分类： politics

A high-profile public claim of widespread anti-Jewish persecution made by a pro-Israel student at one of London’s most prestigious universities is facing significant scrutiny, after an independent investigation found evidence of altered quotes, misleading framing, and longstanding ties to extreme pro-Israel advocacy groups.

Tali Smus, a self-described “British Zioness” and English literature student at King’s College London (KCL), published a widely circulated op-ed in *The Telegraph* in July 2026 under the headline “As a Jewish student at King’s College, I’m being persecuted for my beliefs.” In the piece, Smus alleged that she was targeted in a 100-to-1 group attack by fellow students in a September 2024 Instagram group chat, leaving her in tears and targeted for anti-Jewish abuse. She concluded her op-ed by stating, “I am a Jewish student at King’s College London, and I refuse to remain a statistic. The anti-Jewish hatred I faced will not remain a statistic.”

Smus’s op-ed landed at a charged political moment: it came just days after an Al Jazeera investigation exposed KCL’s harsh crackdown on pro-Palestine student organizers, and coincided with an ongoing UK government review of antisemitism in British secondary and higher education. But an exclusive review of the full group chat log obtained by *Middle East Eye* (MEE) reveals multiple discrepancies between the quotes Smus published in *The Telegraph* and the actual messages sent by students.

For example, Smus claimed a student wrote, “If she interrupts the… lecture again tomorrow… she should be thrown out,” framing the line as a targeted threat. The original message reads, “If she interrupts the writing London lecture again tomorrow I swear to god she should be thrown out” — a comment aligned with KCL’s official policy of removing disruptive students from teaching spaces, issued in the context of Smus repeatedly disrupting class. Smus also alleged a second student wrote, “As a group we should just band together and carry her out at that point,” but she has provided no evidence this message was ever sent, and did not respond to requests to verify the claim.

In another instance, Smus altered the line “that bitch has gotten down” — a description referencing her unfurling of an Israeli flag at a pro-Palestine campus protest — to read “bitch get down,” framing it as a direct physical threat. The chat log also shows only roughly 20 students expressed disagreement with Smus’s views, not the “almost 100 against one” she claimed, and that at least one student spoke out in her defense, criticizing harassing language in the chat. Smus has remained active in the group chat, continuing to send messages long after the 2024 exchange.

Beyond the altered quotes, MEE’s investigation uncovered Smus’s deep ties to a network of high-profile right-wing pro-Israel groups with a documented history of targeting and smearing Palestinian activists and their supporters. Smus appeared on the UK’s right-wing GB News as the Emerson Fellow for Stand With Us, a pro-Israel organization that *The Guardian* has confirmed works closely with Israel’s foreign ministry, including to oppose pro-Palestinian boycott movements. She has also held a fellowship and produced content for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), which describes its campus fellows as “leaders… proactively spreading the truth about Israel” and connects them to mainstream media outlets. Smus additionally serves as president of KCL’s chapter of Students Supporting Israel, an organization partially funded by the Adelson family — the billionaire backers who successfully lobbied former U.S. President Donald Trump to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

Smus’s public resume lists further ties to UK conservative circles: she previously worked as a research assistant at the Henry Jackson Society, a right-wing UK think tank whose senior associate Andrew Fox has amplified her antisemitism claims, and currently works as a policy research intern for Conservative shadow home secretary Chris Philp, whom she met at the UK’s 2024 March Against Antisemitism. In a 2025 blog for the *Times of Israel*, she publicly labeled popular LBC commentator James O’Brien an “antisemitic commentator.”

The investigation also revealed new details about an event Smus criticized in her op-ed: a 7 October 2024 pro-Palestine walkout and vigil held on KCL’s campus to commemorate two KCL alumni, Dr Maisara Alrayyes and Dr Adnan al-Bursh, who were killed by Israeli forces in Gaza. Smus described the event as an offensive celebration of Hamas’s 2024 attack, omitting that she herself joined a counter-protest holding a large Israeli flag at the event.

Multiple KCL community members have pushed back on Smus’s framing of the conflict as targeting her Jewish identity, arguing instead that pushback against Smus centers on her vocal support for Israeli military actions in Gaza, not her religion. One anonymous KCL academic told MEE: “She’s scared to attend classes but feels safe to attend demonstrations that should be hostile to her, in order to make Instagram content. Other students don’t like her. That’s about as far as it goes.”

One student who participated in the 2024 group chat acknowledged that some language used was harsh, noting the charged context of the ongoing crisis in Gaza. “I regret some of the wording I used – I was in my first year of university and encountering someone who unapologetically supports Israel’s atrocious actions in Gaza hit a nerve with me and many others,” the student said.

As of publication, neither Smus nor *The Telegraph* has responded to multiple requests for comment from MEE on the allegations of altered quotes and misleading framing.

