The Guardian published an article, co-written by their former Jerusalem correspondent Harriet Sherwood, (“UK professor suffered discrimination due to anti-Zionist beliefs, tribunal rules“), about academic David Miller’s victory against the University of Bristol in an employment case which determined that anti-Zionism is a protected characteristic in the workplace.
Miller, a Sociology professor and former Guardian contributor, was sacked by Bristol University in October 2021 after making comments about Zionism and Zionists which many believed crossed the line into antisemitism.
The Guardian notes the following about the antisemitism allegations:
Miller initially caused controversy in 2019 when in a lecture he cited Zionism as one of five sources of Islamophobia, and showed a diagram linking Jewish charities to Zionist lobbying. Complaints that this resembled the antisemitic trope that Jews wield secretive influence on political affairs were dismissed by the university on academic freedom grounds.
Since then, comments by Miller in online lectures describing Israel as “the enemy of world peace” and a description of the Jewish Society as an “Israel lobby group” that had “manufactured hysteria” about his teaching further inflamed tensions.
Crucially, however, the Guardian omits that the tribunal’s judgement found there was a good chance that Miller would have been dismissed anyway in 2023 due to comments that he made on social media that year, which included the tweet “Judeophobia barely exists these days”. The judgement went on: “The comments made in the August 2023 tweets were of a different order to the February 2021 comments set out above. The claimant does not suggest any sensible or coherent link to his protected beliefs.”
The Guardian fails to mention this antisemitic post in 2023 referenced by the tribunal.
Nor, does the outlet mention this explicitly antisemitic post by Miller on the same day, where he claims that “Jews are not discriminated against” and that Jews are “over-represented in Europe, North America and Latin America in positions of cultural, economic and political power“.
The Guardian article also omits Miller’s long history of expressing hatred towards Jews.
In 2020, Miller called an interfaith event where Jews and Muslims cooked chicken soup for the homeless a “Zionist plot”, and that it was a plot to “infiltrate the British Muslim community and to capture them to normalize Zionism within the British Muslim community.”
While the Israelis targeted Muslims by using interfaith as a "Trojan horse" to "normalize Zionism in the Muslim community" by a “project of making chicken soup” pic.twitter.com/XsJIyubyqv
— The Golem (@TheGolem_) June 19, 2020
The Guardian also neglects to mention that, after his sacking, he joined Iranian PressTV and began unleashing even more unhinged and hateful rhetoric about Jews – accusations about Jewish power and malevolence that CST’s Dave Rich argued evoked Protocols of the Elders of Zion-style antisemitism.
Watch the below video of David Miller talking about Zionism and Zionists and decide for yourself if he's an anti-Zionist academic worthy of respect in our society or a crank and an antisemite who should be shunned by civil society. pic.twitter.com/iRZhpAijdM
— Harry's Place (@hurryupharry) July 25, 2023
Also, see this post which shows Miller on PressTV claiming there’s a “Zionist stranglehold at the top of industries and governmental organisations which people don’t really know enough about“, and this post where he says “We have to dismantle every single Zionist organisation that there is”. In this post, Miller laments the “penetration of the British establishment by the Zionist movement” and their attempts to “penetrate British elite culture and indeed the British intelligence services”.
Finally, this isn’t the first time that the Guardian has covered for the antisemitic professor. In 2021, when Bristol was still investigating him, we posted about an article at the outlet which highlighted a sensationalist accusation against Miller and his university coming from one Conservative MP, whilst ignoring well-founded criticism by groups such as the CST, Board of Deputies, Holocaust Educational Trust, and Union of Jewish Students (UJS).
The current piece by Sherwood is just another example of the media outlet’s institutional failure to take anti-Jewish racism seriously when the racists are on the left – particularly when those, like Miller, risibly claim that they’re merely anti-Zionist.
