Hostile influence campaign nukes prof – #27

October 5th, 2021

Awake Goy

Lots of content this week, so we’ll just get straight to it.

The biggest story right now is that Bristol university has fired Professor David Miller, for the crime of opposing Israeli racism. Read my report from Friday here.

With Corbyn taken care of, Miller had been the Israel lobby’s Public Enemy Number 1 for the whole of 2021. The Zionist movement is today celebrating the disposal of its single most vocal opponent in British academia.

Founder of Spinwatch, Miller is a sociology professor and an expert in corporate and state lobbies, propaganda and Islamophobia. For the last decade he has led the authorship of and published a whole series of reports about the Israel lobby.

That made him many enemies in that same lobby, which has relentlessly deployed its usual defamation strategy against him: anti-Semitism. This is a perfect illustration of the reality of Miller’s argument about the influence of the Israel lobby in public life.

His sacking is a very serious defeat for both Palestinian rights defenders and free speech campaigners.

For all the dreary cant about “cancel culture” perpetuated by the capitalist media in this country, Miller’s firing for opposing Israel and its lobby is the perfect illustration of what US group Palestine Legal has called “The Palestine Exception to Free Speech”.

I wrote a series of articles in the spring on the Israel lobby campaign against Miller, which was initiated by former Bristol university student turned Guido Fawkes journalist Sabrina Miller. Also involved were right-wing former Labour MP Ian Austin, a former Knesset intern and convicted criminal Jonathan Hoffman.

As is usually the case, this Zionist movement smear campaign was coordinated and directed by Israel itself. A hostile foreign government now has an effective veto on who can and can’t teach on British campuses.

Read about some of the public figures supporting Miller here and his opinion piece for The Electronic Intifada here.

I wrote this piece for my Middle East Monitor column. It is all about recent events in Congress, where Palestinian American lawmaker Rashida Tlaib was smeared as anti-Semitic for the crime of accurately describing Israel as an apartheid regime.

I wrote:

The bipartisan vitriol hurled against Rashida Tlaib demonstrated in the vilest possible way that the pro-Israel lobby cannot tolerate even the slightest degree of dissent. It will accept nothing less than total capitulation. And once you’ve capitulated, it will carry on kicking you, just to make sure you stay down

The latest episode of The Electronic Intifada Podcast is out now, and its a particularly brilliant one, if I do say so myself.

Our guest once again is Professor Joseph Massad, who teaches modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University in New York City. Our topic was the Palestinian Authority and the history of Palestinian collaborators with Zionist colonialism.

Here’s an extract:

the Israelis thought the best thing to do instead of finding an anti-PLO, Palestinian collaborating leadership, why not transform the PLO itself into an anti-PLO collaborationist leadership? Because this way we could bank on its historic legitimacy … the PLO in the ’60s and ’70s, and ’80s was seen as not unlike all these other liberation movements from settler-colonialism, whether it’s the ANC, whether it was SWAPO in Namibia, FRELIMO in Mozambique, the MPLA in Angola … ZANU and ZAPU in Rhodesia – so there’s a great sort of reputation that these revolutionary groups had because of the struggle that they had engaged in to liberate their peoples from settler-colonialism …

I think there’s probably one prominent precedent [to the Palestinian Authority] which is UNITA … Upon the liberation of Angola, UNITA switched sides … from fighting the Portuguese for the liberation of Angola, as [liberation movement] the MPLA took over the country after independence, UNITA began to receive funding and training by apartheid South Africa and the US to undermine the revolution and the new independent country of Angola and … launched an actual war, and raids on Angola

You can watch the whole thing in the YouTube video above, or listen via your favourite podcast app. You can go to the episode page on our website to listen to the audio version. We are now also doing full transcripts, so you can read that on the page.

Joseph Massad is a true radical intellectual — in some ways he is the Edward Said of our era. It was an honour to host him once again.

I appeared on Al Jazeera Arabic a few weeks ago, along with Palestinian academic and BDS campaigner Haidar Eid, to talk about the Palestinian prisoner escape.

Watch here if you know Arabic.

Finally, here is a new interview I did as a guest with Mnar Adley on the Mintpress News podcast. Mnar asked me about the Labour “anti-Semitism crisis” and the purging of former leader Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters. It’s a long discussion and we go into some depth on the topic, so check out the video.