The radicalisation of David Miller

Back in 2013, when he was working as an academic at the University of Bath, David Miller co-authored a booklet about the pro-Israel organisation BICOM in which he addressed the dangers of straying into antisemitic rhetoric. “Critiques of Israel and Zionism can potentially absorb anti-Semitic ideas”, he wrote, before quoting Brian Klug on the subject:

As Klug notes, where anti-Semitic fantasies ‘are projected on to Israel because it is a Jewish state, or Zionism because it is a Jewish movement, or Jews in association with either Israel or Zionism: there you have anti-Semitism.’

It’s good advice: if only Miller himself had heeded it.

Fast forward eleven years, and you’ll find Miller tweeting that it is “organised and established Jewry and Jewish institutions” that are the cause of the left’s problems in Britain, and that anyone who can’t see this is “in thrall to the religion of Judeophilia”.

The same week, Miller claimed that the British state has been “totally captured by genocidal Jewish supremacists”; that the Jewish Labour Movement is a “Jewish supremacist sect”; that “most British Jews” support a “genocidal ideology which fuels the mass murder of Palestinians, including infants”; and that all Zionists are “genocidal, bloodthirsty Jewish supremacists” who “come from Odessa, Warsaw, Brooklyn and Finchley to rape [Palestinians], kill their children and steal their land.” He even has a thing about “Jewish representation in the civil service”, and I don’t think it’s because he’s worried they won’t have a weekly minyan.

Miller has always peddled conspiracy theories about Zionists. He made his name as an academic with his theory that Zionist money was to blame, in part, for fuelling Islamophobia. It is “networks of money or power” involving “Wealthy businessmen and financiers, and conservative and pro-Israel trusts and foundations” that are involved, was how he put it back then. But he was always careful to distinguish in his writings between Zionists and Jews; to argue, as he did in that 2013 booklet about BICOM, that his is merely a political critique of Zionism, not an assault on Jews as such. Whether he believed that at the time is beside the point; this was his line, and he tried carefully to stick to it.

Yet now his language is redolent of nothing other than fascist antisemitism. Oswald Mosley often referred to “organised Jewry” as fascism’s main enemy, telling a rally at the Royal Albert Hall in 1934: “I have encountered things in this country which, quite frankly, I did not believe existed. And one of these is the power of organised Jewry, which is today mobilised against Fascism.” It represents “unclean, alien influence on our national and imperial life”, declared the fascist newspaper Blackshirt. As for all his talk about “Jewish supremacists” having a stranglehold over the British state, this echoes none other than David Duke, a former Klan leader, one of the most prominent and influential neo-Nazis in the United States, and author of the book Jewish Supremacism: My Awakening on the Jewish Question. This book was based on Duke’s PhD thesis on “Zionism as a Form of Ethnic Supremacism”; a sentiment that chimes perfectly with Miller’s current politics.

The first sign of this shift in Miller’s output - from obsessing about Zionists to obsessing about Jews - came in a series of tweets last August, in which he alleged that “Jewish Islamophobia” is a “colossal question” that “shapes actual state policy towards an actually marginalised group”, and claimed that “very significant Islamophobia” “festers amongst British Jewry and has been doing actual damage for the past 20 years”. He implied that Jews are “racial supremacists” using fake allegations of antisemitism to force others into subservience, and wrote that Jews “are over-represented in Europe, North America and Latin America in positions of cultural, economic and political power.”

Miller critics - including myself - had always felt that his accusations about “Zionists” using money and influence to stoke anti-Muslim prejudice were just a thinly-veiled rhetorical assault on the Jewish community. Now the veil had come off completely.

Perhaps Miller’s views became more extreme, more explicitly antisemitic, after the experience of being sacked by Bristol University and then winning his claim for unfair dismissal. Or maybe he really had Jews in mind all along, but no longer has to use such guarded language now that his paycheque comes from the Iranian broadcaster Press TV rather than a Russell Group university. I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter: what counts is what he says, and in recent months his language has become more explicitly and defiantly anti-Jewish than ever.

Worryingly, this has happened at a time when his ideas are becoming increasingly influential. The notion that Western nations need to be “de-Zionised” is increasingly common at pro-Palestinian rallies and on our campuses. This goes much further than a call for people to oppose Israel, and raises the spectre of witch hunts and political tests for Jews in our institutions and workplaces here at home. David Miller is not the only person whose feelings and attitudes appear to have become more extreme since October 7, but he stands at the most antisemitic end of the anti-Israel spectrum, and it is vital that others do not follow him down that path.