Dutch Rapper Appa: Amsterdam 'Pogrom' Was Self-Defense Against Israeli Hooligans

It was a pogrom, the likes of which have not been seen in Europe since the days of World War Two. Or at least that is how corporate media across the world presented last month’s violence in Amsterdam, as Israeli team Maccabi Tel Aviv came to play Ajax in football’s Europa League.In total, five people were hospitalized, with a few dozen more minor injuries. And yet, the event generated hysteria across the West. President Biden, for example, described the supposed attacks against Israelis as “despicable,” adding that they “echo dark moments in history when Jews persecuted.”Dutch King Willem-Alexander, meanwhile, compared the events to the Holocaust.Yet even as public official after public official was denouncing the Dutch and spreading the persecution narrative, video clips showing a very different reality were going viral on social media, challenging the official story.On today’s episode of “The Watchdog,” Lowkey catches up with an eyewitness to November’s violence. Rachid El Ghazoui, better known as Appa, is a legend of Dutch hip hop. Active for over two decades, the rapper is known for his political content and his fierce criticism of racist Dutch politicians, such as Geert Wilders. His lyrics have made him a leading voice among the Moroccan community in the Netherlands.Appa tells a different story to Biden or King Willem-Alexander, presenting it as a tale of Israeli football thugs trashing a beautiful city, and then being challenged and overpowered by locals. As he told Lowkey:It actually started with the Maccabi Tel Aviv hooligans tearing up the streets, attacking people, throwing stuff at people, kicking people off their bikes, destroying taxis. Being hooligans, actually. They started singing racist songs in the main square, [about] killing Arabs and raping women”From there, the Israeli thugs were beaten back, and the resistance put up by locals – many of them of Moroccan descent – was treated as a vicious racist attack. Thus, what was a pretty typical case of European soccer hooliganism was transformed for political gain into a supposedly senseless anti-Semitic pogrom.The plot thickened even further after Israeli media revealed that Israel had sent many Mossad agents to Amsterdam who were present among the Maccabi fans.Ajax won the game 5-0.Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

Israel’s attack on its neighbors could not be sustained without support from the West. And much of that support comes from the United Kingdom. Only a few hundred kilometers from Gaza, the British military base in Akrotiri, Cyprus, serves as the “heartbeat” of the Israeli assault. Israeli warplanes fly there to be serviced and repaired, while Western supply planes fly into the base before making the final trip to Israel.“Almost no one in this country [the United Kingdom] had heard about it before Gaza and before our work on it,” investigative journalist and returning guest Matt Kennard told Lowkey today, adding:This is a colony that Britain retained after awarding independence to Cyprus in 1960. But it wasn’t really independent because Cyprus gave 3% of its land mass to the British, on which they built a massive air base on Akrotiri and a massive intelligence base at Dhekelia. And now, they are being used to facilitate a genocide in Gaza, through [supplying] arms, personnel and intelligence.”Kennard is a writer and journalist for Declassified UK. He has broken several stories about secret British collaboration and support for Israeli actions. Previously, he worked as a reporter for The Financial Times and was a fellow and a director of the Center For Investigative Journalism in London. His latest book is “Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy.”For Kennard, Britain’s active support of Israeli actions makes them participants in the ongoing genocide. Last October, the British government issued a “D Notice” instructing media outlets not to report on any elite U.K. SAS commando operations in Gaza. This action immediately raises the question, “What are British special forces doing in Gaza?”In addition to weapons sales, logistical aid and political support, Britain also secretly trains Israeli troops. Despite this, the Israeli government has continued to attempt to infiltrate and surveil top-level British politicians. Boris Johnson, for instance, revealed that Benjamin Netanyahu personally attempted to place a listening device in his quarters. Kennard’s investigation revealed that one-third of Johnson’s cabinet had their political careers funded either directly by Israel or by the pro-Israel lobby.Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

