by Lionel Shriver, Spectator (Image: Wikimedia public domain)
During last September’s freshers’ fair at Royal Holloway, University of London, two students got into a brief verbal tiff that became subject to the administration’s immediate alarm. Our characters: Brodie Mitchell, a self-described non-Jewish Zionist, and Huda El-Jamal, the female president of the Friends of Palestine Society who is of Palestinian descent.
Mitchell says El-Jamal taunted him – ‘Here’s the wannabe Jew’ – and questioned why he wasn’t wearing a yarmulke. Referring to the keffiyeh El-Jamal was wearing as a headscarf, Mitchell taunted back: ‘You’re wearing a tea towel over your head.’
A monstrous exchange, we can all agree. Naturally, Royal Holloway suspended Mitchell for nine weeks – nine weeks! – the better to investigate ‘alleged conduct that could be considered hate speech’. The university placed strict restrictions on the second-year student to prevent him from interacting with his classmates and thus presumably infecting the innocent with his vile bigotry.
If we’re going to be touchy, why not be consistently touchy? Why was remarking on the young woman’s headgear deserving of suspension, while her remarking on the young man’s lack of headgear got a free pass – when in this context both adornments are politically charged? Could it be that Jews, wannabe or otherwise, are open season, whereas the most casual swipe at The Faith That Shall Not Be Impugned is a matter of the utmost gravity?
Also: assuming that a 60-second mutual slag-off between undergrads is properly the business of university higher-ups, what is so derogatory about this exchange? Even calling Mitchell a ‘wannabe Jew’ is only injurious if you’re an anti-Semite. Otherwise, yearning to join a great Abrahamic faith seems a defensibly noble aspiration. As for wearing a tea towel – so? Granted, this quip was not the soul of wit, but wearing a tea towel would hardly constitute the height of humiliation. I like tea towels. Why, as they double for napkins, I have a whole collection of some 50 colourful tea towels, about which I feel warmly and which I strain to associate with ridicule or disgust. Were you to fling the biting aspersion, ‘You big, fat tea towel!’ I imagine you’d trigger less affront than bemusement.