Scandal is once again roiling the United Kingdom’s famed Oxford University. A private WhatsApp chat of 100 incoming philosophy, politics, and economics freshmen leaked last week. Its contents are a whopper. Oxford Union president Arwa Elrayess, the elected head of the university’s premier debating society, was caught defending the Oct. 7, 2023, atrocities committed by Hamas. Elrayess, the union’s first Palestinian president, rationalized the deliberate murder of 1,200 Israeli civilians and barbaric abuse of women and girls as a “proportional” response to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.Elrayess’s WhatsApp comments merit close analysis. But first, a word about PPE. It’s the Oxford degree that aspiring diplomats, economists, philosophers, and academics specializing in political systems and political theory first obtain. Many PPE graduates will go on to form their country’s political elite. It’s no exaggeration to say the WhatsApp participants are Britain’s likely future leaders and political influencers. Within a year of getting my PPE degree in 1978, I went to work for Ronald Reagan in California and then to the White House.
In the dialogue, Elrayess portrayed Hamas’s systematic rape, torture, and murder as “proportional.” According to my Oxford English Dictionary, the strict meaning of proportional is “corresponding in degree or amount.” The Israeli military has never inflicted such calculated cruelty on Palestinian civilians. Civilian casualties during the recent fighting in Gaza were carefully minimized by Israel. Indeed, some respected assessments suggest they were proportionally lower than the civilian casualties caused by American forces in key urban battles in Iraq.