In less than one year, Israel has managed to turn Gaza into rubble. A recent estimate by a global health expert suggested that around 335,000 Gazans could have been killed as a result of the Israeli attacks. Today, “Watchdog” host Lowkey speaks to one of the survivors of the Israeli bombing, Ahmed al-Naouq. Ahmed al-Naouq grew up in central Gaza and moved to the United Kingdom to attend Leeds University. In 2015, he co-founded We Are Not Numbers, a non-profit group that seeks to tell the stories of Palestinians to the world. The grief began right away for al-Naouq. “On the 7th of October, my fiancé’s house was bombed, and she lost her brother,” he told Lowkey, adding:We were lucky because, only two days before the war, she managed to escape Gaza and go to meet with me. And I know that if she did not travel with her parents, all of them would have been killed on the first day of the war.”For Lowkey, the Israeli attack on Gaza is of historic proportions. He compared it to the 13th-century Mongol invasion of Baghdad in its similarity in that it destroyed thousands of years of civilization. What has been done, he said, was so intensely violent, not just physically but culturally, that it is almost incomparable. On al-Naouq, Lowkey noted that his story:Really tells us the wider way in which Palestinians have been stripped of their humanity and killed on an industrial scale in Gaza. And it stands as a testament to the will to survive, regardless of the bullying, gangsterism and intimidation from the Zionist project.”Al-Naouq, a journalist by training, lambasted the deceitful Western media coverage of the attacks, stating: The media doesn’t care about its own audiences. They don’t care if they don’t know the truth or not. They are seeking their own interests. And clearly, those interests do not correlate with the truth, so we are challenging that by writing our own stories.”After nearly twelve months of bombing, those attacks show little sign of slowing down, primarily because Western governments continue to supply Israel with the hi-tech weaponry it needs to continue and defend its actions in international bodies such as the United Nations. Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

On this episode of The Watchdog, host Lowkey is joined by three guests to discuss how progressive or radical change is blocked in the U.S. and the U.K. by our political establishment, specifically by the Democratic and the Labour Parties. Chris Williamson and his communications officer, Ammar Kazmi, join the show to discuss the political situation in the U.K. Between 2010 and 2019, Chris Williamson was a Labour member of parliament and was a shadow cabinet minister under Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. He was eventually forced out of the party he had joined in 1976 as a 19-year-old after he was the subject of a smear campaign depicting him as an antisemite. Also joining the show today is MintPress CEO and founder Mnar Adley. Adley notes that U.S. politics is set up to fundamentally limit the debate and framework for change by privileging the Democrats and Republicans over third parties, who are shut out of debates, ignored by corporate media, and censored by big tech platforms. All of this is done in order to promote voting for one of the two major parties. But “voting for the lesser evil is still evil,” she said. While in Corbyn’s cabinet, Williamson pushed him to take more radical positions, such as committing to ending poverty altogether. “We are the sixth-biggest economy in the world. There is really no excuse for anybody to be living in poverty in this country,” he explained to Lowkey. Corbyn, however, was “far too timid” and, ultimately, did not stand up to the vicious waves of attacks and smears against him and his followers, particularly on the question of anti-Semitism. As Williamson said: It was clear that antisemitism was being weaponized in order to destroy the Corbyn project, to destroy the prospect of a socialist, anti-imperialist government coming to power. But Jeremy lost the plot because he listened to idiots around him who said that he had to placate the Zionist lobby.”No matter how hard they try, however, there is a growing movement in both countries demanding radical change. And if it continues to gather momentum, both Labour and the Democrats could be overtaken and consigned to the trashcan of history.Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

The British public has spoken, and they have collectively let out a sigh of apathy. The latest election results might have produced a landslide for Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. But going beneath the surface, Britons appeared less than pleased with the options they were given. Turnout was among the lowest seen since the 1880s when women (and most men) could not vote.The notorious British press relentlessly promoted the far-right Reform U.K. party, but to little avail: Reform U.K. ended up with only five seats. Chief amongst those outlets were those of Rupert Murdoch’s empire. The Australian billionaire – described by former prime minister Tony Blair as one of Britain’s four most powerful people and an unofficial member of his cabinet – has worked for decades to push a reactionary agenda into British public life. This has included near-total support for the Israeli government and its expansionist project.Today, “Watchdog” host Lowkey is joined by Alan MacLeod to discuss the U.K. media’s relentless support for Israel. Alan MacLeod is a senior staff writer and podcast producer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017, he published two books on media and propaganda and regularly teaches media studies at universities. He has recently published investigations into Murdoch’s close connections to the Israeli government and on Cyabra, an Israeli intelligence cutout organization posing as a neutral fact-checking group.While Israel has failed to defeat Hamas militarily, it has been able to rely on the support of corporate media in the West, and most of all from Murdoch, who has extensive economic and ideological ties to the state of Israel. Earlier this year, conservative British newspaper The Daily Telegraph went after Lowkey, claiming that a network of Russian, Chinese and Iranian bots was artificially inflating his online pro-Palestine messaging. The basis for this extraordinary claim was an intelligence report from private firm Cyabra.Yet Cyabra is far from a neutral organization. It was co-founded by Israeli military intelligence veterans and continues to work hand-in-glove with the Israeli government. Moreover, around fifty percent of its employees are military reservists who have been called up to serve in Gaza. Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

