Childish, selfish protesters are destroying all the West holds dear

Kids will be kids, they say – an adage that allows for quite a lot of latitude. We expect the young to be angry about everything from parents to a general sense of global injustice.

Well, their blazing fury at the way things are has been given a very great deal of latitude in recent years. So, too, has the anger of their older comrades, so long as the cause is sufficiently fashionable. We let them celebrate and carry out vandalism, violence and other forms of public aggression. And now the result is public and private spaces that are increasingly unliveable; desecrated with the spoilt and selfish tantrums of “progressive” activists.

The list of their impositions is long. There are the groups protesting against climate change, including Extinction Rebellion with their garish marches, occupations and “die-ins”; the traffic-stopping idiocy of Insulate Britain; and, more recently, the grim antics of Just Stop Oil, including numerous defacements of fine art by posh graduates in the quiet halls of great galleries. The Black Lives Matter protests overtook huge swathes of city centres, seemingly above the pandemic rules applied to the rest of us.

Since October 7, we have seen a sinister expansion and coalescence of all these protest movements around the “cause” of Gaza. Aesthetically, the results have been ugly enough, with the Israel-hating machine defacing hostage posters and generating a vast trail of evil rubbish, from stickers with every menacing pro-Palestine, anti-Israel falsehood imaginable to cardboard placards scrawled with childish threats and demands for boycotting and divestment; a huge array of Palestinian flags and flag-inspired materials; and, of course, the keffiyeh, the black-and-white-patterned scarves whose motif now appears on headbands, rucksacks, even shoes. The revolution will be commercialised!

Then there are the vile (but tolerated) encampments on university properties. At UCL, the very letters of the university’s name, which greet visitors in the grand courtyard in a large pale-blue sculpture, have been completely defaced, the U replaced with a G for genocide. This must be incredibly offensive, if not painful, to some reasonable quotient of UCL members – and still the brats get away with it.

As someone who walks about a fair deal, it’s the constant sight of this anti-Israel garbage that gets me down, whether I’m strolling home past lampposts covered in pro-Hamas propaganda or entering the Tube through a gate covered in the green, black and red of a “boycott Israel” sticker.

But if I were a student, I’d feel the selfishness of my peers even more keenly. Especially if I were unable to graduate properly from my university course.

It began, as much does, in the US, where university graduation ceremonies were disrupted by obsessive Gaza protesters, whose strategy is to hold their institutions to ransom until their demands (such as disengaging from all Israeli investments, cultural output and scholarship) are met – making life as miserable as they can for everyone.

But rather than facing consequences – including being forced to feel some shame for their vile behaviour – for their actions, in some places, they have been effectively rewarded. Northwestern and Brown universities, for instance, struck “compromises” with protesters. Northwestern agreed to fund places for Palestinian students and faculty, and be more “transparent” about the investments of its endowment, in exchange for the curtailment of the encampments. Brown has promised a vote on divestment from weapons manufacturers.

No wonder, then, that, so emboldened, this narcissistic taste for destruction has only intensified here in Blighty. Now it seems that our undergraduates cannot graduate properly, either. In May, Oxford Action for Palestine (OA4P) protesters staged one of their ludicrous “die-ins” at the Sheldonian Theatre, forcing graduands and their families to step over them. OA4P said they were disrupting graduation ceremonies because Oxford wasn’t responding to their demands, and also – and here the protesters show their spoilt immaturity – because there is no graduating class in Gaza in 2024 (is there a “graduating class” in all parts of embattled Ukraine, or in the Uyghur gulags in China? No interest in that, of course, from these monomaniacal Israel-haters).

Even worse, Cambridge has had to move its graduations from the beautiful Senate House – where the ceremony has taken place since the 18th century – because protesters have been allowed to get away with threatening the graduation, and being taken seriously.

How much more “disruption” will we have to take? How much more desecration of private and public space, of roads, squares, lampposts, library entrances, university quads and beautiful ancient lawns in the name of rankly dangerous causes? How much more interference with the rights of the law-abiding majority, to graduate in peace and pride once they’ve attained their degrees, and much else besides?

I see no end in sight. All I see is spinelessness in perpetuity, the mealy-mouthed culture around these trumped-up tyrants, the grown-ups in charge desperate to please them, desperate not to upset them, and ultimately terrified that maybe they’re right.

Until the powers that be – mayors, government officials, law enforcement and university vice-chancellors – see clearly what’s going on for the ideologically odious, intimidatory law-breaking and vandalism that it is, the rest of us will have to lump it, shielding our eyes and our ears where we can.