(JTA) – Four Orthodox Jews from London, including a mother and her 13-year-old son, were pelted with gas canisters by at least one man who yelled “Heil Hitler” at them from a moving car. Police apprehended a suspect, 19-year-old Patrick Delaney, who admitted to participating in the attack last week in Tottenham in northern London. But charges were dropped against two individuals who were with Delaney in the car, including his brother. According to reports, the men in the vehicle also shouted “Hitler is on the way to you, Heil Hitler, Heil Hitler, Heil Hitler.”
Separately, the Oxford University Student Union, in a statement this week, acknowledged that antisemitism is a problem at the university and vowed to address it. “We would like to express our commitment to tackling antisemitism,” the statement read, adding, “We would particularly like to acknowledge concerns raised specifically over the National Union of Students and the Oxford University Labour Club.” In 2014, African rights activist Zuleyka Shahin, during a failed campaign for president of the Oxford Union, wrote on Facebook that “Judeo-Christian white men” and “Zio white men” are “complicit in the funding of wars and the social genocide of my people.”
Reports that students of the Labour club in 2015 sang about “rockets over Tel Aviv” and harassed Jewish students prompted Alex Chalmers to resign as the club’s president and focused intense media scrutiny on antisemitism within the Labour party under its leader Jeremy Corbyn. A critic of Israel who has called Hezbollah and Hamas his “friends,” Corbyn was accused of ignoring antisemitism within Labour by leaders of British Jewry.
Britain’s National Student Union last year elected Malia Bouatia as its president. Bouatia, a student at the University of Birmingham, is accused of justifying violence against Israelis and opposing a motion to condemn the Islamic State terror group lest it stigmatize Muslims. She also blamed the “Zionist-led media” for oppression in the global south.