Somehow this will become our fault.
On the evening of October 27th, London students were trapped in a room on University College London’s campus until the police deemed it safe enough to let them out. Protesters banged on the doors, jumped through the windows to get inside, tackling students on their way in, and hurled slanderous epithets against the Zionist students and their guest speaker, Hen Mazzig.
At the end of the event, Hen had to be rushed out of the room with a police coat cloaked over his body. It was only when Hen got to the street outside the university that the police announced to him that they were now safe.
Some will ask why CAMERA would host such an event if we knew this could happen.
The student union at UCL originally canceled the event, decrying Hen as “controversial” due to him being protested against heavily at King’s College London in 2014.
Why are we, Zionists causing such controversy on campus with our events supporting Israel when we know that it angers so many people? Why can’t we just be quiet? It’s bad enough, opponents will say, that we support such a country — do we need to display it so publicly?
The sad truth is that it’s not just the bigots who will be questioning us. It will be the moderates, the pacifists, even other Zionists.
But we refuse to sit idly by while Israel is slammed over and over again from the university level to the UN. The truth is on our side and these aggressive, violent protestors know it.
They know that Hen Mazzig, an openly gay Israeli of North African and Iraqi heritage, whose survival of a terrorist attack at age 12 led him to serve in the COGAT unit, hoping to connect and build relationships between Palestinians and Israelis, is exactly the kind of person that needs to be silenced. He is exactly the person who will easily unravel their web of lies against the Jewish state.
Despite the many ways the UCL Palestinian Society and their supporters worked to keep Hen off campus, they failed. The UCL Friends of Israel Society and the KCL Israel Society hosted a successful event. Hen specifically spoke against what the Palestinian Society was pushing for. He spoke for dialogue and the importance of ignoring the thugs, who, without facts, can only turn to intimidation tactics.
What’s sad is that many of those students on the outside of the room, those supporting the bigots banging on the doors, screaming in support of the Palestinians, have no idea that they have put themselves on the side against peace, on the side that hurts the Palestinian cause, on the side for continued conflict in the region.
Aviva Slomich
CAMERA’s International Campus Director