Social media visa vetting would protect Britain's Jews |
You don’t need to be a fervent admirer of Donald Trump to recognise that, on matters of national security and cultural cohesion, he hits the bullseye our establishment prefers to evade. His administration’s recent proposal – requiring travellers from visa-waiver countries, including Britain, to disclose five years of social media history as part of the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) – has drawn the usual transatlantic sneers: an assault on privacy, a chilling of free expression, another Maga excess.
Yet recent events show social media vetting can expose troubling views. If Britain wants to protect its Jewish citizens – especially young scholars besieged on university campuses – it should follow suit without delay.
I have friends who lecture in Oxford’s ancient colleges: moderate men and women who’ve spent decades nurturing young minds. Over quiet dinners in college halls, they confide what official reports only half-admit: Jewish undergraduates arrive wide-eyed with excitement, only to hide kippot under caps, avoid certain quads after dark, or whisper Hebrew in libraries to evade glares – or worse. The Community Security Trust’s (CST) figures are grim: thousands of anti-Semitic incidents nationwide in recent years, with campuses seeing........