The Leverhulme Trust, a philanthropy in London which provides grants and fellowships to scholars across a range of disciplines, has launched an investigation of one of its early career fellows who works in philosophy at the University of Cambridge.

The philosopher in question is Nathan Cofnas, whom readers may recall from this episode.

(photo via Varsity)

In response to blog posts he recently wrote and which were reported on by Varsity, a Cambridge student newspaper, the Leverhulme Trust announced on Monday:

The Trust has become aware of claims made in a blog by Nathan Cofnas, Early Career Fellow employed at the University of Cambridge. As a result, we have begun an urgent investigation. The grant provided was not for research into the relationship between race and IQ. The views expressed in the blog are in no way those of the Leverhulme Trust. We are very clear that racism of any and all forms is abhorrent.

Cofnas appears to believe that the future of humanity depends on people agreeing with him that the white race (update: or maybe the East Asian… race?) is genetically superior to others, at least in regard to intelligence.

If you’ll permit me some editorializing about this….

On second thought, it’s not worth it.

You can read Varsity‘s account here.

Comments are closed, because I hate free speech and am afraid of the truth, etc., etc.

UPDATE (2/15/24): I ought to have commented on the academic freedom aspect of this when I posted. A reader reminded me of this, hence this update. So, to be clear: to revoke Cofnas’ fellowship or to fire him from Cambridge on the basis of his blog posts would be a blatant violation of his academic freedom, and, in my opinion, were Leverhulme or Cambridge to do so, they’d be wronging Cofnas. Of course, to make this point is not to defend any of Cofnas’s views, which, to put it in a rather understated way, strike me as utterly bizarre. Nor is it to comment on the matter of whether he should have been awarded the fellowship and position in the first place.

The post Leverhulme Trust to Investigate One of Its Philosophy Fellows at Cambridge (updated) first appeared on Daily Nous.

Red Tories’ chaos deepens as second candidate dumped over Israel comments – and party’s Westminster polling falls

The second parliamentary candidate to be suspended by Labour in a matter of days for ‘antisemitic’ comments was given a gushing endorsement by a senior Jewish Labour Movement figure.

Graham Jones trumpeted the backing of Ruth Smeeth – now Anderson – last year while he was seeking selection to stand for Labour in Haslingden and Hyndburn. She referred to him as a ‘true ally’ in her fight against ‘antisemitism’:

Oops.

Anderson was one of the most prominent faces in the creation and propagation of the so-called ‘Labour antisemitism crisis’ after falsely accusing left activist Marc Wadsworth of claiming she was part of a ‘media conspiracy – video evidence showed he had said no such thing, but that didn’t stop her storming out of a meeting and marching with a ‘lynch mob‘ that to the party hearing that drove Wadsworth out of Labour:

Author and investigative journalist Asa Winstanley wrote last year:

Ruth Smeeth MP had good reason to delete the post [claiming Black activist Marc Wadsworth had used an antisemitic smear toward her at a Labour event] —the idea that Marc Wadsworth had said she was part of a “media conspiracy” was completely untrue. Importantly, he did not make any kind of anti-Jewish comment. In fact, he didn’t refer to Smeeth’s Jewishness in any way—he later clarified that he hadn’t even known she was Jewish. Wadsworth replied to Smeeth’s false allegations in a statement the same day, describing them as “poisonous slander.” He said her claims played “into a Jewish media conspiracy theory that I utterly reject and have never espoused.”

Wadsworth’s instincts about Smeeth “working hand in hand” with the right-wing press to overthrow Corbyn were totally correct. Only three days earlier Smeeth had played her own minor part in the coup attempt against Corbyn. She announced on Twitter “with a heavy heart” that she was resigning from a junior role in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. It was timed to coincide with a series of resignations by dozens of hostile MPs, in a failed attempt to force him to resign. They came after the no-confidence vote tabled by Margaret Hodge and the firing of Hilary Benn, another right-wing shadow minister Corbyn had fruitlessly attempted to bring on board as part of his abortive “big church” approach.

But unlike Wadsworth and the others, as a journalist reporting on the UK’s pro-Israel lobby, I happened to be pretty well acquainted with Smeeth’s work.

