David Miller (sociologist)

David Miller (born 1964) is a British broadcaster and former academic. Miller was Professor of Political Sociology at Bristol University from 2018, and was sacked from his post in October 2021 for professional misconduct. Earlier in his career, Miller was Professor of Sociology at Strathclyde University (2004–2011) and Bath University (2011–2018). Since his sacking, Miller has broadcast as a commentator for the Iranian Press TV network with Chris Williamson, a former Labour politician, on a programme which Miller also produces.

Quotes

• In the Salisbury case, as Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan has shown, the government initially relied on a phrase that they thought could be defended as true but which was intended to cultivate a deception. This is that the nerve agent involved in the case is of "a type developed by Russia" ...
  The deception was spectacularly successful. The entire mainstream media went along with it. Embarrassingly, many mainstream journalists deluged Craig Murray with abuse and ridicule for raising modest questions about the government narrative.
  • "Russia, Novichok and the long tradition of British government misinformation", OpenDemocracy (12 April 2018).
  • The "Salisbury case" refers to the Poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, the victims being a Russian-born (former) double agent and his daughter, poisoned in Salibury on 4 March 2018. The official British government findings identifying Russia as responsible was shared by 28 other countries. Craig Murray had suggested in a blog entry (cited by The Times) that Israel had a stronger motive for poisoning the Skripal's than Russia.

• Of course Israel have sent people in to target that, to deal with that. Particularly through interfaith work … pretending Jews and Muslims working together will be an apolitical way of countering racism. No, it’s a Trojan horse for normalising Zionism in the Muslim community. We saw it in East London Mosque for example, where East London Mosque unknowingly held this project of making chicken soup with Jewish and Muslim communities coming together. This is an Israel-backed project for normalising Zionism in the Muslim communities.
  • Speaking to the Labour Left Alliance (June 2020), as cited by David Hirsh in "The Meaning of David Miller", Fathom (March 2021).

• The Zionist movement, and the Israeli government, are the enemy of the left, the enemy of world peace, and they must be directly targeted.
  • Online meeting (29 July 2020), as cited in "MPs and peers call on Bristol University to condemn academic in antisemitism row", The Times (4 March 2021). The source is a non-paywalled archive reprint.

• [The Labour party is] a mere detail of the Israelis' attempt to impose their will all over the world.
  • "Building the Campaign for Free Speech" (13 February 2021; YouTube video of an online conference dated 17 February 2021), as cited in Anthony Julius "Willed Ignorance: Reflections on academic free speech, occasioned by the David Miller case", Current Legal Problems, 75:1, p. 1–44. Published online, 31 May 2022, by Oxford Academic.

• It's a question of how we defeat the ideology of Zionism in practice. How do we make sure Zionism is ended essentially. There's no other way of saying that.
  • From the same online conference cited by Anthony Julius, as quoted in "Bristol professor calls for 'end' of Zionism", The Jewish Chronicle (15 February 2021).

• Do you think that Palestine can be liberated without the Islamic Republic of Iran? Of course it can't. It's absurd – an absurd position.
• [Asked if women in Iran should be able to dress as they please] Are you asking me about sex work and the status of sex workers?
  • During a discussion on Red Line TV, as cited in "David Miller attacked by left-wingers over claims in Iran debate" The Jewish Chronicle (23 October 2022).

• If you are not Jewish, do not be cowed by racial supremacists who want to hector you into political subservience.
  • Tweet, as cited in "David Miller condemned after vowing to make list of 'over-represented Jews'", The Jewish Chronicle (9 August 2023).

• The university dismissing me has effectively ended my career in academia [...] I can never get a job at another university because of what she refuses to say here — that I am an antisemite.
  If I had been given a warning it would have been possible for me to get another job and I would have been out of the University of Bristol’s hair, and we wouldn't be here.
  • "Lecturer David Miller says Bristol University ended his career over Israel comments", The Times (21 October 2023).
  • From Miller's evidence at his [[w:Employment tribunal|Employment tribunal.

• Zionist forces killed their own people on October 7. Zionist propaganda (also known as Hasbara) has suggested that Palestinian resistance forces were responsible for their deaths, but the narrative doesn't add up.
• The Zionist movement prioritises the radicalisation of Jews outside occupied Palestine, so they become enthusiasts for, promotors of, and participants in, genocide.
  • From statements made in November 2023, as cited in "You be the judge: David Miller in his own words", The Jewish Chronicle (8 February 2024).

About David Miller

In alphabetical order by author or source.

2021–2023

• David Miller writes about conspiracy. Some academics analyze conspiracy theories and explain how they become a force in the world. Miller is not among them. He doesn't scrutinize conspiracies, he builds them.
• Incredibly, according to Miller, Zionist power is so overbearing that former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Jennie Formby, the party's General Secretary under Corbyn, did its bidding.
  • David Feldman "The David Miller Case: A Textbook Example of anti-Zionism Becoming Vicious Antisemitism", Haaretz (4 March 2021).

• Miller has chosen to attack the Bristol University Jewish Society — proper, actual students at his own university — as being part of a co-ordinated campaign of censorship directed by the state of Israel.
• [The university] cannot, however, allow some 18-year-old student who comes up from [the Hertfordshire village of] Radlett to study, say, botany and joins the Jewish society to be characterised by one of its own professors as having signed up to a foreign-backed conspiracy to subvert the country's politics.
  • Daniel Finkelstein "Bristol University should sack conspiracist professor" The Times (23 February 2021).

