Oxford Debate Club Now Calls Opponents ‘Morons’
What does it take to be called a “moron”?
If your answer is “to board a flotilla into Gaza after Israel once intercepted it and sent you home, saying, ‘If you return, we’ll do it again,’” you’re clearly wrong.
Today, I had the privilege of being called a moron on X. Not by some random person, but by the co-founder of OxfordSpeaks, an Oxford University society on global affairs for undergraduate and graduate students, Sam Zia.
Zia and I had previously clashed on the subject of Israel and Palestine on at least one occasion. Today, however—on the eve of Yom Kippur—things got truly heated. Because of my commentary that while it’s their personal choice, the Ukrainian women evacuated from Gaza (likely with the help of Israel) alongside their spouses had betrayed Ukraine’s inherent culture of women with strong agency and independent mind for the alien culture of blind servility, whether to an obscure god or to their immediate husbands.
In response, I received Zia’s characteristic of being “really quite an awful person.”
As a woman averse to performative virtue-signaling, I offered to do the oldest thing in the academic world: debate. Not just about Israel–Palestine, but also about Islam, and what constitutes personal choice and responsibility – for it is my core belief that the personal choice of others cannot be viewed through the lend of collective responsibility for that person’s actions.
By now you will have guessed that I was not granted that right— precisely because I was a “moron.” Zia even engaged in a bizarre “male genitals size” competition, boasting that he once had the privilege of interviewing former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert. As if Olmert had been enticed by the prospect of talking to a student, rather than simply visiting the University of Oxford. And as if “interview” is the equivalent of “debate
It would be easy to reduce this story to an online feud between two people. But in reality, it encapsulates the ongoing erosion of the culture of debate in Western academia, which goes hand-in-hand with the exclusion of people deemed “unworthy”—whether with regard to Israel, Ukraine, which, according to some in western academia “provoked” Russia by cooperating with the “racist, colonialist” West, or anything else.
Even in my university days in Sweden, where I completed a master’s degree in European Affairs—which, predictably, attracted a host of hardcore europhiles—the only acceptable debate about the EU was: “Is the EU awesome—or magnificent?”
So much as a pinch of criticism was met with conspicuous levels of hostility and exclusion from the “cool crowd.” I can only imagine what that same “cool crowd” would do now if you tried explaining that while Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is groundless, it was Israel who was attacked on October 7, 2023.
And I also know their reasoning. When justifying their refusal to have their views contested, they almost always invoke the paradox of tolerance, i.e. “tolerance shouldn’t tolerate intolerance.”
Admirable. But the question is: who defines what’s tolerant?
Is it tolerant to say that a religious person must accept transgender theory? Or is it tolerant for a religious person to punish others for premarital intercourse?
If you adhere to the ideology of common sense, your answer would be “no” to both. We all live in a pool of our own beliefs, experiences, and opinions—and we have the right to do so. As long as they don’t take the outer shape of an idea that allows you to pull a knife and stab someone just because, they remain competitive, valid, and to be debated.
So when a person representing Oxford University calls a grown woman with credentials (it’s ok, my non-existent male genitals are big enough to not list them) a “moron” while simultaneously claiming to “foster an open and inclusive environment to allow open and respectful discussion to thrive, and to empower students to make change,” you really wonder how wrong it all went—and whether there’s still room for it to be fixed.
