Mick Hartley

The sacking of Bristol University's David Miller, as we saw yesterday, provoked an anguished response from a host of UK academics and others on the left. Marc Goldberg asks the obvious question …Why do so many academics believe in David Miller?

When the news broke that Miller had been sacked veteran journalist John Pilger tweeted that “Bristol has shockingly colluded in another Israeli-run witch hunt.” And called on his followers to “Speak out!” The head of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Ben Jamal tweeted that “The sacking of Professor David Miller is a disturbing moment coming in the context of a well documented effort by Israel and its allies to stifle advocacy for Palestine and conflate antizionism with antisemitism”. This sentiment was echoed by Heather Mendick, a former academic who served on Corbyn’s staff with responsibility for engaging with the Jewish community. Professor Ray Bush at the University of Leeds lamented on Twitter that the “Zionist lobby” will be “delighted”.

The idea of a global campaign organised by Israel that engages Zionist or Jewish organisations and individuals differs from the notorious antisemitic forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion only in that the Elders are replaced by Israel in Miller’s telling of the tale. Miller’s claims that Israel, a country that was at the time politically paralysed and unable to elect a government for itself was able to mount an international campaign against “the left” may sound ludicrous to some but his claims fell on fertile ground in the world of academia.

Stories about Jews being in control of governments, manipulating events taking place around the world and manipulating circumstances to their own advantage are as old as antisemitism itself. Despite the original Protocols of the Elders of Zion being discredited, age old ideas of Jews and power still abound in the form of tropes about the Rothschilds, George Soros and other wealthy Jewish philanthropists. Somewhere along the line Miller moulded the conspiracy theories about Jews into conspiracy theories about Zionists. David Miller speaks about Zionists doing all manner of things from controlling the Labour Party to arranging interfaith events where friends made chicken soup which he described as a “trojan horse” and even things as ill defined as waging war on “the left”. His words are lapped up by a willing audience.

There’s a second element to this antisemitism. By insisting that he is the victim of an orchestrated Israeli campaign Miller denies Jewish students their due and denies Jews their agency. Led by the President of the Jewish Society, Edward Isaacs, Jewish students on campus recognised antisemitism when they saw it.  Assertions such as that made by Professor Bush about the “Zionist lobby” take away the fact that Jewish students at Bristol University, together with the Union of Jewish Students took on Bristol University, bringing down the wrath of various conspiracy mongering websites in the process, and they succeeded. Maybe it is easier for Miller to tell himself that he was brought down by the might of the global Israeli power network rather than a bunch of students.

In other words, it's the same old antisemitism dressed in the new anti-Zionist clothes. But it's still not clear why academics in particular should be so strongly represented in this twilight world. Perhaps academics are especially attuned to seeing patterns in events, which makes them particularly prone to conspiracy theories. Or perhaps Orwell was right: “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”