Rights and Accountability 26 November 2021
David Miller has now been exonerated twice. (Support David Miller/Bristol university)
A second University of Bristol report exonerated Professor David Miller of anti-Semitism, a leaked document shows.
Written by a leading UK lawyer, the document concludes that “there is no formal case to answer against Professor Miller” and that he had not “exceeded the boundaries of unacceptable speech.”
Despite this, Bristol university fired Miller in October, after a long campaign against him by Israel and its lobby.
David Miller is one of the UK’s leading experts on the Israel lobby, Islamophobia and the Zionist movement.
The leaked document, obtained by The Electronic Intifada, is dated May 2021. As we revealed in October, an earlier report by the same lawyer also exonerated Miller of anti-Semitism.
You can read the new document in full below, with the lawyer’s name redacted.
A Bristol university spokesperson declined to comment substantively on the leaked document, citing the confidentiality of Miller’s appeal against his dismissal. The university also asserted that it wanted the process to be “treated with integrity.”
The university’s registrar and secretary Lucinda Parr then followed up with a demand that The Electronic Intifada reveal the source of the leaked document, which this publication declined to do.
The second report was commissioned specifically to investigate a public talk Miller gave on 13 February and an article he wrote for The Electronic Intifada a week later.
In the article Miller argued that “Britain is in the grip of an assault on its public sphere by the state of Israel and its advocates.”
It detailed how the Zionist campaign against Miller was only one part of a larger push by Israel and its lobby to impose their will in the UK. The Electronic Intifada thoroughly fact checked the article in our usual manner.
The newly leaked lawyer’s report concludes that the article was not anti-Semitic as “defined to include the manifestation of hatred, discrimination, prejudice or hostility against Jews as Jews, or Jewish institutions as Jewish institutions.”
It also stated the article had not exceeded “the boundaries of acceptable speech.”
Elsewhere in the report the lawyer clarifies that “acceptable speech” was defined in their terms of reference from the university as “unacceptable in the sense that [Miller’s statements] are anti-Semitic or amount to or involve discrimination or harassment of a form which threatens to breach the Equality Act 2010. I have concluded that they are not.”
Attacked by Israel lobbyists
The main thrust of the complaint against Miller related to a talk he gave as part of a Labour Against the Witchhunt conference on 13 February, as well as subsequent hostile media coverage.
In that talk he argued that the Zionist movement and the Israeli state are enemies of the left and that he had been “attacked and complained about” by the head of Bristol university’s Jewish society.
Israel lobby groups claimed these statements were anti-Semitic, but Bristol’s lawyer disagreed.
The lawyer stated that there was no evidence that Miller’s use of the words “Zionism” and “Israeli state” were code words for “Jews” and as such his talk did not express “hostility towards or hatred of Jews as Jews.”
The lawyer explained that “the statement that Professor Miller had been ‘attacked and complained about by the head of the Bristol JSoc (the Jewish Society) along with the President of the Union of Jewish Students’ is a statement of fact.”
The JSoc president is Edward Isaacs, a right-wing pro-Israel campaigner. Isaacs took part in the elite “Israel Fast Track Program,” which indoctrinates British Jewish schoolchildren by creating what it calls a “lifetime of connection” with Israel.
Bristol’s lawyer explained that Isaacs’ complaint was not his initiative and was actually “made in conjunction with the Community Security Trust,” a pro-Israel lobby group.
As a Bristol university student, it would appear that Isaacs became the complainant after the CST was rebuffed on the basis that the university had no “formal process for responding to complaints from third parties.”
Fired for factual statements
The CST has deep connections to the state of Israel itself, including even its deadly Mossad spy agency.
The lawyer says that Miller’s statement that Bristol JSoc and its parent group the Union of Jewish Students are formal members of the Zionist movement “is a statement of fact which appears to be accurate and about which I do not accept that there is any basis for categorizing it as anti-Semitic.”
As The Electronic Intifada reported in October, none of the complaints against Miller were made by any of his students. They were purely political in nature but packaged as concern about “anti-Semitism,” based on the false premise that opposition to Zionism – Israel’s racist official ideology – is the same as anti-Jewish prejudice.
The second report by the lawyer backs up this point, stating that Miller had not even been accused of discriminating against students or treating them unfairly: “It is not said, for example, that he has graded students unfairly because they are Jewish, or members of Bristol JSoc, [or] even because they are advocates of Zionism or Israel.”
The lawyer found that Miller had no case to answer, because any lawsuit threatened against the university by the complainants would have been likely to fail.
“It is unlikely that a claim of harassment would succeed on the basis that the mere continued presence of Professor Miller at the university violated the dignity of one or more Jewish (or Zionist, or Israeli) students,” the lawyer wrote.
In other words, Miller’s opponents want his political views censored under the guise of concern for supposed anti-Semitism. They wanted him gone, launched a political campaign to have him fired and succeeded.
Tags
- David Miller
- University of Bristol
- Edward Isaacs
- Union of Jewish Students
- United Jewish Israel Appeal
- Community Security Trust
- Mossad
Comments
Miller - my summary statement
Permalink Chris Friel replied on
Thanks for that. I had just put this out, and now I will read the doc to see what needs updating:
https://www.academia.edu/62482...
Reinstated
Permalink Guy replied on
David Miller should now be reinstated as professor at the university with full pay including all back pay
along with a public apology by the university .Period.
let the facts speak for themselves
Permalink tom hall replied on
To the Electronic Intifada, well done in obtaining the documents exonerating David Miller and exposing the fraudulence underlying his dismissal, which I hope will soon be proven in a court of law. He must be restored to his post and the hack responsible for this fiasco defenestrated from Bristol's administration- sorry, management. Finally, let this deplorable incident be a catalyst for debate aimed at upholding academic standards, defending freedom of speech, and proclaiming the rights of the Palestinian people to present their case before today's students and tomorrow's decision makers.
Report
Permalink Frank Dallas replied on
Yes, of course the report exonerates him, just as any dispassionate examination of the grounds on which thousands have been suspended or expelled from Labour would show them in almost all cases not to have engaged in anti-Semitism. It seems you are five times more likely to be disciplined by Labour if you are Jewish. That's Starmer making Labour safe for Jews. What's going on is a classic example of what so troubled Orwell: the expulsion of objectivity. The lie becomes truth and that truth then becomes history. There is a nice example in one of his As I Please pieces: he had reviewed several books on events in Burma which he had witnessed. The books were all inaccurate. He had also had sight of three manuscripts about the same events which were much more reliable. All three had been turned down by publishers on the grounds the "big public" wasn't interested. Thus, the false view was in print and the truer ones suppressed. This is not rare, but the anti-Semitism nonsense is an extreme example because Israel is an extreme State. The average ten-year old can distinguish between criticism of Zionism and the Israeli State and hatred of Jews, but the entire MSM wilfully fails to do so. Make no mistake, they know just what they're doing. They are siding with wealth and power and the suborning of democracy, and they are doing it with no sense of shame. The purpose is very simple: to keep the world safe for billionaires. The common folk must not be permitted to make the decisions and their interests have to come a long way after those of the rich. That's why Corbyn had to be traduced because, for all his faults, he is genuinely on the side of the common folk, equal rights and an alternative to capitalism. David Miller has got caught up in the cogs of this vicious, fascistic machine. He's a decent man and a good intellectual, which is why they see him as an enemy; because they hate decency and intellectual honesty.