According to the Metropolitan Police of London, Sarah Cotte, a student at SOAS and a committee member of the Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! Society, is facing two charges for expressing support for Hamas.
By Rachel Avraham
According to the Metropolitan Police of London, Sarah Cotte, a student at SOAS and a committee member of the Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! Society, is facing two charges for expressing support for Hamas, a UK-designated terrorist organization: “Sarah Cotte, age 20 (18.03.04) of Camden, allegedly made a public speech in October 2023 that endorsed and celebrated the 7 October attacks in Israel and invited support for those who committed them. This video was subsequently broadcast on X.”
In the video documentation on X, Cotte proclaimed: “We at SOAS Fight Racism Fight Imperialism (FRFI) express our unconditional solidarity with the Palestinian Armed Resistance who have broken free from their open air prison in Gaza and are rising across an occupied country, against the Zionist state which has been bleeding Palestine dry for nearly eighty years. Israel has existed for 27,540 days, but in less than one day, it has been nearly brought to its knees by righteous armed resistance.”
According to the Jerusalem Post, a now deleted Met press release about Cotte’s arrest stated that the speech was made on October 19, but an FRFI North London activist bragged in a Monday Instagram that the speech was made on October 9, two days after the “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.” According to the report, Watchdog GnasherJew brought attention to the incident in 2023, and United Kingdom Lawyers for Israel and other activists said that they had reported Cotte to the police.
The Metropolitan Police of London added: “The second charge relates to similar comments allegedly made on a WhatsApp group.” Cotte was arrested last January and charged on March 4. She is due to appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on March 24.
The charges against Cotte were pressed after anti-Israel activists sprayed the word “divest” in red paint over one of Cambridge University’s historic buildings, the BBC reported. A spokesperson from the university said: “We strongly condemn this vandalism of University property. The police have been informed.” According to the report, Cambridgeshire Police confirmed a crime had been raised for criminal damage to the building.
The charges against Cotte also come at a time when anti-Semitism is at a record-high level in the United Kingdom. There were 3,528 anti-Semitic incidents in the UK during 2024, the second-highest total ever recorded, the Daily Mail reported. According to the report, Community Security Trust, who compiled the latest statistics, stressed that anti-Semitism remained ‘significantly higher than it had been prior to the Hamas terror attack’ on October 7, 2023, with the total more than double 2022’s figure and up 56 percent since 2021.
Prof. David Hirsh told MSN that after October 7, 2023, “Antisemitic ideas [have] become normalized” in the United Kingdom. Hirsh recognizes that many British Jews have experienced what he terms a “cultural shift” in the wake of October 7 — a feeling that “social spaces” in which they’d previously felt at home are no longer welcoming.
“It will get you completely marginalized if you argue what are considered to be Zionist things in many, many walks of life, and the walks of life in which that’s the case are increasing, and have increased since October 7,” Hirsh told MSN. According to the report, this had already been the case in academia, especially the social sciences, for some time. “It is now pretty widely the case across the arts and across the caring professions, such as social work, teaching, even medicine and the law,” Hirsh says.
He recognizes there are no easy answers or quick solutions to the problem of antisemitism. “There’s a culture of antisemitism and antisemitic ways of speaking, which [is] fairly well entrenched,” Hirsh told MSN, adding that there’s no broad public consensus as to what constitutes antisemitism to guide those in positions of authority.
“I think there’s a similar problem [facing] people in authority, whether they be university authorities, broadcasting authorities or the Metropolitan Police, which is that many, many people think that things that we might think are antisemitic are not at all antisemitic and would protest very, very strongly if they were curtailed,” he told MSN. “It’s difficult to ask people in administrative power to do things for which there is not broad support,” Hirsh continues, while also suggesting that many of them could still “do much better.”