A sweeping ideological purge of public libraries and educational institutions across Indian-administered Kashmir has been ordered by the New Delhi-appointed regional administration, triggering fierce condemnation from scholars, local residents and academic freedom advocates who warn the campaign systematically erases dissenting perspectives and destroys independent inquiry in the restive Himalayan territory.\n\nThe official order, issued earlier this month, mandates a full, region-wide audit of every resource held by institutional libraries and learning centers, covering books, academic journals, reference material, periodicals, digital archives and supplementary reading resources. The directive explicitly bars institutions from acquiring, retaining, circulating or making accessible any material deemed \”objectionable, inflammatory or inappropriate\”, including content that promotes secessionism, extremism, anti-national ideology or any narrative that prejudices what the order terms the \”sovereignty, unity and integrity of the Union of India\”.\n\nThis latest campaign was triggered by objections from legislators of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) over two government-distributed textbooks. The texts — *Personalities and Legends of Jammu and Kashmir* by Hilal Ahmad and Santosh Meena, and *Great Personalities of Jammu and Kashmir* by Dr. Sushant Giri — were rolled out to more than 250 regional schools under the federal government-funded Samagra Shiksha education initiative. BJP opposition leader in the region Sunil Sharma claimed the books used terminology including \”Indian-occupied Kashmir\” and called their presence in school libraries \”a direct challenge to India’s sovereignty and territorial integrity\”, labeling their inclusion an act of \”academic jihad\” designed to indoctrinate young students.\n\nIn response to the BJP outcry, regional administrative head Manoj Sinha suspended eight School Education Department officials, launched a formal investigation into both the volumes and their authors, and blacklisted the two publishing houses that produced the books, ordering all previously published material from both firms withdrawn from circulation immediately. Controversy centers on a small number of entries in the 240-page *Personalities and Legends of Jammu and Kashmir*, which profiles prominent Kashmiri figures, including pro-independence leaders alongside well-known international and Indian writers. The text refers to Maqbool Bhat, founder of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front armed group, as a \”shaheed\” (martyr); Bhat was hanged by India in 1984 after a Supreme Court death sentence, and his remains were secretly buried inside New Delhi’s Tihar Jail. The book also quotes late Kashmiri resistance leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani describing Kashmir as a \”disputed region awaiting political resolution under the UN\”. No detailed information about the content of the second book has been made public.\n\nThis audit is far from an isolated measure: in August 2024, the administration already banned and seized 25 major academic and political texts on Kashmir, labeling them forfeited to the state under Indian criminal law. The blacklist includes landmark scholarly works on the region’s dispute such as AG Noorani’s *The Kashmir Dispute*, Victoria Schofield’s *Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War*, Arundhati Roy’s essay collection *Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction.*, Sumantra Bose’s *Contested Lands* and *Kashmir at the Crossroads*, Hafsa Kanjwal’s *Colonising Kashmir: State-Building Under Indian Occupation*, Anuradha Bhasin’s *A Dismantled State*, and Christopher Snedden’s *Independent Kashmir*. Additional raids on independent bookstores last year saw authorities armed with lists of banned titles clear shops of customers and seize blacklisted volumes, while a 2025 raid confiscated Islamic literature from shops and private homes across the Kashmir Valley.\n\nScholars warn the current full library audit represents the latest escalation in a years-long campaign to enforce state-sanctioned ideological narratives in the region, which accelerated dramatically after the 2019 unilateral abrogation of Article 370, the constitutional provision that granted Indian-administered Kashmir semi-autonomous status, including protections for local land ownership, limited independent political decision-making and reserved local employment. Following the revocation, New Delhi split the region into two centrally administered union territories, introduced laws allowing non-Kashmiri citizens to purchase land and settle in the region, and expanded a broad crackdown on dissident political voices, independent journalism, human rights organizers and critical thought. Enforcement agencies have implemented widespread high-tech surveillance, expanded police powers and imposed harsh restrictions on public expression.\n\nDr. Ather Zia, a professor of anthropology and gender studies at the University of Northern Colorado Greeley whose own book *Resisting Disappearances* was among the flagged works, framed the purge as part of a long-standing pattern of systemic censorship. \”The removal of so-called ‘objectionable material’ is not a new thing but part of a continuity in the long history of censorship and suppressing critical thinking and scholarship in Kashmir,\” Zia explained in an interview. \”It is meant to reinforce the systemic erasure of grounded knowledges and histories of people. Any normal and intellectually healthy society operates on dissent, disagreements and critique, and examining difficult histories and multiple perspectives openly. Once again, this extreme purge, which is recurring and roots out any form of dissenting or critical voice from academic and mainstream discourse, points to democratic engagement in Kashmir being a true illusion. It tells us about a system that demands extreme compliance of thought and deed to survive, and has normalised repression.\”\n\nProminent pro-freedom Kashmiri leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq emphasized on social platform X that banning books cannot erase shared historical memory: \”Banning books will not erase historical facts and the repertoire of lived memories of people of Kashmir.\”\n\nOutside scholars of Kashmir have also condemned the campaign as a direct attack on core democratic principles and academic freedom. Dean Accardi, a historian at Connecticut College specializing in Kashmir studies, noted that state censorship of academic material almost always stems from ruling elite fears of public opposition to state policy. \”Rather than addressing the sources of the people’s discontent, censorship aims to decrease public knowledge of facts on such matters as well as open public debate, replacing these core constituents of any true, open democracy with propaganda and punishment in the name of ‘security’,\” Accardi said. \”The history of Kashmir and its people involves great conflict and often troubling, uncomfortable truths. The state should not attempt to suppress those truths through censorship but instead address them openly and make things better for Kashmiris.\”\n\nGoldie Osuri, a sociologist and critical Kashmir studies scholar at the University of Warwick, said the audit follows last year’s 25-book ban as part of a sustained assault on independent academic inquiry that conflicts with the Indian state’s official narrative. \”We are witnessing an ongoing war against any academic material that might differ from the Indian state’s narratives where it concerns Kashmir,\” Osuri said. \”The Indian state, it seems, cannot brook any narrative that attests to Kashmiri contestation of Indian rule. In essence, this is a war against academic freedom. If academic work can only serve ‘national’ interest, then it cannot be called academic work. And schools and universities cannot be understood any more as genuine places of learning. Where it concerns academic material, it seems that educational institutions are being forced to serve as checkpoints for the Indian state rather than places where students can be exposed to differing narratives and understand the contexts for these differing narratives.\”\n\nThe climate of fear generated by the audit has already spread to private life across Kashmir, with many local residents quietly destroying or discarding their personal collections of books on Kashmiri politics, history and religion to avoid potential official repercussions. Nafees, a government employee and avid reader who recently cleared his shelves of decades of collected works on Kashmir, including books inherited from his late father, said fear has become pervasive in daily life. \”Some of these were part of my late father’s collection,\” Nafees said. \”I didn’t want to give them away, but as a government worker, I couldn’t risk keeping them. Fear has taken over. You never know what excuse the authorities might find to trouble you.\”\n\nA local Kashmiri research scholar, who requested anonymity to avoid official retaliation, summed up the steady expansion of state control over expression: \”The government has been keeping an increasingly close and continuous watch on what gets written, printed and read in Kashmir.\”\n\nThe Kashmir region has been a site of unresolved geopolitical contestation since the 1947 partition of British India, when both newly independent India and Pakistan claimed the entire Himalayan territory. The two nuclear-armed nations have fought multiple wars over the region, and decades of armed uprising and state repression have left Indian-administered Kashmir one of the most heavily militarized regions in the world, with daily repression shaping the lives of millions of local residents.

