Academic Corruption, the Israel Lobby, and 9/11 or, Why I have resigned from my emeritus status at the University of Sussex
by Kees van der Pijl
March 2019
On 3 November 2018, in reply to a Twitter message summing up a series of crimes
ascribed to ‘Saudis’, beginning with their alleged responsibility for bringing down the
Twin Towers, I posted, ‘Not Saudis, Israelis brought down the Twin Towers with help
from Zionists in US Govt’.
This was picked up by self-professed Jewish and pro-Israel organizations denouncing it as ‘anti-Semitic’. The accusation was accompanied by the identical demand of practically all complainants to strip me of my status as professor emeritus of the University of Sussex. The comments were duly reported in the Daily Mail, the Independent, and Russian Sputnik, and possibly others. No mention was
made of the many supporting reactions, often accompanied by new documentary evidence and by the important enjoinder that the university should investigate, if anything, the claim being made, not the person making it.
Of course there is no denying that anti-Semites are roaming social media too, making it even more unattractive to investigate in depth any issue that involves the state of Israel and the Zionist networks supporting it. The anti-Semitism taboo on investigating the crimes of the Israeli state and in particular, its role in 9/11 and the War on Terror is in fact reinforced by these ‘fellow-travellers’. Yet however
unpleasant their company, the global catastrophe unfolding before our eyes makes it mandatory to investigate its causes and driving forces. 18 years of widening war, around six million dead, (1)
and more and more countries thrown into chaos, should be enough to raise the question,
Who was/is behind all this, beginning with the 9/11 attacks themselves? And who are more entitled than academics to provide an answer? However, universities in Great Britain are no exception to the general trend of corruption that is turning the majority of academics into ‘embedded’ intellectuals, who
like their colleagues in the media, travel with the troops on regime change expeditions (1) and provide intelligence and propaganda. (2)
Staff members are disciplined by precarity, reductions in pay and conditions, ‘peer review’, and dependence on funding, but university managements are kept in line by rewards. As one university newspaper reported during the February 2018 lecturers’ strike over new pension cuts, Vice-Chancellors’ salaries were increasing. It noted that ‘stand out figures …included Sussex’s VC who has a total salary over half a million pounds. (3)
When I was appointed at the University of Sussex in 2000 I was complimented by many with having landed in an institution famous for the space it offered to heterodox scholars. In the appointment procedure I expressed my criticism at the illegal NATO intervention in Yugoslavia then underway in the strongest terms and there was no objection to that, on the contrary. My first research publication at Sussex was a piece placing this intervention in historical perspective. (4)
When I retired, on the other hand, a top NATO official, Jamie Shea, spokesman of the alliance at the time of the Kosovo intervention and meanwhile deputy assistant Secretary-General, had been appointed
visiting lecturer. Following controversy among staff and students, his title was merely changed to ‘visiting practitioner’ (Shea later became ‘External Advisor, Post-graduate curriculum development’, at Sussex).
The growing role of the Israel lobby is even more pronounced. In February 2012, a few months before I retired, an Israel chair was instituted at Sussex (and at a number of other UK universities). Named, in this case, after Yossi Harel, the captain of the ship bringing Jewish settlers to Palestine in 1947 and financed by a group of Israel supporters in the UK, this chair was contested as well. Thus, one informed comment on the Sussex website considered it ‘highly inappropriate and unethical to create this subject at Sussex which will undoubtedly be taught in an indoctrinating and biased fashion. Most of the donors, including Ronald Cohen, Gerald Ronson, Lord Weidenfeld and Leonard Blavatnik all have pro-Israel ties, and a few of them sit on Zionist thinktank boards. How can an impartial study of this area be conducted, which takes into account the plight of the Palestinian people, when all the funding comes
from Zionists?’
More followed. On 13 March 2019, the Weidenfeld Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex was inaugurated at the German embassy in London. Launched in memory of the late Lord Weidenfeld, ‘a long-term supporter of the University of Sussex’s renowned work in German-Jewish studies and founding supporter of its more recently established Chair in Modern Israel studies’, the ViceChancellor, Adam Tickell, noted that ‘enlightening the current and the next generation to the dangers of ignoring the lessons of the past’ (in matters of anti-Semitism) was again urgent. (5)
Since it is hard to imagine socio-economic and political conditions in the contemporary West that would endanger people for just being labelled Jewish (like those existing in central and eastern Europe in the 1930s), today the accusation of anti-Semitism has largely become a way of discrediting anti-Zionism and criticism of the current Israeli regime. That is certainly how the Israeli government sees it. Since
2007, a ‘Hasbara’ forum reporting directly to the Israeli prime minister is entrusted with propagating the ‘positive side’ of the country’s policies, which in many cases have descended into outright criminality, notably in the occupied territories and towards neighbouring states. One specific task of the Hasbara forum (the term means ’enlightenment’) is to denounce university professors and lecturers criticising Israel as anti-Semites. (6)
In the period between 5 February 2019, when I was notified of the procedure against me (which then had been underway for more than two months without notification) and March the first, when I travelled to Sussex to defend myself against this accusation, I further studied the subject, only to find again that the statement I made is a statement of fact. There is no way that my right to speak out on this matter
can be suspended. For the average university management team today, this is an entirely different matter. Unless they came in on other qualifications, they have exchanged their role as scholars for the trajectory that if all goes well, ends with a position as Vice-Chancellor and the remuneration that comes with it. Their concern is not academic freedom, but funding, and at Sussex, the Israel chair and now also the Weidenfeld Institute as a result rule out having anyone criticizing Israel, even when retired, associated with the University.
On 12 March I received a letter listing the following sanctions:
… You are asked to make a public apology on social media, acknowledging the hurt that your actions have caused and distancing yourself formally from anti-Semitism in any form. The wording of this apology must be agreed with the University prior to publication, and may be used by the University for its own purposes.
