The University of Bristol has fired one of its professors over his explicitly anti-Zionist standpoints and opposition to the Israeli regime and its powerful US and UK-backed worldwide lobby.
“Professor David Miller is no longer employed by the University of Bristol,” the university said in a statement on Friday.
Miller “did not meet the standards of behavior we expect from our staff,” it added brusquely.
Reflecting on the decision, the Electronic Intifada, an online news outlet, called Miller “a leading UK critic of Israel and its lobby,” who had fallen prey to years of smear campaign by the Israeli lobby.
It cited the academic as saying he would be “fighting it all the way” against the campaign by appealing the decision.
An online countercampaign that has been fighting in his favor said the university’s decision was “designed to send a chill down the spines of academics around the world who expose Zionist racism.”
Zionism is a well-known strand of racism that is the official ideology of the Israeli regime and its hardline supporters. Armed with Western political and military support, the Israeli regime has been using the ideology to expel Palestinians and others from their homelands across the region for decades.
The move by the British university came amid a campaign by Western governments to wrongfully brand all instances of anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism. France has already illegalized anti-Zionism under the pretext that it serves to oppose Jews and their religion.
For his part, Miller, an academic expert in propaganda and political pressure groups, also said “the university has embarrassed itself” with the decision. Writing for Electronic Intifada, he had once regretted that “Britain is in the grip of an assault on its public sphere” by the Israeli regime “and its advocates.”
More than 300 academics and intellectuals, including Noam Chomsky, Palestinian scholar and activist Sami al-Arian, and dissident Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, have signed an open letter in his defense.