University lecturer ‘proud’ to support legal bid to lift UK ban on Hamas
Tarek Younis wants all 'Zionists removed from our institutions' and accused Israel of 'genocide and ethnic cleansing' in the weeks after 7 October
A senior lecturer at one of Britain’s top universities has publicly backed efforts to de-proscribe Hamas as a terrorist organisation in the UK and previously written that “our work isn’t done until all Zionists are removed from our institutions and shamed, alongside all racists, into nothingness”.
Dr Tarek Younis, an academic at Middlesex University in Hendon since 2019, made the admission on social media, where he said he was “proud to have contributed” to a legal application submitted by London law firm Riverway to remove Hamas from the UK’s list of banned terrorist groups under the Terrorism Act 2000.
The firm behind the application argues that the ban “breaches the European Convention on Human Rights”.
The post, made on 9 April on X (formerly Twitter), is the latest in a series of interventions by Dr Younis, who has long platformed extreme anti-Zionist and anti-Israel views.
He previously claimed that Labour Friends of Israel was “involved in the blatantly racist suppression of Palestinian solidarity”.
And although he later deleted the post about Zionists being “removed from our institutions and shamed… into nothingness”, screenshots of the remark continue to circulate.
Younis has also been a mentor at the Aziz Foundation, a grant-making body that sponsors British Muslim students through university. Jewish News understands he will no longer be used by the foundation after the social media posts were brought to its attention.
According to his now-removed Aziz Foundation profile, Younis is a former British Academy fellow whose research has focused on “the racialisation of Muslims as a result of statutory counter-terrorism policies (Prevent) in the NHS” and who also researches and writes about Islamophobia.
As reported by Jewish News, he had been due to speak at an Islamophobia panel at the British Association of Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies, but the session was scrapped after the extreme anti-Zionist sentiments of some of the panellists was exposed.
The Health and Care Professions Council, which regulates psychologists in the UK, told Jewish News: “We take any accusations that a registrant may have breached our standards extremely seriously. Anyone can raise a concern that a registrant may have done so through our fitness to practise (FTP) process, and this will then be investigated by the FTP team.”
Middlesex University, ranked among the top six UK institutions in the 2024 Times Higher Education Young University Rankings, declined to comment.
Jewish News contacted Tarek Younis for comment.
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