A controversial legal case unfolding in the United Kingdom has raised urgent alarms over expanding the use of terrorist sentencing designations for non-violent direct action protesters, after five Palestine Action activists convicted of criminal damage for a 2024 demonstration at a Barclays bank branch learned they could be punished as terrorists without the original trial jury ever being informed of this possibility.

The five defendants — Brendon O’Hagan, 28, Amanda Kelly, 31, Hmeera Atiqnisar, 31, Mohammed Malik, 28, and 70-year-old Alma Yaniv — were found guilty in June 2026 of causing £212,000 (approximately $283,000) in damage during the August 2024 protest at the Barclays location in Burnley, northern England. The demonstration targeted the bank because at the time, Barclays held public shares in Israeli defense contractor Elbit Systems, a major manufacturer of military technology used in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The bank has since divested from all of its 16,345 Elbit Systems shares, a change first reported by Middle East Eye (MEE) in October 2024.

Following the guilty verdict on criminal damage charges, presiding judge Phillip Parry notified defense legal teams that he is considering applying a formal “terrorist connection” to the offenders’ crimes, a classification that would trigger enhanced terror sentencing guidelines. Critically, jurors who delivered the guilty verdict were never informed during the trial that such a designation could be applied. To support his consideration of the classification, Parry circulated a prior ruling from Justice Owen Johnson, who handled an earlier high-profile Palestine Action case.

