The NUS creates a safe space from Jews, dissent and free speech
The President of the National Union of Students, Malia Bouattia, has been speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. The BBC is not owned by Jews (but you might want to check). So Malia Bouattia, who talks of the “Zionist-led media”, is unshackled. She wants to speak about safe spaces, places where the censorious, intolerant and illiberal can feel at home, much as they would in Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia or the student bar at Dundee University, where the telling of ‘religious or political jokes’ is banned, as is the Sun and a pro-life group.
She says:
“The thing about safe spaces is they have existed for a very long time in many different forms. It’s a call from the grassroots: it’s an application of democratic processes in order to ensure that spaces of education – students’ unions and so on – are safe places in which to debate and in which to discuss ideas.”
This all seems like satire until you note that these mass debaters are serious. They have tried to ‘no platform’ people like Germaine Greer and the gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell for saying things Bouattia and her fellow champions of debate and democracy might not like to hear.
Bouattia’s attitude to free speech is punctuated by a huge ‘but’.
She also has interesting views on Jews. She called the University of Birmingham a “Zionist outpost”. She bemoaned “mainstream Zionist-led media outlets”.
Is she disappointed with her attitudes towards Jews? “I would certainly review my language and would definitely want to explain the political context which I was discussing,” she says. “I absolutely was not saying the things that it has been interpreted as.”
You see what happens when your safe space views are aired in public. People get the wrong idea. Context matters.
Thankfully, with Bouattia at its helm the NUS can protect students from reading the wrong sort of media and having their views on Jews misunderstood. These students – the UK’s intellectual cream – will be able to function without having their views questioned by people who fail to agree with them. They will never be offended. What they believe will remain as fact. No argument. No dissent.
When they graduate – and it can take a long time for education to end (Malia was 28 when elected president by a few hundred voters) – they can go to work at the BBC, The Guardian or some other safe space where free thinkers mass to be on what they love to call ‘the right side of history’.
It’s not the 1930s, sheeple. Get with the program.
Posted: 27th, September 2016 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