• David Miller is a textbook case of a toxic antisemite dressed up as an anti-Israel activist.
• It's disappointing that anyone takes Miller seriously when his hateful rhetoric is replete with so many overt and ugly stereotypes about inordinate Jewish power and our supposed malign influence.
• The dissemination of his work doesn’t enrich the world; it impoverishes the public conversation with lies and poisons society with hate.
  • Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League in a series of Tweets (8 August 2023), as cited in "David Miller condemned for making list of 'over-represented Jews'", The Jewish Chronicle (9 August 2023).
  • In one tweet, Miller had said "Jews" do not face discrimination, are "over-represented" in high-status professions in Europe and the Americas and are "in a position" to discriminate against marginalised groups.

• David Miller's description of how the world works is a fantasy of Zionist conspiracy. In form it is similar to more explicitly anti-Jewish antisemitism. And when he talks about Israel's "time-honoured tactic", and in another article about an "age-old Israel lobby tactic" he inadvertently slips into a way of thinking that is much older than antizionism.
  David Miller is not articulating a worry that Jews may be over-sensitive about antisemitism or about criticism of Israel. His position is that Jews who allege that there is antisemitism on the left, or on campus, are acting as part of a deliberate and collective conspiracy to lie.
  • David Hirsh "The Meaning of David Miller", Fathom (March 2021).

• This is straightforward antisemitism. Here is the problem with those who treated any accusation of antisemitism as a witch hunt: they ended up defending people like this, blinding themselves to glaringly obvious red flags.
  • Owen Jones tweet/post on X, as cited in "David Miller condemned after vowing to make list of 'over-represented Jews'", The Jewish Chronicle (9 August 2023)
  • A response to Miller's tweets about Jews posted in early August 2023.

• There is a minor character in Shakespeare's Henry IV Pt. 2, Francis Feeble, a woman's tailor and country soldier. Falstaff praises him, "most forcible Feeble." Let me ask: What is feeble in Miller's presentation, and what forcible? The feeble? Everything that should matter to an academic: methodology; research; evidence; history. The forcible? Everything that an academic should shun: extravagant claims, unmoored from evidence; the antisemitic premises of the work; the verbal assaults on Jewish students - assaults which are the inevitable outcome of his writing and speech-making.
  But of course the feebleness of the analysis does not matter to people who are already convinced of the malign existence of the Lobby. Miller does not have to prove anything to them – still less, anything new. Just to write or speak the word "Lobby" is enough: the sought-after effect is achieved. This is writing as evocation. He reminds his audience of what it already knows. That's why to complain that (as seems likely) many of his supporters haven't actually read his stuff misses the point. All they need to know is that he writes about the "Israel Lobby".
  • Anthony Julius "Willed Ignorance: Reflections on academic free speech, occasioned by the David Miller case", Current Legal Problems, 75:1, p. 1–44. Published online, 31 May 2022, by Oxford Academic.
  • The source given for the quote from Henry IV Pt. 2 is R Proudfoot, A Thompson, D Scott Kastan (eds.), The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works (Bloomsbury 2011), p. 411
  • Miller's employment at the University of Bristol was terminated at the beginning of October 2021.

• [On Miller's sacking as a professor] Bristol [University] has shockingly colluded in another Israeli-run witch hunt.
  • John Pilger tweet, as cited in "Why do so many academics believe in David Miller?", The Jewish Chronicle (8 October 2021).

• Miller claims he suffered discrimination when he was fired two years ago because his anti-Zionism counts as a philosophical belief under the Equality Act. This is no mere critique of Israeli policy. Miller believes that Israel should disappear completely. "Our cause is not to establish a Palestinian state but to dismantle Israel", is how he put it. It feels like an appropriate moment to be asking whether such a belief can ever be, as the law states, "worthy of respect in a democratic society, compatible with human dignity and not conflict with the fundamental rights of others".
• The anti-Zionist theories he taught in seminars may not have envisaged this but Hamas has just demonstrated what trying to defeat the Zionist enemy entails: mass murder, rape, kidnapping, babies slaughtered in unspeakable ways. Anti-Zionism has a very different meaning this week from whatever it may have meant in the past.
  • Dave Rich "Hamas shows us what anti-Zionism means in practice", The Times (13 October 2023).
  • Hamas murdered at least 1,300 Israelis on 7 October beginning the 2023 Israel–Hamas war.

2024–present

• In light of some of the commentary around the employment tribunal's judgment in the case of Professor Miller and Bristol University, I want to clarify that antisemitism must continue to be challenged wherever it arises.
  We have seen people in this country use their views on Israel as an excuse to display antisemitism.
• It is therefore important to underline that this ruling does not change the fact that while academics have the right to express views, they cannot behave in a way which amounts to harassment of Jewish students.
  • Kemi Badenoch in the House of Commons (7 February 2024), as cited in "Badenoch: People using views on Israel as an excuse to display antisemitism", Jewish News (8 January 2024).
  • A Bristol employment tribunal had found Miller's anti-Zionism "qualified as a philosophical belief and as a protected characteristic" under the Equality Act 2010. At this time, Ms Badenoch was the Minister for Women and Equalities as well as Secretary of State for Business and Trade. The date of the minister's comments in the Commons is derived from an article in The Jewish Chronicle also cited below.

• The concept that an ideology needs protecting is totally ludicrous. What needs protecting are identities, not ideologies ... The same logic could be applied to a white supremacist.
• The ruling starts to undermine the protections that the Equality Act claims to guard.
• [The Attorney General should] reflect and come up with a solution [...] There will be a consensus in Parliament that this needs ironing out.
  • John Mann, Baron Mann "'Parliament must act over ludicrous Miller judgment'", The Jewish Chronicle (8 January 2024).
  • At this time, Lord Mann was the British government's advisor on antisemitism.

See also

• Antisemitism in the UK Labour Party