Campus war for Israel - #36
Trained by Israel and its lobby, Edward Isaacs played a key role in the firing of David Miller.
Before I take a break for Christmas (full details below) here’s a round-up of some great journalism and writing which I recommend you read.
First up, Kit Klarenberg has written a second piece for us over at The Electronic Intifada about the pro-Zionist students at Bristol university behind the successful campaign to have leading academic David Miller fired.
This one focuses on Edward Isaacs, the head of the university’s Jewish Society. Isaacs has been given a national (and indeed, international) platform to falsely claim that he was bullied by Professor Miller as part of some dastardly anti-Semitic plot. Not only was this an outright lie, but Miller was absolutely correct in his point that Israel uses willing Zionist activists like Isaacs as an extension of their overseas influence campaigns.
It turns out that Isaacs was not just some poor innocent bullied Jewish student, but a well trained pro-Israel propagandist. He had been recruited and groomed into the Zionist movement while still a schoolboy at the prestigious Haberdashers’ Boys’ private school (annual fees: more than £21,000).
Lots more in the full piece, which you can read here.
This was the second in a series about the anti-Palestinian activists on campus who fronted the successful smear campaign against David Miller. If you missed it at the time, you should also check out Kit’s piece about Sabrina Miller, the liberal Zionist turned right-wing journalist who also played a major role in deposing Professor David Miller.
Next, do read Joseph Massad’s latest article. Massad is professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University in New York and probably the world’s leading Palestinian intellectual. He’s working on an upcoming book which I think will be a major publishing event. His recent article about Keir Starmer’s supine genuflection to the Israel lobby is also well worth reading.
His latest piece, which came out on Thursday, is a fascinating look at the history and present brutal reality of French settler-colonialism in Kanaky — the island nation known to French colonists and settlers as “New Caledonia”. It contains a lot of hidden history which I personally knew almost nothing about until reading this article. It’s a reminder of the validity of Massad’s overall general thesis: that Israeli settler-colonialism in Palestine is by no means unique or different in the long (and ongoing) history of European colonialism.
I should do a post listing my top podcasts one day, but for now, definitely one of favourite shows is The East is a Podcast, Sina Rahmani’s brilliant mashup of anti-imperialist politics, audio experimentation and train-of-thought ranting. You should definitely subscribe and (if you can) become a donor via his Patreon. As a long-time subscriber I can attest that it’s well worth the (very modest) price of admission.
Do listen to this amazing recent episode featuring my EI colleague Nora Barrows-Friedman with Justin Podur and Jon Elmer discussing the current state of journalism in the world. A classic episode.
Finally, I recommend this excellent piece by Joshua Cho over at veteran media watchdog site FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting). It’s about the COVID-19 pandemic and how right-wing Republicans in the US are misusing the questionable concept of “natural immunity” to basically prescribe a brutal libertarian regime of letting the coronavirus rip with no controls (the same could be said of much of the Tory party on this side of the pond).
Cho convincingly argues that it’s a myth that post-infection immunity is superior to vaccine induced immunity (which is actually just as “natural,” since they work by stimulating our bodies’ natural immune response). Even the single Israeli paper which looked at one particular variant of the coronavirus and suggested post-infection immunity could be more effective, also found that the best protection was in people who had had both post-infection immunity and the vaccine.
My Work This Week
In case you missed it in your inbox, I wrote this piece for my paid Substack subscribers about a recent anti-Chinese media fabrication and dug into its origins.
Check it out in the link above. Upgrade your subscription to the paid option to sustain this free weekly newsletter and access the entire archive of locked posts.
In my Middle East Monitor column this week I examine the Bristol university situation and place it in the wider context:
The firing of Miller is a severe blow to the concept of academic freedom in this country. It means that Israel – acting through its agents in the UK – now has, to a certain extent, a veto on who can and cannot teach on British campuses. The consequences of this are chilling.
But, predictably, the fake, right-wing "free speech" brigade has absolutely nothing to say about all this. They only seem to care about ridiculous culture-war issues and the (habitually exaggerated) threat of so-called cancel culture.
But what US group Palestine Legal has accurately dubbed the "Palestine exception to free speech" is increasingly spreading to the UK.
Christmas break
I’ll be taking two weeks off for the Christmas break, so this will be the last edition of the newsletter for 2021. It will return 11 January.
It seems the Omicron variant is about to hit the UK with full force and Christmas could well end up being just as cancelled this year as it was in 2020. This is a worrying time for us all.
Nonetheless I wish all my readers a happy holidays and Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it. I hope you manage to safely spend some downtime with your loved ones.
May 2022 be a better year than the last.
