A bombshell investigation by the Union of Jewish Students (UJS) has revealed a significant spike in Islamist-driven antisemitism on British university campuses, including the revival of blood libels, since the Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023.
Far too little is being done about this threat by university authorities, regulators and the government, all of whom are failing students, especially Jewish students.
The normalization of antisemitism affects nearly 10,000 Jewish university students across Britain, as one in five non-Jewish students openly admit that they would be reluctant to, or would never, share a house with a Jewish student, as per a poll conducted by the UJS.
Published on March 16, 2026, the report, titled “Time for Change: A Landmark Report on UK Campus Antisemitism,” links the rise in Jew-hatred to Islamist pro-Palestinian activism, with 49 percent of students having heard slogans or chants glorifying Hamas, Hezbollah, or other proscribed groups and student groups explicitly calling for violence against Jews.
While student groups have even justified the Islamist terrorist attack on Jews at Bondi Beach in December 2025, 47 percent of students have witnessed justification of the October 7 attacks, rising to 77 percent among those who encounter Israel-Palestine protests regularly.
Almost one in four students reported hearing speech or seeing behavior that targets students specifically for their Jewish religion or ethnicity. In one case, a flat of non-Jewish students shared on social media that they had “only one rule—no Zios in the flat.”
“Zio,” the report notes, “is an antisemitic slur and a code word for Jew coined by the former Grand Wizard of the KKK, David Duke.”
Elite University Researcher Revives Islamist-Driven Blood Libel
The situation is worse at elite universities, particularly the Russell Group universities, like Oxford, Cambridge, and Bristol, where 51 percent feel unsafe to engage in political debates, and 79 percent describe campus discourse around Israel-Palestine as “intimidating or toxic,” the report warns.
On November 11, 2025, Samar Maqusi, a researcher at the elite University College London, revived the long-debunked Damascus blood libel, claiming that a group of Jews kidnapped and murdered Father Thomas, an Italian Capuchin monk and his Muslim servant Ibrahim Amāra in Damascus in 1840 and used his blood to make “special pancakes” for the Feast of Tabernacles.
Historians regard the Damascus blood libel as a key narrative that laid the foundation for Islamist antisemitism. UCL banned Maqusi for life and suspended the UCL Students for Justice in Palestine Society, which had invited the academic to speak.
“There’s an Islamist and hard-left student bloc trying to terrorize Jewish students every day,” Dov Forman, a third-year UCL student, told the Future of Jewish Substack. “Many Jewish people only go on campus for lectures. I have friends who have left their accommodation because they feel scared.”
Joseph Mintz, Professor of Inclusive Education at UCL, told The Daily Telegraph that, “A strain of progressive thinking aligns with Islamism in its anti-Western positioning, making antisemitism acceptable. Universities are traducing the societies they are part of. Antisemitism is one significant expression of that.” [See editor’s note below.]
To highlight this issue, the report documents one instance in which City Action for Palestine, a leftist organization, harassed an Israeli professor at at City University in London in October 2025. Activists wearing masks subjected him to “vile abuse” while students wearing “motorcycle helmets ran through corridors shouting in megaphones, disrupting learning and intimidating Jewish students and staff in the heart of campus.”
Report Correlates Islamist Antisemitism at Elite Universities with Protests
The UJS investigation found that Britain’s elite universities have a significantly higher frequency of demonstrations: 26 percent of students encounter protests at least weekly at most universities, but this rises to 42 percent at Russell Group universities.
A Jewish student at Queen Mary University of London, a Russell Group university, narrated how a mob of students screamed slogans praising the terrorists of October 7 and called for the fall of Israel and the globalisation of the intifada during her biology exam right under the window of her exam room.
“I had to try my best to ignore the chants and focus on doing my best on the exam I had worked so hard studying for, which was extremely difficult. Once I finished the exam, I walked out of the building to be faced with 50-100 students standing in a group, some with face coverings, continuing that same chanting,” she said.
Demonstrators at the University of Glasgow, also a Russell Group school, unfurled a six-foot banner reading “Glory to the Martyrs” on the second anniversary of the October 7 massacre, the report noted. In an Instagram post, the students vowed to “celebrate the Al-Aqsa flood” – Hamas’ name for the attack, which killed over 1,200 Israelis and saw 251 taken hostage.
The investigation also found that the Leeds Students Against Apartheid Coalition (LSAAC) had shared posts on October 7, 2025, stating that the anniversary “honours the Palestinian resistance” and that the October 7th attacks were a “bold armed offensive.”
LSAAC quoted Abu Obeida, spokesperson for Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades, describing Gaza as “the greatest military school in contemporary history” and later shared a post praising the “legendary” skill of the “Qassam Shadow Unit” in hiding Israeli hostages from the world.
“This report captures the shameful state of the UK education system. Islamist extremism is normalized in student societies, campuses are now places that Jewish students avoid for fear of encountering regular protests featuring genocidal and antisemitic pro-terror chants, and students of all backgrounds are having their expensive learning disrupted, despite what they are paying,” a spokesperson for Campaign Against Antisemitism told Focus on Western Islamism (FWI).
“Far too little is being done about this threat by university authorities, regulators and the government, all of whom are failing students, especially Jewish students,” the spokesperson lamented.
In July 2025, the explosive report Islamist Antisemitism: A Neglected Hate established the pivotal role that Islamist ideology plays in fostering and spreading antisemitism among Muslims in Britain, FWI reported.
The report collated the “best available evidence” linking antisemitism and Islamism, investigating the rhetoric of Islamist influencers, antisemitic sermons, discourses on jihad, and the history of Muslim-Jewish relations in the Qur’an, to show how antisemitism is infecting British Muslims.
The report documented the relationship between Nazism and Islamism, warning that “highly influential Islamists” either deny the Holocaust or present it as “unfinished business to be carried to its conclusion by Muslims.”
Further, it revealed how Islamists explained Israel’s existence as incompatible with Islamist theology. “For Islamists, the presence of a Jewish state in the Middle East is an intolerable challenge to the divinely-ordained political order,” the report noted.
Editor’s Note, March 25, 2026: The original version of this article inaccurately attributed a quote from Joseph Mintz to an article published by Future of Jewish, a Substack newsletter. While the quote does in fact appear in Future of Jewish, it was originally published in The Daily Telegraph. The current version of this article cites the Telegraph piece where the quote first appeared.
