An aerial view shows the bodies of victims of an attack following a mass infiltration by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip lying on the ground in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, in southern Israel, Oct. 10, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ilan Rosenberg

Controversy ensnared the historic Oxford Union debate society on Wednesday when its president, reportedly the first Palestinian to hold the position, was revealed to have described the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel as “less than proportional” and asserted that the Hamas terrorists who slaughtered, abducted, and raped Israeli civilians will one day be remembered as “heroes.”

Arwa Elrayess shared the thoughts with her peers in a group chat hosted on WhatsApp, as first reported by The Telegraph, a British daily. The popular messaging service is celebrated for its promise of encrypted, surreptitious communication, but it remains vulnerable to screenshots and damaging leaks. In Elrayess’s case, she spoke to about 100 people.

“Any resistance group will inevitably be deemed a ‘terrorist’ organization by the West until they achieve their liberation, by which time they’ll be lauded as heroes, as history as repeatedly proven,” Elrayess said in one message. Later she added that Hamas should have perpetrated more violence and killings, saying, “Some would argue it’s less than proportional. Have you seen what Israel has put Palestinians through for decades?”

In another text, she said, “Proportional doesn’t mean ‘right’ by the way. Just that you can’t be shocked that it happened.”

The comments set off a conflagration in the Union while prompting calls for Elrayess’s resignation.

The group Oxford Students Against Discrimination denounced the messages for coming “at a time when Jewish students have faced an unprecedented rise in harassment, intimidation, and fear.”

In another statement, Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA), a British Jewish advocacy group, called the comments “absolutely sickening,” adding, “any effort to excuse or explain it away should disqualify someone not only from being president of the Oxford Union … but also should render then unfit from holding any position at all.”

Standing on her verbosity, Elrayess offered the public more insights in an additional statement to the Telegraph which responded to the outcry. Her critics, she said, mistook the WhatsApp messages for a “legal brief or public statement” when she intended them to be harmlessly discursive — a “theoretical description of the structural context of the conflict.”

Student anti-Zionists have praised terrorists before.

Earlier this month, the University of Colorado Boulder’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter celebrated the first anniversary of a deadly antisemitic firebombing which occurred just a mile away from campus, drawing blistering rebukes from Jewish community advocates.

Mohamed Soliman, 46, an Egyptian national, last month pleaded guilty to all charges he faced in state court for hurling Molotov cocktails at a pro-Israel rally in an attack on June 1, 2025, that killed one person and left more than a dozen others injured.

The victims were taking part in a peaceful rally in downtown Boulder to raise awareness for the plight of Israeli hostages seized by Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists and taken to Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023.

Writing on Instagram in a post that has since been deleted, SJP praised Soliman for “striking against the colonist procession” and described the incident as “merely a case of chickens coming home to roost.”

Calling for Soliman’s release from prison, the group continued, “Mohamed chose the only sane response available to a rational human being confronted with the normalization of genocide. He refused the comfortable position of the grateful immigrant and the role of obedient subject, choosing confrontation with a violent system over passive proximity to the comfort of empire.”

In September 2024, Columbia University’s most strident SJP spinoff distributed literature calling on students to join the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’ movement to destroy Israel during the school’s convocation ceremony.

“This booklet is part of a coordinated and intentional effort to uphold the principles of the thawabit and the Palestinian resistance movement overall by transmitting the words of the resistance directly,” said the material, which was passed off to incoming freshmen. “This material aims to build popular support for the Palestinian war of national liberation, a war which is waged through armed struggle.”

Other sections of the pamphlet were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose is to build an army of Muslims worldwide.

In March, the group promoted terrorism again, with the University of California, Berkeley chapter sharing a reel in which deceased Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) senior fighter Farouk Salameh argued for “the armed option” against the “Zionist enemy.”

Terrorism “is the only way,” Salameh said in video shared by the Berkeley SJP group, adding, “What was taken by force should be returned by force. This land was taken by force, and it will be taken back by force. This is a Zionist enemy. It builds settlements and expands. There is no place for negotiations.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.