By Steve Winston, Managing Director, National Jewish Assembly. Originally published in the Jewish Weekly on 12 June 2025.
A university lecturer in Britain has publicly declared himself “proud” to support the legal campaign to lift the UK’s ban on Hamas. That sentence alone should send shudders down the spine of any citizen who believes liberal democratic institutions are worth defending.
Dr Tarek Younis, a senior lecturer at Middlesex University, has not only voiced support for removing Hamas from the UK’s list of proscribed terror groups, but has also posted that “our work isn’t done until all Zionists are removed from our institutions and shamed… into nothingness.” This is not a minor ideological misstep. It is a chilling example of how British academia is becoming a breeding ground for pro-terrorist activism and antisemitic radicalisation – and it speaks volumes about the intellectual and moral decay now seeping into higher education.
Let us be clear about Hamas. It is a proscribed terrorist organisation responsible for the murder, rape, torture, and abduction of civilians. Its founding charter calls for the annihilation of Jews. On 7 October, Hamas terrorists entered Israeli territory and committed the worst mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust. That anyone – let alone a university lecturer – would lend their name and academic credibility to a campaign to rehabilitate such a group is not just disturbing. It is a moral outrage.
Worse still, these activists turn a blind eye to Hamas’s treatment of its own people. Journalists, dissidents, women, members of the LGBT community – all are subject to arbitrary arrest, torture, and murder. In recent weeks, even desperate Gazans seeking food have been shot dead by Hamas gunmen.. It seems that, for these activists, Jew-hatred trumps even Hamas’s cruelty towards its own population.
In British universities, the lines between anti-Zionism, antisemitism, and open support for terror have become dangerously blurred. In the name of “decolonial” theory or “critical resistance,” professors and students are now given platforms to praise Hamas, whitewash jihadist violence, and demonise Israel as a colonial oppressor. That Dr Younis was entrusted with mentoring students through the Aziz Foundation, and invited to speak at national mental health conferences, reveals the extent to which this poison has been normalised.
The irony, of course, is that universities are supposed to be bastions of liberal democratic values – free thought, academic inquiry, peaceful dissent. But when academics start advocating for genocidal terrorist organisations, and calling for the purging of “Zionists” from public life, what remains is not free thought. It is fanaticism in a cap and gown.
This episode is a grim reflection of just how far British academia has drifted from its moral foundations. When educators call for terrorist groups to be legitimised and Jewish people or those who hold lawful Zionist beliefs to be removed from institutions, we are no longer dealing with dissent. We are dealing with ideological rot.
If a lecturer made similar statements about any other protected characteristic – race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, philosophical belief – calling for its adherents to be “shamed into nothingness” – they would rightly be condemned, investigated, and removed. But when it is “Zionists” – now legally recognised as a protected philosophical belief under the Prof David Miller ruling – the silence is deafening. The double standard is not merely academic. It is antisemitic.
This case must serve as a turning point. The NJA calls on Middlesex University and the Department for Education to publicly clarify whether advocacy for a proscribed terrorist organisation is compatible with the responsibilities of an academic post. The Health and Care Professions Council must investigate whether Dr Younis’s views are compatible with any position of public trust. And the wider academic community must confront the ideological permissiveness that has allowed open terror sympathies to take root within our universities.
What we are witnessing is the slow erosion of democratic culture – not from outside, but from within. Those entrusted with educating the next generation are using their positions to normalise hate and champion those who would destroy the very freedoms they enjoy.
British academia must decide what it stands for. If it cannot draw the line at Hamas, then it no longer deserves the public’s trust.
