Bristol University professor David Miller just won't go away. He's the fanatical anti-Zionist who we last heard from in February, with his claim that members of the Bristol University Jewish Society were tools of the Zionist state. Bristol University notably failed to take any action after one of its academics had accused perfectly innocent students, as Daniel Finkelstein put it, of having "signed up to a foreign-backed conspiracy to subvert the country’s politics". Presumably they hoped the matter would be quietly forgotten.
And now he's back, teaching the same old lies:
Professor David Miller is to teach two modules this term despite being under investigation since March after calling the university’s Jewish society “political pawns [used] by a violent, racist foreign regime”.
The Union of Jewish Students (UJS) accused the University of Bristol of assuming his “innocence” and “legitimising the targeted attacks he made towards Jewish students” as the controversial academic looks set to return to work.
Prof Miller was initially placed under investigation after Jewish students said they did not feel safe while he taught at the university.
But module information released for the coming academic year reveals that he is to teach two courses: ‘Understanding terrorism’ and ‘Harms of the powerful’.
UJS said the latter module had been “specifically disavowed by the Jewish community for containing offensive material”.
Leaked lecture slides from the course show Prof Miller classifying a range of British Jewish communal bodies - from the Board of Deputies to the CST - as tools of Israeli foreign policy and causes of Islamophobia.
Furious Bristol JSoc representatives have now written to the university’s School of Policy Studies to demand its director, Esther Dermot, “stand with and protect” Jewish students.
Prof Miller teaches sociology at the university and is a leading member of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media, a group slammed as “apologists for Assad” by The Times.
He was suspended from the Labour Party last year after claiming that Sir Keir Starmer had taken “Zionist” money.
Earlier this year he called for “the end of Zionism” and said Israel “is trying to exert its will all over the world”, leading to a hate crime investigation from Avon and Somerset police and denunciation by 550 academics including Simon Schama and Simon Sebag Montefiore.
If he'd said something truly outrageous - like, for instance, that biological sex matters, or that women don't have penises - he'd have been out on his ear. Teaching hatred against Jews and against Israel, though, is not a problem at Bristol University.
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