While the Labour Party may have triumphed in the recent British parliamentary elections, the real victors may have been Israel. Israel and its lobby have deep connections to the British Labour Party, headed by Sir Keir Starmer, and are likely pleased to see him come to power.On today’s episode of “The Watchdog,” Lowkey is joined by John McEvoy to discuss his work uncovering Israel’s surprisingly firm grip over the British political system. John McEvoy is an investigative journalist for Declassified UK, a media outlet covering British foreign policy and intelligence agencies’ true role around the world. While Labour has achieved a landslide victory, McEvoy warns that this was not because of widespread public support. Instead, it was down to a split in the vote between the Conservatives and their far-right challengers, Reform U.K. And while the public yearns for change, Starmer has been steadfast in his refusal to adopt bold policies to deliver what the people want. “Keir Starmer is poised to destroy a lot of hopes of British people and those who have wrongly invested their hopes in him. And that's a recipe for political disaster and a wider shift to the right here,” McEvoy told Lowkey. Perhaps even more worrying is the level of Israeli influence within the Labour Party. Pro-Israel money has flooded in; more than half of the new cabinet has been bankrolled by the British pro-Israel lobby, McEvoy’s recent study revealed.Starmer has repeatedly refused to condemn Israel or do anything to concretely support a ceasefire in Gaza. His Labour Party has also elevated some of the most shameless propagandists into key positions. One example is Luke Akehurst, the former director of the pressure group, We Believe in Israel. Throughout its bombardment of Gaza, the U.K. has remained one of Israel’s closest allies. Arms exports have increased since October 7, and London has continued to provide diplomatic cover for the genocide. Moreover, British spy planes continue to fly over Gaza, while military supply planes have made dozens of trips to Israel since the bombardment began, making Britain an accomplice in war crimes.Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

A surprise general election has been called in the United Kingdom, and Labour Party leader Keir Starmer is the overwhelming favorite to become the next prime minister. But today’s guest is looking to upset that grim future.Andrew Feinstein is standing against Starmer for his Holborn and St. Pancras seat in central London. Feinstein is an expert in the arms trade, a former member of the South African parliament under Nelson Mandela, and a tireless activist, who Watchdog host Lowkey describes as someone who “campaigned for decades on important issues that really cut to the core of power and the way it functions in society.”Under Starmer’s leadership, the Labour Party has ruthlessly purged leftist, anti-establishment voices from its ranks, including former leader Jeremy Corbyn. Feinstein described Starmer as holding an “authoritarian, undemocratic approach to politics,” accusing him of weaponizing anti-Semitism to carry out a witch hunt against radical elements within the party.Starmer has given his full-throated endorsement to Israel, even as it carries out a genocidal onslaught against the people of Gaza, and strong-armed the Speaker of the House into shutting down a motion brought to parliament calling for a ceasefire. Meanwhile, he has expelled more Jews from the Labour Party than all other leaders combined, all under the guise of fighting anti-Jewish bigotry.Feinstein is a white Jewish man who grew up in Apartheid South Africa. His mother is a survivor of Hitler’s genocidal ambitions, having hid for three years in a Viennese coal cellar to avoid detection by the Nazis. He became active in the anti-Apartheid struggle and became an elected official for the African National Congress during the country’s transition to democracy. He eventually resigned after being refused the right to investigate billions of dollars worth of arms deals signed by Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki.He warns that Starmer’s approach to politics represents a threat to democracy in the United Kingdom, and wants his campaign to be completely different, the antithesis of Starmer.Feinstein stressed that local issues, such as hunger, unemployment, and a lack of housing, would be the key issues he would fight on. Nevertheless, he maintains an international perspective and is hopeful things are about to radically change across the globe. “This period of late neoliberal capitalism, which has bequeathed the world such injustice and such inequality, must be on its last legs. And that’s what gets me out of bed every morning,” he said.Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

One of the most sickening aspects of the continued Israeli aggression against the people of Gaza is the near-total support it is receiving from Western governments. That is what our guest today on “The Watchdog” tells Lowkey. “Gaza has also exposed the true hypocritical face of the Western countries and those Western values which they have been claiming for years and years,” Dalloul Neder said, adding:  "Values such as human rights, the wartime protection of civilians, the rights of patients, doctors, protection of hospitals and of civilians. Gaza was enough to expose Western hypocrisy and complicity – whether it is the United Kingdom or the United States – all such values fell like leaves in Gaza.”Dalloul Neder is a Palestinian man living in Manchester, U.K., who lost five members of his family in a December Israeli attack. He still has many relatives trapped in Gaza, including some who have the right to live in the U.K., but, despite their requests for help, have heard nothing from British authorities. A recent clip of him confronting senior Labour Party MP Angela Rayner went viral as he interrupted her public event, showing the room images of his murdered relatives before he was assaulted and detained by British police. Today, he told Lowkey that his intention was to put pressure on the Labour Party to abandon its near-total support for the Israeli project of destroying and colonizing Gaza. However, as the pair discussed today, that is easier said than done, given that Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer built his career on purging left-wing, anti-war activists from the party, framing their opposition to Israeli aggression as anti-Semitism. Starmer’s predecessor as leader, Jeremy Corbyn, for example, was kicked out of the party, along with many of his supporters. “Who is more deserving of a suspension from the Labour Party? Jeremy Corbyn or [Iraq War architect] Tony Blair,” Neder asked Lowkey, who noted that the years of dehumanization Corbyn received from the British establishment was an extension of the dehumanization Palestinians receive to this day. Neder and Lowkey contrasted the duplicitous actions of the West with those of nations in the Global South, especially those of South Africa, which has led the way in attempting to hold Israel accountable for its crimes at the International Court of Justice. “The whole world decided to let us down and kill many more women just like my mother. My mother was part of a wider structure in Gaza: we are now talking about more than 31,000 martyrs, among them 12,000 innocent children killed… God willing, we shall see more examples like South Africa, and justice will be served,” Neder said.Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

