Man who said Holocaust happened because Jews are “cowards” reportedly escorted off Birkbeck campus

An antisemitic demonstrator at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, who was filmed claiming that the Holocaust happened because Jews are “cowards” has reportedly been sighted being escorted off campus by security staff at Birkbeck, University of London. If you think that you know who he is, please contact us confidentially at [email protected].

The man was filmed by students and a member of Campaign Against Antisemitism’s Demonstration and Event Monitoring Unit at a demonstration at SOAS on Thursday. The man, whom we are trying to identify, said that Jews “were led like lambs to the slaughter, naked…because you’re cowards” in the Nazis’ gas chambers.

The man evidently took delight in taunting Jewish people who were seeking to engage with anti-Israel demonstrators outside a lecture by Israeli Ambassador Mark Regev. When asked whether he had heard of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, in which lightly-armed Jewish fighters managed to repel heavily-armed German infantry backed by tanks and artillery for almost a month, the man said that they were cowards too. 13,000 Jews died in the revolt, half from being burned alive or suffocated.

Thursday was not the first time that the man has been spotted at SOAS. In a video from 2011, the same man was filmed making similar comments, adding that “the Jews” were supposedly attacking Arabs because they had supposedly failed to fight back against the Nazis. As he argues with a Jewish man, a part-time lecturer at SOAS allegedly swiped the Jewish man’s camera from his hand and bit his ear (he was later acquitted of charges of common assault and criminal damage). Even after the incident, the same man seen at SOAS on Thursday continues to taunt the injured Jewish man.

In an e-mail to all students at SOAS, Registrar Paula Sanderson wrote: “We condemn unreservedly the comments that were made by the person shown on the video — he on not a student or staff member at SOAS. There is no place for hate speech on the SOAS campus and freedom of speech does not permit the expression of racist or antisemitic views.”

We would like to identify the man in the videos. If you think that you know who he is, please contact us confidentially at [email protected].