03.04.2025
From SWP to Iranian asset
He calls for Iranian nukes and spouts anti-Semitic nonsense - but we should continue to fight for his right to free speech, says Carla Roberts
The vast majority of leftwingers accused of being ‘anti-Semitic’ are, as we know, anti-Zionists. In Labour Against the Witchhunt, we saw time and time again how even the most minor criticism of the actions of the Israeli government were falsely labelled ‘anti-Semitic’ and used to kick out one socialist after another from the Labour Party - at the behest of Jeremy Corbyn’s general secretary, Jennie Formby, we should remember (and under Iain McNicol).
However, we also saw a small number of cases where somebody had indeed written something anti-Semitic - or reposted a daft conspiracy theory about the Rothschilds running the world. Most comrades (though admittedly not all) took it well when we pointed that out. LAW correctly insisted that, in order to effectively fight the witch-hunt, we would have to be tough on actual anti-Semitism. We even had to expel a few people from LAW for that reason.
This is one of the most disappointing, though perhaps not surprising, aspects of the witch-hunt: it has led some socialists into very dodgy political territory. Full of rage against Israel’s genocidal campaign, they are incapable of seeing how global imperialism works and have ended up believing that ‘the tail wags the dog’: ie, the Zionists (or even ‘Jews’) run the world. In other words, they have ended up doing exactly what they were once wrongfully accused of.
Sadly, David Miller is such a case. LAW defended him when he was sacked by Bristol University in October 2021 after a campaign by the pro-Zionist lobby. This was very much an example of the real ‘cancel culture’ threatening free speech today, with the government fully and openly supporting the witch-hunt against Miller, thereby revealing the hypocrisy of their position against ‘cancel culture’ around trans issues. We organised a number of protests, including outside the university itself.
But Miller has since made quite a political transformation. His initial George Galloway-type admiration for the Brics countries, and in particular Iran and Hezbollah, has grown to bizarre levels of sycophancy. His reporting about the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut is excruciating: “You do not see anything like that in this country, this level of militancy and unified voice. If that ever existed in this country, it is long gone,” he enthuses in Palestine Classified, egged on by Chris Williamson, admiring “how the axis operates and the loyalty to it by millions of people in the Levant”.1
Journey
Some might be surprised to hear that he is a former long-time member of the Socialist Workers Party. However, his views are actually consistent with the line of the SWP during the high period of the Stop the War Coalition and Respect, when the organisation excused and prettified its Islamist allies, equating criticism of the Islamists with pro-war politics in a typical application of the post-1935 Comintern’s popular front approach: thou shall not criticise, but subordinate yourself politically to your coalition partners on the right.
Miller’s latest output on X and the Iranian state channel Press TV represents another fateful step for the former academic. We should say from the outset that this does not lead us to demand that Ofcom investigates X, let alone that the police should take action against him, as the despicable pro-Zionist Board of Deputies does.2
Let us look at some of Miller’s rantings. He now believes that the “Axis of Resistance is the only serious anti-Zionist, anti-imperialist force in the world (he sometimes refers to it as simply “the resistance”) and that “the Islamic Republic of Iran desperately needs to develop nuclear weapons”. In another post, he says that “any political dissent, but especially that coming from Muslims, tends to be more coherent, universalistic and material than other varieties.” Like Marxism?
He has clearly lost any hope in the global working class and now has only contempt for the left: “The global left is occupied and infiltrated by Zionist fanatics who cloak themselves in socialist and ‘pro-Palestinian’ garb, which has caused deep confusion among gullible white leftists in particular.” Instead he is looking for leadership from religious reactionaries and the Iranian theocracy. After all, they are the only true opposition to imperialism, which is led by the nose by, you guessed it, Zionists.
On March 27, he tweeted: “On behalf of the Zionist movement and at its express direction, the US empire is slaughtering the pioneers of this humanitarian intervention [in Yemen].” The $100 million donation to Donald Trump’s election campaign from the pro-Zionist billionaire, Miriam Adelson, “was clearly on the condition that the operations in the West Bank and the annexation go ahead”. Oh and “Geert Wilders can be said to be a creation of the state of Israel and its foreign intelligence assets.”
He has been soft on conspiracy theories for some time - which now have descended into outright anti-Semitism. We got a first whiff of it in August 2023, when he wrote that “Jews are overrepresented” and thereby have the “power to make economic, political and cultural decisions” - implying a collective Jewish control over “all areas of British public life”. He apologised for the tweet as part of his campaign to get his job back, and changed “Jews are overrepresented” to “Jews are the most privileged minority group”.3
But since then he has only hunkered down on his original train of thought: “For too long, we have all misunderstood the scale of the threat emanating from Jewish supremacism and the genocidal ideology of Zionism. It is time to act. Europe is already occupied by both this ideology and the financial networks that underpin it.” And: “The answer is not just to be pro-Palestinian, whatever that means. The challenge is to be anti-Zionist, to materially contribute to the global struggle against Jewish supremacism. Your war is right where you are.”
Even the most fervent supporters of Miller would struggle to claim that this is not open anti-Semitism (as well as utter nonsense).
