London’s Goldsmiths is hosting the Communist University, a series of lectures organised by the Communist Party of Great Britain.
Advertised on Facebook and reported by Guido Fawkes, the week-long “school for the thinking left” will be hosted in the buildings of the constituent college of the University of London, with tickets for the full week of the socialist summer camp costing £250, or £150 for the “unwaged”, with a generous “solidarity price” of £300.
Taking place between the 17th and 24th of August, participants can attend talks on topics such as: “How can we transform the LP [Labour Party] into a vehicle for socialism?”; “Climate change and the necessity of system change”; and “Labour Party’s historical relationship to Marxism”.
One of the speakers is Tony Greenstein, an anti-Zionist campaigner and founding member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign who was expelled from the Labour Party for using the phrase “Zionist scum” and for claiming that “Zionists collaborated with the Nazis”. He is set to join Moshé Machover in a talk entitled: “Israeli Jews: Are they a Hebrew nation?”
Campaign Against Antisemitism called the decision by the university to host the event “deeply troubling”, telling The Telegraph that Goldsmiths is “welcoming onto campus a number of individuals who have a history of baiting Jews or outright antisemitism”.
A college spokesman told the newspaper that the event was a commercial booking and not organised by Goldsmiths’ College, saying: “We are committed to freedom of speech and, in common with other universities, hire out event space to organisations that abide by the law and our booking policies.”
The revelation comes after the college announced it was banning the sale of beef from its campus to fight climate change this week.
In September 2018, Goldsmiths was embroiled in another controversy over far-left philosophy on campus, when the college’s LGBT society was suspended and disaffiliated from the Students’ Union for tweeting an extensive defence of gulags, and why sending a “bigot” to one was a “compassionate” act of socialist love.
LGBTQ+ Goldsmiths had tweeted the now-long-deleted thread, which began as a diatribe against “terfs” — “trans-exclusionary radical feminists”, or women who do not believe that men who change their gender are women — and said that such people who question transgenderism could benefit from being sent to gulags for up to 10 years for “re-education”.