Iran 1979 and the failure of universities on antisemitism

Judaism was and is always radical. Its radicalism might indeed be an explanation for why Jews and their revolutionary ideas have not always been treated with much compassion by the rest of the world. But ironically, compassion for that world was one of those ideas. Judaism introduced into the ancient world the previously unimagined notion that not only were all of mankind descended from one person, but that God’s love and compassion encompassed all of those descendants, not just one tribe.

Contrary to the usual understanding of the Jews as the “chosen people,” in fact, it was Judaism that introduced the principle of a universal brotherhood of man, transcending national barriers. Yet Judaism’s universalism is firmly grounded in the covenant between God and humanity, a covenant with responsibilities on both sides. We can see this in the daily “Aleinu” prayer said at the end of each daily prayer service, which includes the words “And all humanity will call upon Your Name, turning all the wicked of the earth to You. May all the inhabitants of the world recognize and know that to You every knee must bend, every tongue must swear loyalty.”

For regular synagogue goers, the familiarity and regularity of this prayer tends perhaps to obscure its radicalism. The revolutionary message of this prayer being that wrongdoers across all the nations of the world are not to be condemned and cast out, but rather that their common humanity should be recognized along with the hope that they will one day recognize their responsibilities and return to the covenant with God.

These intertwined Jewish ideas of a universal covenant with God, responsibility to Him and the possibility of forgiveness from Him for everyone, are in many ways just as radical in 2025 as they were 3,000 years ago. They point towards a world in which faith, community and responsibility play a central role. Yet they also point to a world within which diversity and difference are recognized and understood, within a framework of values that come from God. The most important of those values being that every human being is created “B’Zelem Elokim.” in the image of God. This is a far cry from many aspects of modern Western life, where the internet and social media amplify the degradation of the inherent worth of the individual through pornography, cancel culture and social isolation.

Yet you can still trace a line, indeed a strong line, from this Jewish idea of the universal brotherhood of man to modern Western values. The Enlightenment pointed towards a world where the inherent value of each unique human being was central to how we thought about the world and structured our societies.

This is an inheritance rooted in Judaism, but also, it is important to note, continued in both Christianity and Islam (those who suggest that somehow Islam sits outside of this tradition of equality and “B’Zelem Elokim” are, in my view, both mistaken and misguided).

At the same time, in Judaism, taking God completely out of the question in liberal democracy is seen as running the risk of undermining the very idea of the equality of man.

However we conceive of Western liberalism, its roots in the radical ideas Judaism introduced into the world are clear. Ideas that are increasingly under threat. And under threat to a large extent from the very places where we might expect the values underpinning Western societies to be transmitted – our universities.

At my own institution, University College London, earlier this year, a researcher who also did their doctorate at UCL, strongly suggested at a meeting of Students for Justice in Palestine on campus that the Damascus blood libel of 1840 was a true event, not an awful example of antisemitic persecution. The response of the university and indeed the media coverage condemning this event has to be recognized and praised, and despite this awful incident, UCL is no worse in my view than most other institutions in terms of antisemitism.

However, the key question of how this could have happened at all remains largely unspoken and unanswered. For me, the answer lies in the abandonment and rejection of Western values, ultimately Jewish values, by the academy. It’s perhaps a good time to remember that sociologist Michel Foucault, the founding father of the progressive and indeed identitarian thinking that has overtaken universities in the 20th and 21st centuries, and the most cited scholar in history, lavished praise on the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

There’s a direct line from Foucault’s conflation of progressive thinking and Islamism through to the 21st century embrace of anti-Westernism and the acceptance of antisemitism in universities. Iran, along with the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and indeed the Palestinian Authority teach their children and citizens that Jews are untrustworthy, deceitful, and sometimes less than human, at the same time as erasing their history and connection to the land of Israel.

In parallel, Western universities teach that Jews are usurpers, colonialists, and hopelessly parochial in their refusal to accept a Godless world, at the same time as transmitting to their students so regularly the modern blood libel that the Jews are baby-killers and genocidal murderers. Is it any wonder that the confluence of ideas that Foucault set in motion can come to fruition with the restating of the historic form of the blood libel by a doctoral graduate in 2025?

The test of Western values is whether they are seen as applying universally across boundaries of faith and nationality. In the modern era, the fact that the blood libel, along with the tsunami of antisemitism across society since October 7th, can resurface in this way, shows that universities are failing in their responsibility to transmit these values. Yet across the West, governments spend their hard-earned tax dollars on supporting universities whilst they traduce the very societies they are there to support. Perhaps it’s time we thought again about what our universities are for, and why they are there, and whether they support or undermine our valuable inheritance of liberal democracy.