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David Miller (sociologist)

British 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

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  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

About David Miller

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In alphabetical order by author or source.

2021–2023

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  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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".
  • 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.

2024–present

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  • 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.
  • 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.

See also

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