Anti-Zionists
This month then, we saw the next logical step in Miller’s increasingly bizarre world view:
It’s tiring to even have to say this, but there are no ‘Israeli’ anti-Zionists … It is doubtful whether there are more than a handful of Jewish anti-Zionists anywhere. After all, how many Jewish martyrs have there been in the past 140 [sic] on the path to liberate Palestine from Zionism? How many Jews have engaged in military action against Zionist targets in that period? We can talk about ‘Jewish anti-Zionism’ once there are organisations at war with the Jewish state.4
This whole tweet is bonkers, ignoring as it does many brave struggles of anti-Zionist Jews, including in the Battle of Cable Street or indeed the witch-hunt in the Labour Party. Tony Greenstein has done a good job critiquing Miller5 (although Miller has apparently stated that Greenstein is one of the above-mentioned “handful” of decent Jews on the whole planet). Not that even this part makes much sense, as Greenstein - just like Miller himself - has to our knowledge not “engaged in military action against Zionist targets”, let alone blown himself up as a “martyr”.
To back up what he says, Miller has repeatedly posted the results of a survey conducted by the Institute of Jewish Policy Research,6 according to which “between 63% and 80% of British Jews identify as ‘Zionist’. Even higher numbers say that they feel ‘very or somewhat attached to the country’ (73%) or ‘personally connected’ to Israel (97%).” Almost all Jews are Zionists, you see.
You do not have to be an academic to understand how such results are achieved and why - you formulate the questions according to the results you want. The skewed survey is designed to serve the political agenda of the Zionists who commissioned it. Funnily enough, it also suits Miller’s agenda. As Tony Greenstein writes, “Miller is not only going down an anti-Semitic rabbit hole, but a Zionist one too. Zionists claim that all Jews, bar a handful of ‘self-haters’, are Zionists.” The other side of the Zionist coin.
A few days later, on March 20, Miller topped all this off with another unhinged rant: “Every genuinely anti-Zionist Jew can count on being kept safe by the movement, when the time comes. Every Zionist Jew must be held accountable and de-Zionised.” And remember, there are only a “handful” of “genuine anti-Zionist Jews” globally! And then: “And let’s be clear, there are Zionists everywhere. In every town and city. Find out where they are.”7 It was this tweet that led to the Board of Deputies complaining to the police. Should this be taken up by the police and go to court, we suspect they will not find it too difficult to claim that Miller is “directly inciting violence against Jewish individuals and institutions in this country”.8
Miller’s mind seems to have been increasingly clouded by his illusions in the Brics countries and the various reactionary militias they support. Yassamine Mather has pointed out numerous times that none of those countries could be described as anti-imperialist in any meaningful way, and even the description as ‘non-imperialist’ does not apply to all. Countries like China and Russia might, for lack of a better word, even be described as wannabe- or proto-imperialist. They certainly have absolutely no interest in helping or even ‘liberating’ the Palestinians, as comrade Mather explains: “The anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, pro-Palestine rhetoric that has come from the Islamic Republic over many decades is in actual fact cynical window-dressing”.9
But that is, in any case, of secondary importance to Miller, whose hatred of Zionism now trumps everything. For him, it is not capitalism that is the problem and it certainly is not socialism that he wants. Worse than that: Miller’s writing about the “privilege” and “overrepresentation” of Jews (a revival of the classic anti-Semitic trope) serves really only one side: US imperialism. Since the supposed reason for US policy support for Israel was the threat of anti-Semitism, the fact that the policy produced anti-Semitism is a positive feedback loop: the more anti-Semitism the US can point to, the more it can justify its policies in the Middle East.
Controls
So why on earth do we defend his right to free speech? Almost the entire left is united in its insistence that he has become persona non grata and shall not be touched. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Jewish Voice for Labour10 and the SWP11 all agree with the Board of Deputies and the government on that issue: Miller has “crossed the line” and must be banned from all meetings henceforth. JVL even believes his views are not acceptable “within the terrain of academic freedom” - a dangerous anti-free speech concession to official cancel culture, which will inevitably be used against JVL itself.
The PSC leadership has published a useful internal four-page ‘guidance document’12 after its Chelmsford branch invited Miller to speak at a meeting. The leadership forced the branch to cancel the meeting and, in response, Chelmsford PSC has resigned en bloc, without much of a fight (we suspect it is a rather small ‘bloc’).
The document outlines some good arguments against Miller and finishes with this operative conclusion: “The language deployed by Miller is fundamentally destructive to our political organising for Palestine and the only answer is to exclude it from our movement. We are not a state banning free speech nor a court imposing sanctions.”
That is right. Organisations, all organisations, have their boundaries, which decide who is on the inside and who is on the outside. What is true of a chess club is also true of LAW, PSC, SWP and the CPGB.
However, when it comes to academia and society at large, we are for unrestricted freedom of speech. We certainly do not trust the government, the courts or big tech telling us who is allowed to speak and who can say what. Yes, we support laws making it illegal to incite murder. But that is not freedom of speech.
Meanwhile, let him have his platforms on X, Spinwatch, Al Mayadeen and Press TV.
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All quoted tweets and contributions are freely accessible on David Miller’s feed on X (x.com/Tracking_Power).↩︎
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bod.org.uk/bod-news/board-of-deputies-writes-to-home-office-over-incendiary-comments-by-david-miller.↩︎
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azvsas.blogspot.com/2025/03/david-miller-has-gone-from-asset-to.html.↩︎
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www.jpr.org.uk/reports/jews-uk-today-key-findings-jpr-national-jewish-identity-survey.↩︎
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bod.org.uk/bod-news/board-of-deputies-writes-to-home-office-over-incendiary-comments-by-david-miller.↩︎
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‘Part of the establishment’ Weekly Worker March 21 2024: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1483/part-of-the-establishment.↩︎
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www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/statement/david-miller-has-crossed-a-line.↩︎
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socialistworker.co.uk/sw-view/why-david-miller-is-wrong-about-antisemitism.↩︎
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drive.google.com/file/d/1CoqlYNu5ogCxuDzRjIUhSDtb3AdZYO2A/view.↩︎