In that June 2026 case, Johnson applied the terrorist connection designation to four Palestine Action activists convicted of criminal damage for a raid on an Elbit Systems factory near Bristol, also carried out in August 2024. Johnson justified the classification on the grounds that the activists caused serious property damage, acted with the intent to influence UK government policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and intended to intimidate segments of the British public. That sentencing marked a historic first for UK law: it was the first time the terrorist connection designation had been applied to activists who committed only non-violent direct action, had not been convicted of any formal terrorist offenses, and did not cause intentional physical harm to any person. The four activists received lengthy prison sentences and will be required to comply with strict 15-year terrorist notification obligations after their release.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has backed the application of terror sentencing in the Barclays case, despite the fact that prosecutors never mentioned the possibility of a terrorist classification during the full trial. For the defendants, this last-minute push for enhanced sentencing has come as a major shock.

Mohammed Malik, one of the five convicted activists, told MEE in an interview that the defense team had no advance warning that any terror-related designation would be added to the case, and that the prosecution never raised the issue at any point during proceedings. “I was shocked that broken windows and red paint can be deemed as terrorism,” Malik said. He added that the attempt to sentence the group as terrorists highlights the dangerous precedent set by Johnson’s earlier ruling, which punished four Palestine Action protesters as terrorists for destroying Israeli-made quadcopter drones owned by Elbit Systems.

If the terrorist connection is applied, the designation will drastically change the sentencing outcome for the five activists. Under UK rules, a terror-related sentence requires defendants to serve at least two-thirds of their full custodial term behind bars, and parole boards can require activists to renounce their core political beliefs as a condition of early release.

Notably, the 2024 Barclays demonstration took place before the UK government officially proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organization. The government’s proscription only links three specific Palestine Action incidents to terrorist activity, all of which involved more than £1 million in alleged damage — far more than the damage at the Burnley Barclays branch.

Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori has warned that Johnson’s original ruling established a dangerous legal precedent that paves the way for widespread use of terror designations against political protesters. She called the move to consider terror sentencing in the Barclays case a clear sign that the “flood gates are opening” for expanded criminalization of pro-Palestinian protest in the UK.

A sentencing hearing for the five activists is scheduled to take place on 4 September.

Diplomatic friction between China and Japan has erupted into public view after conflicting official statements over whether a meeting between the two nations’ top diplomats took place at last week’s ASEAN Regional Forum held in Manila, the Philippines. The disagreement lays bare the sharp deterioration of bilateral relations that began in November, when Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi made a controversial comment on Taiwan that crossed a core red line for Beijing.

Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi initially told reporters that he had held an impromptu brief discussion on bilateral ties with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi after the two encountered each other on the sidelines of the gathering. Japanese media later qualified the account, reporting that any interaction between the two officials would have amounted to no more than casual greetings and polite small talk. Despite this, Prime Minister Takaichi reaffirmed last Monday that dialogue is ongoing between the two countries at multiple levels, pointing to Motegi’s reported exchange with Wang as evidence.

China’s foreign ministry flatly contradicted the Japanese account just one day later. At a regular daily press briefing, spokesperson Lin Jian issued a clear denial: “Let me make it clear once again that during his visit to Manila, Foreign Minister Wang Yi did not have a meeting with the Japanese side on his schedule, nor did any brief exchanges take place on the site.”

The root of the current diplomatic freeze traces back to Takaichi’s first weeks in office, when she addressed parliament in November on Japan’s collective self-defense policy. The framework, which allows Japan’s military to deploy to support an allied nation—most commonly the United States—when certain conditions, including a threat to Japan’s own national survival, are met. When asked whether a Chinese military blockade or other armed action targeting Taiwan would qualify as a scenario that would trigger Japanese involvement under the policy, Takaichi said such an event could meet the criteria. “If it involves the use of warships and military actions, it could by all means become a survival-threatening situation,” she stated.

The comment triggered immediate outrage from Beijing, which claims the self-governing island of Taiwan as its sovereign territory and rejects any foreign interference in cross-strait affairs. Any public comment or action that is seen as supporting Taiwan independence, including U.S. arms sales to the island, crosses what China labels a non-negotiable red line in its foreign relations. Takaichi has declined to withdraw her remark, though she later told the same parliamentary committee that she would avoid discussing specific collective self-defense scenarios moving forward.

The ongoing diplomatic standoff follows a clear pattern in recent months: Japan has repeatedly signaled it is seeking opportunities to reopen high-level dialogue to repair frayed ties, while Beijing has refused to engage, maintaining a firm diplomatic cold shoulder toward Tokyo. These elevated tensions have already spilled over into the economic sphere, with a notable drop in the number of Chinese tourists choosing to visit Japan. Strategic mistrust has also deepened, with both nations growing increasingly uneasy over perceived military expansion by the other in the East Asia region.
“As we have repeatedly noted, Japan is open to dialogue at all levels, and I believe it is extremely important that we continue our dialogue as both Japan and China hold a major responsibility for regional peace,” Motegi stated last week, reaffirming Tokyo’s ongoing push for diplomatic engagement.