A demonstration against a campus speech by controversial UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese was cancelled this week after a row between two Jewish activist groups.
Anti-racism organisation Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) planned a series of campus protests following the announcement that Albanese – who has compared Israel to Nazi Germany and reportedly told delegates at a Hamas-linked conference they had the “right to resist” – was due to go on a speaking tour of UK universities in November.
However, at a protest at the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas) on Monday, rival activist group Stop the Hate turned up with “their own sound system”, and shouted “slogans that we disagreed with”, CAA said.
After carrying out a “a security assessment”, CAA then decided to cancel a protest at Queen Mary University that had been due to take place the following day.
Stop the Hate, the CAA alleges, “hijacked” their protest and made it “unsafe and unsavoury”. They added that after the arrival of Stop the Hate on Monday, “people wouldn’t stand in places we had agreed to with police”.
Itay Galmudy from Stop the Hate said: “Protests in general are a risky and messy business… The focus should be on the fact that multiple organisations … came together to stop her from expressing her views in our city. Anything else plays to the pro-Palestinian crowd. I think it’s a shame we have to have this conversation.
“We’ve been doing [protests] .. successfully for almost a year now and we will continue. We are not going to step down because of silly, meaningless differences of opinion.”
Stop the Hate added that they were “extremely concerned about rising hate on our streets and the potential for anti-Israel protests to move from words to physical violence. We firmly believe our community and its organisations are stronger and more effective united and that it is more important than ever that we work together to combat this as a community. We are particularly grateful to CST for ensuring our safety.
“Yesterday, as ever, we stood strong in the face of hate and showed that we will not be intimidated or cowed because our love is stronger than their hate.”
Albanese was appointed to serve a three year term as the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories in 2022.
The Italian lawyer has since produced a series of reports that accuse Israel of turning the West Bank into an open-air prison and imposing a system of apartheid.
Last year, a bipartisan group of US Congress members said she had a clear lack of impartiality and should be fired by the UN.
Dozens of human rights groups have defended Albanese and insisted that Israel is running a smear campaign designed to silence legitimate criticism of their human rights violations.