I wrote a story about her in 2014, when she was selected as a Labour candidate. I did so because of two key facts, ignored by a media that would later pay her such close attention: she had worked as a spin doctor for the Israel lobby and had acted (wittingly or otherwise) as a secret Labour Party source for the US government.

Anderson, who was once described in a leaked US embassy communication as someone to ‘strictly protect’ who had provided inside information on then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s election strategy, has also smeared left-wing Jews who support Palestinian human rights – and said, at about the same time as she was endorsing Jones, that pro-Palestinian Jews should ignored by the UK media and if they didn’t like it, ‘tough’. She went on to smear left Jewish group JVL, forcing the BBC to publish a belated ‘correction’ for not challenging the accusation.

Other JLM activists similarly have egg on their faces after jumping in to try to get Rochdale voters to back Azhar Ali, the other suspended candidate – only a couple of weeks before the Rochdale by-election – despite his ‘antisemitic’ comments about Israel:

On the left, the JLM's timeline right now, with key figures explaining why it's right to have some tolerance when someone on your own side mucks up.

On the right, the distant past of… 2021, when the JLM said "serious" zero tolerance was expelling left groups. pic.twitter.com/HOaI4bfHDD

— Alex Nunns (@alexnunns) February 12, 2024

Ali was set to lose the by-election badly even before being officially dumped last night, having featured in videos of him being told to leave by voters he tried to canvass because of his association with Keir Starmer’s support for Israel’s genocide, in stark contrast to the warm welcome widely given to pro-Palestinian candidate George Galloway.

For his part Jones, before he lost his seat, was one of two Labour MPs who sat drinking on the Commons terrace with disgraced right-wing activist Ian McKenzie, who had made comments about the rape and beheading of senior Labour MP Emily Thornberry. Jones was then taken to task by local members for his support for McKenzie.

The chaos of the Starmer regime and its propensity for shooting itself in the foot continues to grow – as well as its complicity in apartheid Israel’s genocidal slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Gaza. Starmer’s red Tory party has fallen three points in the polls, despite the Tories’ ongoing disaster, and has lost half or more of its support among Muslim voters, as well as being rejected by those opposed to Israel’s genocide.

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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

https://medium.com/media/d59840c1e3f6f99dbe7b2dc0f7892690/href

Mass media outlets like The Guardian, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have been allowing the publication of some amazingly racist pieces these last few days. All are directed at middle easterners and those of middle eastern descent, just as the western empire drops more and more bombs on more and more countries in the middle east.

On Monday The Guardian published a political cartoon which would be indistinguishable from Nazi propaganda of the 1930s, except that it happens to depict a Muslim instead of a Jew. The cartoon features Iranian leader Ali Khamenei holding puppet strings to so-called Iranian proxy groups in the middle east like the Houthis, Hezbollah and Hamas, in exactly the same way Nazis used to depict Jews as malignant puppet masters manipulating world affairs.

Compare this:

to Nazi propaganda about Jews puppeting world leaders during the lead-up to the Holocaust:

To this day it’s understood by the mainstream press that it’s unacceptable to depict anyone of the Jewish faith as any kind of puppet-master figure in any context at all. Fox News, the Dutch paper De Volkskrant, the Indian Bharatiya Janata Party and right wing political cartoonist Ben Garrison have all come under fire in recent years for depicting Jewish people in that way, so it’s safe to say that if The Guardian had published a similar cartoon about Israeli influence featuring an Israeli leader it would have been a massive scandal subject to international outcry.

In fact the bar is quite a bit lower for what qualifies as an outrageous racist trope when it comes to criticism of Israel. Mainstream platforms like The Guardian, The New York Times and the Sunday Times have been pressured to remove cartoons critical of Israel which are far less clearly anti-semitic than cartoons about sinister puppet masters. In 2014 the Sydney Morning Herald was pressured to remove and apologize for a cartoon which was labeled anti-semitic because it featured “a grotesque stereotype of a Jew using a remote-control device to blow up houses and people in Gaza,” something that for the last four months has been a daily occurance and an objective fact of life.

