London's Queen Mary University will allow Hamas-supporter Azzam Tamimi to address the student body on Tuesday, at a Palestine Solidarity Society event called "One State or Two State Solution." The move has sparked outrage on the campus because of Tamimi's outspoken support for terrorism and the destruction of Israel.
"Anybody in the world, with faith or without faith, must come together in order to eradicate this cancer from the body of humanity," Tamimi said about Israel on a 2006 YouTube video of a London "al-Quds Day" rally. "It is just a matter of time. You count my words and you remember these words. It's a matter of time – as they withdrew from South Lebanon because of the great jihad of Hizballah, and as they withdrew from Gaza because of the great jihad of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, this black chapter in the humanity of history will eventually come to an end."
In 2004 BBC interview, Tamimi claimed that he would carry out a suicide bombing if possible, and stated that his inability to travel to Israel was holding him back. "You see sacrificing myself for Palestine is a noble cause. It is the straight way to pleasing my god and I would do it if I had the opportunity," he said in the heated discussion with journalist Tim Sebastian.
Despite Tamimi's support for violence, a university spokesman defended the invitation, saying "freedom of expression and the sharing of ideas and beliefs are at the heart of Queen Mary's ethos." The head of the university, Professor Simon Gaskell, also didn't seem fazed by the activist's expressions of violence. "In making these arrangements we neither endorse nor deny the views expressed; rather we are allowing freedom of expression within the law," he told reporters. It was in the power of the students to make judgments about opinions and beliefs presented to them, he added.