It was noted that the tweet remains in the public domain and continues to cause offence to some people and bring the University into disrepute; consequently, you are asked to remove the tweet made on 3 November 2018.
You are reminded of the required standards of behaviour for academic title holders, including Emeritus Professors, and advised that should you not comply… by 29 March 2019 then the matter will be referred back to consider whether further action should be taken… In the event of failure to comply, the on-going presence of the tweet in the public domain and your failure to comply with the decision of the Committee could form the basis of a fresh complaint against you, with all possible sanctions being available to the Committee (including removal of the right to use the title of Emeritus Professor).
You are reminded that even in the event that [the measures listed] are complied with in line with the required timescale, this will not prevent the Committee investigating any future complaints about your conduct in line with the Code.
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On 14 March, one day after the inauguration of the Weidenfeld Insitute, I resigned
from my emeritus status in protest, with the following letter to the Vice-Chancellor.
Dear Professor Tickell
I have received the letter dated 12 March 2019 in which I am instructed to
make a public apology for the grief I have caused by my Twitter reply on 3
November 2018 that ‘Israelis blew up the Twin Towers with help from Zionists in
US govt’, retract it, and remove the message itself.
It is also announced in the letter that henceforth I will be monitored in
case new complaints might arise. I can only conclude that neither my written
representation dated 14 February 2019, nor the extensive oral representation I
made in the presence of my wife on 1 March, to what I take was the Senior Management
Group, have made any impact in the judgement of what I now understand was/is
the [Academic Promotion, Advancement and Titles Committee].
As I have tried to make clear in the two representations, the University has
conducted a procedure of which I was only informed after almost three months,
in which various officers of the University were involved and a vote was taken
among the members of the Department. Not unexpectedly after that vote, news of
the procedure against me was making the rounds well beyond Sussex.
The vote was taken in December without a regulation being available, and the
regulation on which the decision of the committee is now based, was written
after the fact and applied retrospectively. I will not mention again that for
seven years now I have been active in the fight against the Far Right and the
racism on which it thrives, and the insult that the accusation of anti-Semitism
means for me personally.
I conceded in the oral representation that my comment may have been shocking
for those who
believe that ‘9/11’ was the work of Osama bin Laden and 19 Arab hijackers. I
also made clear that had the University asked me right away to clarify I would
have done that without further delay.
However, as I have studied the matter closely and in context, on the basis
of an extensive list of
sources, I cannot retract it. As a scholar I must stand by the facts I discover
in the course of my work. Never in my
time as a researcher in Amsterdam or Sussex have I been forced to change any conclusions
of scholarly work, and I will not now accept any restrictions on my academic
freedom either.
Since in the APATC letter, there is no further mention of the University
values listed in the
December 2018 Code of Practice, such as 10 (e), promising support for those
having the courage to change and be bold, and 14, the right to present
‘unpopular points of view’, I must conclude that from now on, should I retain
the emeritus title, I would not be free to conduct my research in
freedom, as article 14 claims to guarantee.
Therefore I resign from my emeritus status. I do so in protest over the
treatment by a University that I have always felt a deep loyalty to, but which
in this case has brought me into disrepute by a serious accusation which I
reject as unfounded but against which it is difficult if not impossible to
defend oneself nevertheless.
As to the appeals procedure, the two solicitors who are advising me on this
issue have come to the conclusion that if these are the standards the
University adheres to, there is no point in appealing. Therefore I will not
appeal, other than by defending my reputation publicly. (details about
acknowledgement and confidentiality)
With this letter I gave up the emeritus status and said goodbye, this time definitively,
to a University where I spent some of my best years.
Of course, it was not necessarily very smart to post as a one-liner on
Twitter a statement that was bound to be controversial and reference it to a
web encyclopedia that collates all that exists on a given topic, ripe and
green. However, the key question is not one of form but whether Israelis blew up the Twin
Towers or not. This I turn to next.
.
(1) Calculated by mortality rates, see Nicolas J.S. Davies, ‘Die Blutspur der US-geführten Kriege seit
9/11: Afghanistan, Jemen, Libyen, Irak, Pakistan, Somalia, Syrien’, in Ulrich Mies, ed. Der tiefe Staat
schlägt zu. Wie die westliche Welt Krisen erzeugt und Kriege vorbereitet. Vienna: ProMedia, 2019.
(2) I have developed this at length in my Discipline of Western Supremacy, vol. III of Modes of
Foreign Relations and Political Economy. London: Pluto Press 2014.
(3) ‘New figures show one Vice-Chancellor is earning £800k’, The Cardiff Tab, 22 February 2018.
https://thetab.com/uk/cardiff/2018/02/22/new-figures-show-one-vice-chancellor-is-earning-800k-seewhere-yours-ranks-33685 (last accessed 25 March 2019). See also The Guardian and The Telegraph, both of 12 February 2019, for further details. The Guardian also notes in another report that ‘nearly 25% of British universities [were] in deficit last year’.
(4) ‘From Gorbachev to Kosovo. Atlantic rivalries and the re-incorporation of Eastern Europe’ Review
of International Political Economy, 8 (2) 2001, 275-310.
(5) ‘Latest staff news: Sussex Weidenfeld Institute for Jewish Studies launches at London event’.
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/staff/newsandevents/?id=48112 (last accessed 25 March 2019).
(6) Annette Groth, ‘Der Antisemitismusvorwurf als Disciplinierunginstrument und Diskurstotschläger’,
in Mies, Der tiefe Staat schlägt zu, pp. 97-8.
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Academic Corruption, the Israel Lobby, and 9/11 or, Why I have resigned from my emeritus status at the University of Sussex (part two)
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