Even after more than 100 days of genocidal attacks on Gaza, the Israeli assault continues to rage. The onslaught itself is very well documented by courageous Palestinian journalists who risk their lives daily. However, the role of Western governments in all this is not nearly as widely reported.Joining “The Watchdog” today to talk about this issue is returning guest Matt Kennard, a writer and investigative journalist for Declassified UK. Kennard has broken several stories about secret British collaboration and support for Israeli actions, which he will discuss today. Previously, he worked as a reporter for The Financial Times and was a fellow and a director of the Center For Investigative Journalism in London. His latest book is “Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy.”On October 13, the U.K. government announced it was deploying a wide range of military assets to the Eastern Mediterranean area, including spy planes and 1,000 troops. From its military bases in Cyprus, the British military has been flying large numbers of supply flights to Israel, helping sustain the Israeli attack. As Kennard noted, in December 2020, the U.K. government signed a secret military agreement with Israel that likely commits it to “defending” the apartheid state if it comes under attack.Britain’s military hub in the region is RAF Akrotiri, a vast, sprawling military compound in southern Cyprus. It is not only the center of British imperialism in the Mediterranean but is also home to more than 120 U.S. airmen and hosts of spies from the N.S.A. From there, both countries project their power across the Middle East, Europe, and North Africa.But even as the British government supports Israel, the Israeli state is attempting to penetrate and interfere in U.K. politics. In 2019, Alan Duncan revealed that he was blocked from becoming Middle East Minister in Theresa May’s cabinet at the behest of the Israelis because of his mildly pro-Palestine positions. The Conservative Friends of Israel – which acts as a front group for the Israeli state – wields enormous power within the party, including the ability to make and break political careers.The Labour Party is also deeply connected to Israel, to the point where Israeli lobbyists have funded 40% of Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet. This kind of “entrenched espionage” eats away at and makes a mockery of the idea of British democracy, Kennard told Lowkey todaySupport the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

For nearly a decade, Professor David Miller has been in the crosshairs of the pro-Israel lobby. But in recent years, their campaign against him has intensified. Miller was fired by Bristol University in the U.K. following a ferocious campaign by the Israel lobby, which even led to direct government intervention in the case. He has been holding the university to account in an employment tribunal and expects the results very soon. In this episode of “The Watchdog”, host Lowkey catches up with Miller to hear the latest on his case. Professor Miller has a long background in studying P.R. and propaganda, originally focussing on media spin on Northern Ireland, the HIV/AIDS crisis and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It was the latter that first brought him to study Islamophobia and how it functions in society. Today, Miller and Lowkey described how so much of the hostile atmosphere towards Muslims is actually driven by the state and committed Zionist organizations that try to influence it. For example, 12 of the top 13 funders of the Islamophobic Henry Jackson Society, a British think tank that influences U.K. public policy, were groups founded by Zionists. And three-quarters of the organizations that fund these Islamophobic groups also bankroll the building of illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Miller was sacked from his position as Professor of Sociology after a pressure campaign involving Zionist student groups and even members of parliament, who accused him of “inciting hatred against Jewish students.”In 2019, a student filed a complaint against him, claiming he was racist toward Jewish people. But that was only the start of the affair. After Miller was acquitted, there began a massive media campaign against him, leading to more than 100 members of the House of Commons and House of Lords signing a letter demanding he be sacked. This massive state intervention into the freedom and independence of academia is a free speech issue that few of those who make it their business to supposedly champion the free flow of ideas have touched.  The Kafkaesque witch hunt against Miller bears a strong resemblance to how Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was hounded out of politics. Ironically, Miller’s book, “Bad News for Labour: Anti-Semitism, the Party and Public Belief,” details how bogus charges of anti-Semitism were weaponized against Corbyn in order to defame and destroy him.Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.