Top 15 David Miller Quotes

[The Attorney General should] reflect and come up with a solution [...] There will be a consensus in Parliament that this needs ironing out.

The ruling starts to undermine the protections that the Equality Act claims to guard.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

[On Miller's sacking as a professor] Bristol [University] has shockingly colluded in another Israeli-run witch hunt.

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".

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.

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.

The dissemination of his work doesn’t enrich the world; it impoverishes the public conversation with lies and poisons society with hate.

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.

David Miller is a textbook case of a toxic antisemite dressed up as an anti-Israel activist.

[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.