

Ahmed also has a historical association with Hizb ut-Tahrir.

That needs to be stated accurately.

Evidence submitted to Parliament in 2011 said she had been a member. Contemporary reporting on a Charity Commission review recorded Ahmed saying that she had left Hizb ut-Tahrir years earlier.

At the time, membership was lawful.

Hizb ut-Tahrir was proscribed only in January 2024, after the Government concluded that it had promoted and encouraged terrorism, including through its response to the October 7 massacre.

I have seen no evidence establishing that Ahmed remained a member after proscription. Nor have I seen evidence that she has committed a terrorism offence.

Those qualifications matter.

They do not dispose of the institutional questions.

Recent reporting has returned to educational material associated with Ahmed from 2002, including writings concerning Western education, jihad, technical education and teacher training. Those claims should be judged against the original documents, rather than inflated by social media into conclusions the evidence cannot sustain.

There is also a present-day question.

The Islamic Educator Learning Community has reportedly promoted material produced by the Islamic Curriculum Initiative. Among the material reported is the description of Israelis abducted on October 7 as “prisoners of war”.

The words should not be attributed personally to Ahmed unless evidence shows that she wrote or approved them.

Cambridge, however, should be able to answer some simple questions.

Who approved the relationship?

Who controls the material distributed through university-associated programmes?

Who checks external curricula?

Who carries safeguarding responsibility when those programmes reach children?

What does it mean in practice for an educational initiative to be “hosted” through Cambridge infrastructure?

And who takes responsibility when the people being trained are themselves teachers, carrying those ideas into classrooms far beyond the university?

Hardly Torquemada.

Basic governance.

One might even have expected Cambridge to ask these questions without being prompted.

Especially since universities are statutory Prevent authorities.

At this point the familiar objection usually appears: academic freedom.

Good. Defend it.

Students and academics must remain free to attack Zionism, defend Palestinian nationalism, criticise Israel, study Islamism, argue about Hamas and question British counter-terrorism policy.

A university unable to tolerate difficult or offensive ideas is barely worthy of the name.

But academic freedom does not relieve universities of every other responsibility Parliament has placed upon them.

They must also have due regard to preventing people from being drawn into terrorism.

Protect lawful speech. Recognise radicalisation.

Holding those two ideas in one’s head at the same time should not represent an impossible intellectual achievement for Cambridge University.

It is called judgement.

What should concern us is the strange institutional paralysis that appears whenever Islamist ideas enter the conversation.

Britain has spent years becoming exquisitely skilled at detecting ideological danger everywhere else.

Reverse the politics for a moment.

Imagine a university-linked programme teaching children about a white supremacist movement.

Imagine its militants repeatedly described as “defenders”.

Imagine murdered minorities relabelled as enemy collaborators.

Imagine racial terrorism described as community resistance.

Imagine the organisation’s grievances receiving page after page of sympathetic explanation while its victims recede into the margins.

Would anyone seriously argue that asking questions about safeguarding amounted to an assault on academic freedom?

Of course not.

The committees would reproduce overnight.

There would be reviews, action plans, listening exercises, working groups and mandatory training before anyone had finished their first coffee.

Quite right too.

The trouble seems to begin when the ideology under scrutiny enjoys more fashionable political company.

That is not tolerance.

It is cowardice with a university lanyard.

The issue reaches beyond Cambridge.

Since October 7, Britain’s campuses have provided ample evidence that the language surrounding Israel and Zionism can bleed into hostility towards Jews.

The Community Security Trust recorded 272 university-related antisemitic incidents during the 2023/24 academic year, up from 53 the previous year. It was the highest academic-year total CST had recorded.

The numbers later fell from that extraordinary peak. But during the first six months of 2026, 57 per cent of higher-education antisemitic incidents recorded by CST contained references to Israel or the war alongside anti-Jewish language, motivation or targeting.

This does not make criticism of Israel antisemitic.

It tells us something more useful.

The conflict has become one vehicle through which some antisemitism is now expressed.

The Jew becomes “the Zionist”.

The Jewish student becomes Israel’s representative.

A synagogue acquires responsibility for decisions made by ministers in Jerusalem.

A British Jew is expected to explain a foreign military campaign because somebody else has decided that Jewish identity carries collective political liability.

Language performs the preliminary work.

Change the noun and, eventually, you can change the rules governing the person underneath it.

Universities should understand this better than most institutions. They have spent decades examining the political power of language.

Yet some academics seem capable of discovering oppression in a pronoun while suffering temporary linguistic blindness when “hostage” becomes “prisoner of war”.

One can spend a seminar explaining that terminology shapes power, then apparently wander into the next room and decide that terminology surrounding Hamas is merely a matter of perspective.

It would be funny if the subject were not so serious.

The Government has already conceded that there is a problem. In March, the Department for Education announced stronger measures against extremism, harassment and intimidation on campus, alongside tougher Office for Students monitoring of Prevent responsibilities.

That should be the beginning.

The Office for Students should examine how universities have discharged their Prevent obligations since October 7.

Any outside programme using a university’s name, infrastructure or institutional credibility should face proper scrutiny of its governance, funding, curriculum control and safeguarding.

The standard should be higher where children are involved, and higher again where teachers are being trained to reproduce material elsewhere.

Prevent also needs greater confidence in dealing with the territory between lawful political speech and criminal terrorism.

Nobody should attract state attention for using one contentious phrase.

Context matters. Repetition matters. Audience matters. Purpose matters.

But patterns matter too.

If terrorist violence is repeatedly euphemised, if civilians are systematically recategorised, if the terrorist actor’s grievance is foregrounded while his methods steadily disappear, institutions should at least possess the intellectual equipment to recognise what is happening.

Otherwise Prevent becomes ridiculous.

We wait until radicalisation becomes unmistakable, then congratulate ourselves for having noticed it.

Liberal societies survive by making distinctions.

Islam is not Islamism.

Muslims are not Islamists.

Criticism of Israel is not antisemitism.

Studying a terrorist movement is not supporting one.

And civilians kidnapped from their homes do not become prisoners of war because somebody finds the description politically useful.

Lose those distinctions and we lose the language with which to defend liberalism itself.

Terrorism does not require an entire society to embrace terrorism.

It requires something easier.

Enough people must begin to wonder whether the terrorist really was wrong.

Whether his victims were entirely innocent.

Whether an atrocity committed in the service of the correct grievance deserves a gentler word.

And whether saying otherwise might somehow be indecent.

That is how moral boundaries move.

First the words are cleaned.

Then the categories shift.

The victim acquires quotation marks.

The terrorist acquires context.

And the institution entrusted with knowing the difference decides that the safest course is to say nothing.

We have been told for years that words matter.

I agree.

So let us stop pretending that they cease to matter at precisely the moment they make terrorism easier to excuse.