{"id":243505,"date":"2021-10-03T07:35:15","date_gmt":"2021-10-03T07:35:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=243505"},"modified":"2021-10-04T07:19:12","modified_gmt":"2021-10-04T07:19:12","slug":"professor-david-miller-fired-after-israel-lobby-smear-campaign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=243505","title":{"rendered":"Professor David Miller fired after Israel lobby smear campaign"},"content":{"rendered":"

Asa Winstanley \u2013 Electronic Intifada Oct 1, 2021<\/strong><\/h1>\n

The University of Bristol has fired Professor David Miller<\/a>, a leading UK critic of Israel and its lobby.<\/p>\n

After a years-long campaign of smears<\/a> by that same lobby, the university said on Friday that, \u201cProfessor David Miller is no longer employed by the University of Bristol.\u201d<\/p>\n

The statement<\/a> said only that Miller \u201cdid not meet the standards of behavior we expect from our staff,\u201d though it did not elaborate.<\/p>\n

Miller told The Electronic Intifada he would be appealing and \u201cfighting it all the way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet the statement appeared to exonerate Miller from the Israel\u2019s lobby\u2019s deliberately false allegations of anti-Semitism.<\/p>\n

An \u201cindependent report\u201d by an unnamed lawyer had found that \u201cProfessor Miller\u2019s comments did not constitute unlawful speech,\u201d the statement acknowledged.<\/p>\n

Miller said the report had actually gone further and that the lawyer\u2019s report had \u201cexplicitly determined\u201d his remarks \u201cwere not anti-Semitic.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Support David Miller Campaign, which has been rallying around the professor, responded that the university was sending a message that \u201cit will protect racists, and [that] Muslims, Black students and Palestinians are not welcome at Bristol.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a statement sent to The Electronic Intifada, the campaign said that the university\u2019s decision was \u201cdesigned to send a chill down the spines of academics around the world who expose Zionist racism.\u201d<\/p>\n

The campaign said that Miller\u2019s sacking had come after a \u201cpressure campaign by Israel\u2019s assets in the UK\u201d and accused the university of collaborating with the Israel lobby.<\/p>\n

For his part, Miller said that the decision to fire him was \u201ctaken under pressure from the Israel lobby\u201d which he said \u201clobbies for a hostile foreign state. The university has embarrassed itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Appeal<\/h2>\n

The university said in its statement that Miller \u201chas a right of internal appeal which he may choose to exercise and nothing in this statement should be taken to prejudge that.\u201d<\/p>\n

The university \u201cdoes not intend to make any further public comment at this time,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n

Bristol University further claimed that it was committed to an environment preserving \u201cacademic freedom.\u201d But in what seemed a Freudian slip, it also said that \u201cwe take any risk to stifle that freedom seriously.\u201d<\/p>\n

An academic expert in propaganda and political pressure groups, Miller has been a key critic of the Israel lobby for the last decade, as well as of Zionism, the state\u2019s racist<\/a> official ideology.<\/p>\n

At the start of 2021<\/a>, pro-Israel lobby groups ramped up their campaign against him.<\/p>\n

These included the Board of Deputies of British Jews<\/a>, the Zionist Federation<\/a>, the Jewish Labour Movement<\/a> and the Community Security Trust<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At the end of February, Israel itself also got involved<\/a>, mobilizing one of its online troll armies to flood social media conversations with calls for Miller to be fired.<\/p>\n

Act.IL \u2013 which is directed and funded<\/a> by an Israeli ministry \u2013 issued a mission calling for attacks on an opinion piece published by Al Jazeera defending Miller.<\/p>\n

With no evidence, the troll army\u2019s operators smeared Miller as guilty of \u201cblatant Jew-hatred\u201d and called on their users to attack the Al Jazeera piece online.<\/p>\n

Lobby campaign<\/h2>\n

A who\u2019s who of right-wing figures, anti-Palestinian activists and Israel lobbyists<\/a> made a massive effort to push for Miller to be fired, with even British politicians piling on.<\/p>\n

Soon after, the university announced<\/a> it had launched an \u201cinvestigation\u201d into Miller.<\/p>\n

More than 300 academics and public intellectuals pushed back, signing an open letter<\/a> to the university in support of Miller and his work.<\/p>\n

Signatories included Noam Chomsky, Palestinian scholar and activist Sami al-Arian, dissident Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, filmmaker Ken Loach and comedian Alexi Sayle.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe feel duty-bound to express our solidarity with Professor Miller and to oppose such efforts to crush academic freedom,\u201d the letter stated.<\/p>\n

It says that Miller is the target of \u201cwell-orchestrated efforts\u201d to misrepresent his views \u201cas evidence of anti-Semitism.\u201d<\/p>\n

In February, Miller wrote in a piece<\/a> for The Electronic Intifada that \u201cBritain is in the grip of an assault on its public sphere by the state of Israel and its advocates.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMeaningful conversations about anti-Black racism and Islamophobia have been drowned out by a concerted lobbying campaign targeting universities, political parties, the equalities regulator and public institutions all over the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Miller said that the decision to fire him was \u201ctaken under pressure from the Israel lobby\u201d. The decision, he said, was \u201cdesigned to send a chill down the spines of academics around the world who expose Zionist racism.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Israel_Anti-Semitism_Zionism_and_US-UK_allies"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=243505"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243505\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":243506,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243505\/revisions\/243506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=243505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=243505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=243505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}