There is zero chance that The Guardian’s editors would have even for a second entertained the idea of publishing such a cartoon about Israeli leaders in the year 2024, but apparently publishing the exact same sort of rehashed Nazi propaganda about Iranian leaders is perfectly fine.

Ben Norton on Twitter: "The NY Times is comparing victims of US-Israeli genocide and colonialism to insects.This is the contemporary equivalent of Nazi rhetoric that dehumanized their victims as cockroaches. Except now fascist ideology is so mainstream in the US, NYT columnist Thomas Friedman uses it. https://t.co/6pBTkoesrw / Twitter"

The NY Times is comparing victims of US-Israeli genocide and colonialism to insects.This is the contemporary equivalent of Nazi rhetoric that dehumanized their victims as cockroaches. Except now fascist ideology is so mainstream in the US, NYT columnist Thomas Friedman uses it. https://t.co/6pBTkoesrw

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who has never met a middle eastern war that didn’t physically arouse him, was somehow permitted to publish an article titled “Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom” which compares middle easterners to insects and parasites.

There is of course no meaningful analysis in Friedman’s piece; he’s literally just comparing countries he likes to cool animals and countries he doesn’t like to yucky bugs. Hamas is a spider. Iran is a “parasitoid wasp”, and Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq are the caterpillars it lays its eggs in. Netanyahu is a lemur, hopping side to side based on the political demands of the moment, and the United States? You guys, get this: the United States is a lion. Rooooar!

Again, there is no mainstream western outlet in existence who would permit a columnist to compare Israelis to insects or parasites, and rightly so — it’s exactly the type of dehumanizing language was used by the Nazis to pave the way to the Holocaust. But comparing Muslim populations is a-okay in the eyes of the western press.

“We have no counterstrategy that safely and efficiently kills the wasp without setting fire to the whole jungle,” Friedman writes, as though this is a perfectly sane and normal thing to print in the most influential newspaper in the western world.

“Sometimes I contemplate the Middle East by watching CNN. Other times, I prefer Animal Planet,” Friedman concludes, apparently never having been told that contemplating the middle east by watching either is an embarrassing admission.

And that’s it. That’s the extent of the analysis here from mister Thomas L Friedman, who has won no fewer than three Pulitzers for this kind of baby-brained schtick. And if that isn’t an indictment of the state of western journalism, nothing is.

Abdullah H. Hammoud on Twitter: "It's 2024 and the @WSJ still pushes out this type of garbage. Reckless. Bigoted. Islamophobic. Dearborn is one of the greatest American cities in our nation. - fastest growing city in MI- home to the #1 travel destination in MI (Greenfield Village / Henry Ford Museum)-... pic.twitter.com/81iQGGKWPx / Twitter"

It's 2024 and the @WSJ still pushes out this type of garbage. Reckless. Bigoted. Islamophobic. Dearborn is one of the greatest American cities in our nation. - fastest growing city in MI- home to the #1 travel destination in MI (Greenfield Village / Henry Ford Museum)-... pic.twitter.com/81iQGGKWPx

Not to be outdone, The Wall Street Journal has published an article by Steven Stalinsky titled “Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital” about the Michigan city which is home to the largest per capita Muslim population in the United States.

In recent decades Dearborn saw a wave of immigration from Palestine and from Muslim-majority nations that the US is currently bombing like Syria, Iraq and Yemen, and apparently Mr Stalinsky finds it outrageous and scandalous that such a population would be opposing Israel’s actions in Gaza at this time. He frets over a Palestinian American Islamist cleric calling President Biden a “senile pharoah”, which I think we can all agree is hilarious.

Stalinsky runs a think tank called the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which was literally founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer. Pro-Palestine activist and academic Norman Finkelstein has accused MEMRI of using “the same sort of propaganda techniques as the Nazis,” and even brazenly unprincipled empire propagandist Brian Whitaker has written that MEMRI “poses as a research institute when it’s basically a propaganda operation.”

In the last few days The Wall Street Journal has also published editorial board pieces with demented headlines like “Chicago Votes for Hamas” after the Chicago City Council voted to support a ceasefire in Gaza, and “The U.N.’s War on Israel” about the since-discredited narrative that some UNRWA staff are known to have participated in the October 7 attack.

