Bristol University is under pressure to remove a professor who has used his social media profile to promote pro-Iranian and pro-Assad regime propaganda.
Students at the UK tertiary institution called for the dismissal of Prof David Miller who has claimed a campaign of censorship against him led by Jewish students working with the government of Israel. Students accuse him of using anti-Semitic tropes.
Two MPs, Andrew Percy and Catherine McKinnell, wrote to the university head Hugh Brady to call for the sociologist's removal.
“No lecturer should be making students feel unsafe or unwelcome on campus," Mr Percy said.
“The fact that he won’t apologise is truly shocking and shameful. These kind of comments encourage anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish students.”
The university in a statement acknowledged "a significant number of calls for Professor David Miller to be dismissed".
However it said there had been no decision to penalise the academic. “UK law requires that we, like all employers, act in accordance with our internal procedures and the ACAS code of conduct," the statement said. "Any action which we might take as an employer is a private matter. We are under obligations of confidentiality in relation to all of our students and staff, which we will continue to comply with.”
In his own statement Mr Miller decried the criticism as "age-old Israeli lobby tactic[s] imported from the US".
Robert Jenrick, the communities minister, last year wrote to all universities to warn against providing a haven for conspiracy theories after Mr Miller said "parts of the Zionist movement were funding Islamophobia".
“There’s been some terrible examples over the course of the last year of universities where there’s been anti-Semitic materials posted around campus and Jewish Societies having to go to a student ballot to have the right to exist and university professors lecturing what can only be described as conspiracy theories," he wrote in the letter.
“Those sorts of practices need to come to an end. They're not acceptable in our society.”
Mr Miller has been featured on Iran's Press TV and defended by Vanessa Beeley, a blogger who has led denials of the Ghouta massacre as a "western media chemical weapon fraud".
