Barnaby Raine | |
|---|---|
 Barnaby Raine in a January 2024 interview on an Islam Channel podcast | |
| Born | Barnaby Simon Max Raine May 1995 Kensington and Chelsea, London, England |
| Alma mater | |
| Years active | 2010–present |
Barnaby Simon Max Raine (born May 1995) is an English intellectual historian.[1] He is known for his political commentary.
Raine grew up in North London and identifies as Jewish.
His great-grandparents migrated to Manchester, London, and Dublin from the Russian Empire (the portions that are now western Ukraine, Lithuania, and Poland) in search of a better life in the face of pogroms and poverty driven partially by marginalization and persecution of Jews there.[2] He is the son of businessman Henry Raine.[3]
Raine has stated that he "gave his parents a lot of trouble" with his leftist views, especially his father. His mother worked in public health. Raine states that his parents believed that the British ruling class didn't like Jews much and transferred their own anxiety about being greedy onto Jews by stereotyping them as greedy, but expressed those feelings less openly after the Holocaust. At the same time, his parents also believed that they needed the approval of the ruling class, and pursued that approval to some extent.[2]
Raine attended Westminster School, a private school (British English: public school),[4] where he did not participate in many sports. He felt a stark moral imperative, or "pull" not to remain silent and to try to push the needle towards justice — a pull deeply cemented by a sense of Jewish history of being persecuted and historically needing other groups speak out about the persecution. At age 14 he volunteered at the Stop the War Coalition seeking to re-found it. He then worked for the cause of refugees and migrants, then for advocacy group Liberty, then protests against the 2001–2021 War in Afghanistan.[2] At age 15 he was already being written about in alternative media, with Belgium's DeWereldMorgen calling him "the Mozart of speeches", noting that Raine's was "a name to remember". In the article, he stated that he identified as a socialist and "even" a Marxist.[5]
He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in History and Politics from Wadham College, Oxford in 2016,[6] where he met Palestinians for the first time helping organize Israeli Apartheid Week, where speakers included Israeli and British historian Avi Shlaim, Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, and South African Jewish anti-apartheid activist Dennis Goldberg, who was tried alongside Nelson Mandela.[2]
In 2014, Raine led a boycott of the Oxford Union in light of allegations made against its then president Ben Sullivan.[7] He also protested against Marine Le Pen's visit in 2015.[8] In his final year at Oxford, Raine sat on the National Executive Committee of the National Union of Students (NUS).[9]
After graduating from Oxford, Raine went on to complete a Master of Arts in History at Columbia University in 2018, and is currently writing his PhD on the end of capitalism. He was awarded a 2020 International Dissertation Research Fellowship by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).[10]
Raine became Associate Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research in 2020.[11][1] By 2023, Raine was a member of the Salvage Editorial Collective[12] and had previously contributed to publications such as The Guardian, Jacobin, n+1, Vashti Media, Red Pepper, New Internationalist, RealClearPolitics, Socialist Worker, and Politics/Letters.[13][14] He has often made appearances on Novara Media's news livestreams on YouTube, and has occasionally guest-hosted the content.[15] In 2023, Raine participated in The World Transformed[16] as well as a Symposium on the Frankfurt School at the Goethe Institut.[17]
Raine states his work for the Palestinian cause while at Oxford made him realise the scale of the dehumanisation upon which Zionist power "relies", i.e. that it relies on Israelis and Jews believing that Palestinians are "terrifying people full of hate", to justify acts of violence and aggression against them, much as the South Africa regime did to blacks under apartheid. Raine maintains that the Zionist view of history is replete with paranoia, focusing on historic anitsemitism to conclude that Jews must "kill" or "do evil to" external enemy groups before the other groups defeat the Jews, much as Afrikaners kept the memory of British concentration camps to drive paranoia that other groups sought the demise of the Afrikaners and justify oppression of blacks and others.[2]
Raine has stated that he had internalized negative perceptions of Palestinians in his youth, but at Oxford realized that these were not valid and were analogous to those that used to be held about Jews, and that even radical Palestinians that he met sought not to attack Jews, but rather work towards a situation where all ethno-religious groups could thrive in peace without oppression.[2]
Raine believes that Judaism teaches Jews not to oppress others, and that Israeli oppression of Palestinians contradicts those teachings. He notes that in Jewish history, the story of Hanukkah speaks of justified Jewish (Maccabee resistance against a colonial power, the Seleucid Empire. He further maintains that the Israeli state and its promoters deflect criticism of Israel by conflating it with antisemitism, and thus use Jews as "shields".[2]
Raine became interested in politics and activism at a young age. He was 15 years old and in the midst of preparing for his GCSEs when he went viral on YouTube for making a speech in 2011 protesting the planned increase in university tuition fees.[18][19] He also took part in the Coalition of Resistance and Occupy London.[4]
As a result of the speech, Dutch-language Belgian site DeWereldMorgen interviewed him and noted of the 15-year-old:[5]
We talked with [Raine] for an hour, in which [he] spoke for 55 minutes without a single "um" or misspeak, spiced up with well-founded opinion and rich with quotes and concrete examples. A lot of politicians could learn from that.
In the interview, Raine acknowledged his privileged background, and expressed his desire to use his privilege to speak up about injustices, both in the UK and abroad.[5]
In 2014, Raine made a speech at a pro-Palestine protest in London as part of the Jewish Bloc Against Zionism.[20] He was interviewed by Stephen Dixon on Sky News.[21] While on the NUS NEC, Rained signed an open letter condemning Prevent.[22] He was a presenter at the 2016 Limmud Conference.[23]
In a 2017 interview with Al Jazeera, Raine described himself as a "firm anti-Zionist", and called Israel "instilling [oppression] with gruesome violence" a "betrayal" of Jewish values, which he believed to be "mending the world" and standing "at the forefront of struggles against oppression and exploitation".[24]