And I must say it sure is an interesting coincidence how all this mass media demonizing and dehumanizing of Muslim populations is happening at the exact same time the western empire is raining military explosives upon nations full of Muslims. It’s almost like the western press are trying to manufacture consent for the military aggressions of western governments. It’s almost like they always have.

__________________

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Prof David Miller wins unfair dismissal case vs Bristol Uni

In what his lawyers have described as ‘a significant triumph’, Professor David Miller has won a ‘landmark’ decision today in one of the most closely monitored Employment Tribunal cases of recent years.

Prof. Miller successfully claimed discrimination on the basis that his philosophical belief that Zionism is inherently racist, imperialist, and colonial is a ‘protected characteristic’ under the Equality Act 2010, alongside a finding of unfair dismissal.

This judgment establishes for the first time ever that anti-Zionist beliefs are protected in the workplace.

In a comprehensive 108-page judgment, Regional Employment Judge Rohan Pirani of Bristol Employment Tribunal ruled in Miller’s, establishing that he had experienced discrimination based on his philosophical belief and had been unfairly dismissed by Bristol University.

David Miller is an academic sociologist specialising in state and corporate propaganda, public relations and lobbying. He was employed by the University of Bristol as a Professor of Political Sociology and continued working for the University until he was dismissed on 1 October 2021 after coordinated pressure from pro-Israel groups, despite two separate lawyer-led inquiries for the university finding that he had said and done nothing antisemitic.

The case has drawn attention to the challenges faced by academics and individuals advocating for justice, fairness, and equality in Palestine. It also underscores the issue of the weaponising of antisemitism by supporters of Israel to stifle discussions on Zionism, the political belief in a Jewish right to establish a state in Israel.

Rahman Lowe’s Zillur Rahman, who represented Miller, said Miller would be seeking ‘maximum compensation’:

This is a landmark case and marks a pivotal moment in the history of our country for those who believe in upholding the rights of Palestinians. The timing of this Judgment will be welcomed by many who at present are facing persecution in their workplaces for speaking out against the crimes of the Israeli state, and the genocide taking place in Gaza.

I am delighted for our client, David, who has been vindicated. His courage in fighting against the vicious campaign that was waged against him by Zionists within and outside the university, now sees him as a trailblazer for others that will follow. What is interesting about this case is that when David expressed his beliefs about Zionism which led to him being dismissed, they weren’t that widely known. However, the genocide Israel is committing at present, has woken the world up to the very belief David holds and was manifesting, which is that Zionism is inherently racist and must be opposed.

Whilst I am happy for David, it is clear that what took place has had, and will continue to have an impact on his career and therefore, we will be seeking for maximum compensation.

David Miller said:

I am extremely pleased that the Tribunal has concluded that I was unfairly and wrongfully dismissed by the University of Bristol. I am also very proud that we have managed to establish that anti-Zionist views qualify as a protected belief under the UK Equality Act. This was the most important reason for taking the case and I hope it will become a touchstone precedent in all the future battles that we face with the racist and genocidal ideology of Zionism and the movement to which it is attached.

The determination that I was sacked for my anti-Zionist views is a huge vindication of my case all the way through this process. The University of Bristol maintained that I was sacked because Zionist students were offended by my various remarks, but it was plain from the evidence of its own witnesses that this was untrue, and it was the anti-Zionist nature of my comments which was the decisive factor. I also want to note that this verdict is a massive vindication of the approach I have taken throughout this period which is to say that a genocidal and maximalist ideology like Zionism can only be effectively confronted by a maximalist anti-Zionism. Apologies, debate, and defensiveness of the sort illustrated by many on the left, and even in the Palestine Solidarity movement will not work. The Zionist movement cannot be negotiated with. It must be defeated. I want to thank the court, Regional Employment Judge Pirani and the two panellists Ms Kaye and Mr Launder for the professional way that proceedings were conducted.

I want to thank my legal team Zillur Rahman of Rahman Lowe and Zac Sammour of 11KBW for their strong commitment to defending the right to be anti-Zionist from the outset.

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