‘Hostile foreign state’ behind sacking of Professor David Miller

We understand that – on Thursday, 24 February 2022 – Professor David Miller was notified of a decision of the University of Bristol’s Appeal Panel to uphold the decision of the university’s legal department to sack him on spurious grounds of ‘gross misconduct’.

Support David Miller – a volunteer-led anti-racism campaign, composed of academics, students and independent researchers – has repeatedly expressed concerns that the University of Bristol’s disciplinary processes have been compromised by assets of a hostile foreign state. The State of Israel and its assets in the UK seek to eliminate all critics of Zionism from UK university campuses.

Zionism is the racist ideology that professes a God-given right of European and other Jewish colonisers to occupy and seize Palestinian land, homes and resources.

Professor Miller has been subjected to this censorship campaign because of his research showing that Zionist campaign groups have funded and promoted Islamophobia in the UK and abroad.

The same Zionist extremists hounding Professor Miller recently failed in their campaign to have the Palestinian academic Shahd Abusalama sacked from Sheffield Hallam University. They will continue to face determined resistance from a growing movement of students and academics, fighting back against Zionist extremism and censorship on campuses around the UK.

The Appeal Panel’s capitulation to pressure from Zionist lobby groups – including the State of Israel’s UK lawyers – is an alarming act of subversion and political interference.

Professor Miller will be challenging this decision at an Employment Tribunal.

The Support David Miller campaign believes that this is a litmus test. We encourage everyone who is concerned about this chilling attack on academic freedom and freedom of speech to donate to our crowdfunder.

Professor Miller said:

“I’ve been targeted by a pernicious witch-hunt, led by known assets of the State of Israel in the UK and funded by the dirty money of pro-Israel oligarchs. This is an attempt at entryism and political intimidation.

“The University of Bristol has wilted under this new wave of McCarthyism. The University treated this appeal as a mere formality, with a pre-determined outcome.

“I’ll be challenging the University’s perverse decision at an Employment Tribunal, to help stop our fundamental rights of free expression and academic freedom being further corroded at the behest of a hostile and illegitimate foreign regime.”

Background:

In 2019, Professor Miller gave a lecture on the ‘Five Pillars of Islamophobia’ as part of a module called ‘Harms of the Powerful’. Among those five pillars are ‘parts of the Zionist movement’.

Following the lecture explaining how parts of the Zionist movement promote Islamophobia, the British pro-Israel campaign group, the Community Security Trust, lobbied the University of Bristol to censor him. That complaint was dismissed after a full investigation found that Professor Miller had broken neither any laws nor the university’s rules.

After a speech Professor Miller gave at an online conference in February 2021 – in which he called for ‘an end to Zionism’ and again referenced the role of parts of the Zionist movement in stoking Islamophobia – the pressure campaign reached fever pitch.

The leading elements of the UK’s Israel lobby, and its fellow travellers, were mobilised against Professor Miller, including the: Community Security Trust; Board of Deputies of British Jews; All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism; Jewish Leadership Council; Union of Jewish Students and other pro-Israel groups.

The campaign also relied heavily on pro-Israel student actors, including the current President of Bristol JSoc, Edward Isaacs, Bristol Tab columnist Ben Bloch, Guido Fawkes columnist Sabrina Miller and UJS President Nina Freedman.

During the investigation, it became apparent that the university was taking, with total credulity, its positions in relation to Israel and Zionism from these pro-Israel groups and actors. Bristol’s investigation processes were effectively weaponised to conduct a witch-hunt against Professor Miller for the crime of opposing Zionist racism.

Despite engaging an expensive Queen’s Counsel last year to assess Professor Miller’s remarks, who concluded that his ‘comments did not constitute unlawful speech’, Bristol astonishingly claimed that it took ‘any risk to stifle [academic] freedom seriously’.

That QC report also concluded that Professor Miller’s remarks were neither ‘antisemitic’ nor amounted to ‘discrimination or harassment of a form which threatens to breach the Equality Act 2010’.

1.     For further background on the campaign that has been waged against Professor Miller, please consult our FAQs.

2.     Professor Miller has received a large among of support in the form of open letters, from academics and researchers, Bristol students, Jewish people and Muslims.

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