Defend Academic Freedom – Defend David Miller – Defend the right to speak out on PALESTINE and ISRAEL

What was David’s crime? Calling for an End to Zionism an Ideology of Racial Supremacy & Apartheid

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The Union of Jewish Students, in conjunction with the far-Right Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, has been running a campaign targeting anti-Zionist academics at a number of universities. To date we know of academics under threat at Bristol, Sussex, Edinburgh, Leeds and Warwick Universities. There may be more.

At Bristol University in February 2017, the CAA waged a similar campaign, this time against Rachel Gould, who is Jewish herself, because of an article she had written in 2011 'Beyond Antisemitism'. The article dealt with how the memory of the Holocaust is used to deflect support for the Palestinians and how groups like the CAA are very much adept at doing just this.

The misnamed Campaign Against Antisemitsm launched a similar campaign to that against David Miller against Rachel Gould

Once again there was a similar hue and cry. Gould argued that it was time to "stop privileging the Holocaust", arguing that the memory of the Nazi genocide was susceptible to "manipulation" by politicians.

Immediately Sir Eric Pickles, as he was then, (later Lord Pickles, President of Conservative Friends of Israel) claimed that Rachel Gould's article was "one of the worst cases of Holocaust denial". Michael Ribbeck in the Bristol Post described this as

'quite frankly ridiculous and inflammatory. Perhaps Sir Eric should read up on the discredited historian David Irving before he starts throwing around accusations and trite soundbites.'

Soon after Rachel Gould left Bristol for Birmingham University. 

David Miller may have been singled out in publicity but this has been a nationwide campaign. To their shame, the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs have been conspicuous by their silence, Corbyn included. Some traitorous Labour MPs like Andrew Gwynne have added their signatories alongside a roll call of racist Tories and Ulster Unionists.

Even more shameful Caroline Lucas, the sole Green MP, who has previously called herself an anti-racist, signed an Open Letter calling on the Vice-Chancellor of Bristol University, Professor Hugh Brady, to dismiss David Miller at the behest of Israel’s Apartheid Lobby.

Although the letter to Brady says ‘You must act now before any further damage is done’ there is no doubt as to the meaning. If Lucas did have any doubt then a meeting of the Education Select Committee should have cleared away the cobwebs in her brain. The Guardian reported that

Jonathan Gullis, MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, asked the government to impose tougher sanctions on universities which do not address accusations of antisemitism. He cited as a further example the investigation into Goldie Osuri at Warwick University, whose speculation on Israel’s role in spreading accusations of antisemitism against the Labour party was cleared on grounds she was exercising her right to free speech.

“We need to start sacking people … until we start bringing that kind of scrutiny and action into our university sector,...  these incidents will keep happening,” Gullis said.

These are the kinds of people Caroline Lucas now holds hands with and whom the Campaign Group -  McDonnell et al, refuse to criticise.

Ray Honeyford - the racist Bradford Headteacher who 'Fat Lump' Pickles and the BNP Supported (the description comes from Alan Duncan's recent book!) 

Caroline Lucas had no problem signing the letter with the racist homophobe, Ian Paisley, the virulently Islamaphobic Bob Blackman and the anti-Roma Lord Eric Pickles, who once gave support to the BNP campaign in Bradford in support of racist headmaster Ray Honeyford. Honeyford had penned an article in the Salisbury Review, a publication bridging the gap between the Tory Right and fascist groups. A sample of Honeyford’s article was this description of Black people:

Cultural enrichment’ is the approved term for the West Indian’s right to create an ear splitting cacophony for most of the night to the detriment of his neighbour’s sanity, or for the Notting Hill Festival whose success or failure is judged by the level of street crime which accompanies it.

Pickles went to the ends of the Earth as Council leader to defend Honeyford’s right to insult Black and Asian parents but he sees no inconsistency in supporting a BNP campaign in Bradford and leading the attack on David Miller for calling for an end to Zionism and stating that Israel and the Union of Jewish Students are using Jewish students as pawns, which they are.

There is a simple reason why the Israeli Embassy funded UJS resents a call for the end of Zionism and that is because UJS, like the JLM which controls UJS, are affiliated to the World Zionist Organisation. The WZO in the words of Ha'aretz has a Land Theft Division. It funds the settlement movement.

UJS is controlled by the JLM. Ella Rose, a past President of UJS was the first Director of the JLM. Luciana Berger was another past President.

The Jewish Labour Movement describes the racist Israeli Labor Party as its 'sister' party

The JLM on its website describe the Israeli Labor Party as its ‘sister party’. The ILP has just gone into coalition with 3 far-Right Zionist parties – Yamina, whose leader Naftali Bennett will be Israel’s new Prime Minister, New Hope led by Gideon Saar, a former Likud Interior Minister who led the campaign to deport Israel’s 40,000 Black refugees and Avigdor Lieberman of Yisrael Beteinu, the new Finance Minister.

Lieberman is a true thug. He was convicted of assaulting a child in the settlement he lives in. He has also called for the drowning of Palestinian prisoners in the Dead Sea.

However he also made another statement, which is in line with a consensus in the Zionist movement stretching from left to to right.  

“The vision I would like to see here is the entrenching of the Jewish and the Zionist state…I very much favour democracy, but when there is a contradiction between democratic and Jewish values, the Jewish and Zionist values are more important.” (Scotsman, October 23, 2006)

This consensus includes the Jewish National Fund which, in response to a High Court ruling in Kadan that it could not refuse to sell or lease land to a non-Jew responded that:

A survey commissioned by KKL-JNF reveals that over 70% of the Jewish population in Israel opposes allocating KKL-JNF land to non-Jews, while over 80% prefer the definition of Israel as a Jewish state, rather than as the state of all its citizens.'

In 2018 this was put into practice with the Jewish Nation State Law, which Netanyahu explicitly stated means that Israel is a state of its Jewish not all of its citizens.

It is Zionist ideology which believes that Israel should be a state of its Jewish rather than all its citizens. It is the ideology of Apartheid. It is the racist ideology that hypocrites like Caroline Lucas, Neil Kinnock, and the Labour and Tory Right support. And of course which the Union of Jewish Students and the JLM support.

David Miller is being attacked, not for anti-Semitism as his critics would have it but for anti-racism and that is why it is incumbent upon everyone to defend him.  I look forward to seeing you tomorrow at the meeting.

Tony Greenstein

Facebook event here: https://bit.ly/3ceU3ep

Speakers include:

- Norman Finkelstein, author, ‘The Holocaust Industry’ 

- Salma Yaqoob, anti-war activist

- Dr. Deepa Driver, union activist and academic

- Moshe Machover, author, expert on Middle East

- Saladin Meckled-Garcia, UCU UCL vice president

- Ilan Pappe, Israeli socialist, University of Exeter 

- Tom Hickey, a leading member of BRICUP 

- Tony Greenstein, blogger, expert on Middle East