Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon on Tuesday said that Israel is developing a new policy to deal with incidents such as that which he experienced at Oxford University last week.
Last Monday, a Muslim Oxford student called out "slaughter the Jews" in Arabic during a talk Ayalon gave at the British university.
Addressing the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations on Tuesday, Ayalon said of the incident that "this type of warfare is on a global scale, which is guided by the Palestinian Authority and Islamist groups."
The deputy foreign minister explained that Israel is moving to "put them on the defense" and has decided "to use deterrence by filming these events." The video from the Oxford Union was passed on to British police who are investigating these incidents, Ayalon said.
"We need to focus Jewish NGOs and organizations to this issue. They say 'Free Palestine' and try and prevent us from speaking, we say 'Free speech'," Ayalon continued. "We have learned how to defend ourselves from [physical] terrorism and now we are leaning how to defend from verbal terrorism."
Earlier this week, the Oxford student who shouted “slaughter the Jews” said his remark was misunderstood.
The
Oxford Student newspaper named the student as sophomore Noor Rashid and said that Rashid claimed he used a classical Arabic chant “Khaybar ya Yahod” which commemorates a seventh-century battle between Arabs and Jews.
The battle of Khaybar was an attack launched by the prophet Muhammad in 629. It led to the defeat of the Jewish community in the Arabian peninsula, forcing the Jews to pay half their income to the Muslim victors.
“My version went: ‘Khaybar, O Jews, we will win.’ This is in classical,
Koranic Arabic and I doubt that apart from picking up on the word
‘Jew,’ that even the Arabic speakers in the room would have understood
the phrase,” Rashid told the
Oxford Student.
“As you can see, I made no reference to killing Jews,” he said, adding
that the remark had “absolutely no derogatory or secondary meanings.”
Jonny Paul contributed to this report