University Occupations Update.

I have just come back from visiting Cambridge's occupation, which looks very resilient as it has at least 50 people there at any one time (and they have a 5-man press team going hell-for-leather getting them media coverage).

Currently I understand that universities whose occupations have succeeded are SOAS, the LSE, Essex and Oxford, whilst Birmingham students were violently evicted.

Continuing occupations are King's, Sussex, Warwick, Newcastle, Manchester Metropolitan, Leeds, Kingston, Manchester, Salford, Bristol, Nottingham and Cambridge.

The people of Gaza have been abandoned by the BBC and Sky News, which say that fundraising for people the Israeli doesn't want to exist, who are starving and who cannot rebuild their homes because Israel won't allow building materials or food into the country through normal channels is taking a political perspective.

I joined the Cambridge occupation with a prominent member of Cambridge Amnesty International. She was distraught at the fact that among the hundred or so people milling around the building "there were no liberals", not from Amnesty and not from other campaigning organisations. The only non-socialist group to support the occupation were the Cambridge Quakers. The reason? The same liberal ideal of moral equivalence (/relativism/bankruptcy) which the BBC and Sky are trying to use to justify turning a humanitarian crisis into a mass grave.

What do I mean by moral equivalence? It is explicitly a denial of tactics such as occupations on the basis that they are sloping the playing field in favour of a few students. Those in occupation are taking power which they are using to publicise outrages in Gaza. This unbalances the equation because one viewpoint is being heard to the detriment of all others. The best argument will win out, all being equal.

BUT ALL IS NOT EQUAL. First, there is a complete denial in this case of true oppression, an assumption that the two parties engaged on equal terms. As Labour MP Paul Flynn puts it, "Did you get a grant for your voluntary work in ridding Whitechapel of prostitution, Mr Ripper?" is not the question we should be asking. Secondly, whilst I realise that there are accusations all around of media bias, we have to ask who owns the way to form public opinion and what they want. Many of the media's owners have a long history of support for Israel: here the crazy question becomes "Do you think you are the victim of a vicious campaign by your own media, Mr Berlusconi?"

I witnessed a very civil group discussion with four members of the Israel Society in Cambridge, but in the face of a hundred pro-Gaza occupiers they were being very brave to come and speak, and I doubt that if you had asked them what they had felt that there had been "a level playing field". Thanks to Sky and the BBC, every Gazan who dies because aid budgets run low is an unwilling martyr to this elusive liberal principle.