Targeting Jews and Jewish
anti-Zionists is explained by Miller’s Failure to Understand Why
Imperialism Supports Zionism and Genocide
in Gaza – As Such It is Anti-Semitic
The Virulent neo-Nazi Stew Peters Show & His $6 Million Reward for
Proving the Holocaust Happened
I didn’t want
to have to write this blog. There are far more important topics such as Genocide
in Gaza. However Miller’s recent social media postings are
becoming ever more bizarre and crossing the line into anti-Semitism. Miller has
abandoned anti-Zionism.
His behaviour is not only strange it is also stupid. If 'antisemitism'
is the ritual accusation of the Zionists why try to prove them correct by
attacking Jews as Jews? It seems that Miller believes that it is Western Jews
who are responsible for the hideous monstrosity that is the Israeli state. This
is the Zionist narrative.
Jews in the West are the moral alibi for imperialism. Does anyone
seriously think that Trump is seriously concerned
about Jews or anti-Semitism? His ‘concern’ over the
‘plight’ of Jewish students is grotesque in the extreme given his own racism
and hostility to Black
Lives Matter and anti-racism, with his portrayal of
migrants as rapists and criminals.
Trump has given overt support to the neo-Nazis of Charlottesville, describing them
as ‘very fine people’ and to the
Proud Boys and other White Supremacist militias. Miller understands none of
this.
When Biden said that if
Israel didn't exist it would have had to be created he was expressing the views
of mainstream imperialist thought in the US. According to Reagan’s
Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, Israel was the US’s unsinkable aircraft carrier
and cheap at the price in an area of immense strategic and economic interest.
Jews in the words of
Barnaby Raine are merely the West's colonial pets.
I was reluctant to break from Miller because of what had happened at
Bristol University where he was fired in a McCarthyist witchhunt. I was elated
at his victory in the Employment Tribunal and I hope he wins at the EAT. Initially
I pushed back against the criticism of him by JVL and Na'amod, I cannot do so now because David has made
it clear that he is going down an anti-Semitic pathway.
In holding Jews responsible for Israel’s holocaust in Gaza, Miller lets
imperialism off the hook. The genocide could be halted tomorrow if Trump, or
Biden had stopped the flow of arms. It could have been halted if the Arab
states had stopped the flow of oil. The fact that that miserable humanoid Starmer,
has uttered not one word of criticism speaks volumes.
In a tweet of 24 March
Miller said
Those who are
interested in ending this genocide must begin by targeting those responsible
near them: the entire Zionist movement globally must live in fear of
accountability until it is dismantled and its ideology eradicated. And let's be
clear, there are Zionists everywhere. In every town and city. Find out where
they are.
Zionism is the worst catastrophe that has befallen the Jewish people
next to the Holocaust itself. It is an abomination. It has destroyed Judaism’s
moral and ethical traditions.
Isaiah’s injunction to
‘learn
to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless,
plead the widow’s cause’
has been replaced by Israel’s
determination to turn Gaza into a land of orphans. We have a new acronym WCNSF
(Wounded child, no surviving family).
The injunction in Exodus ‘not (to) oppress a stranger... having yourselves been strangers in the
land of Egypt” has
been replaced by Death to the Arabs.
I am all in favour of destroying Zionism politically and
organisationally but targeting individual Zionists is not the way to do it.
Miller is arguing that we start ferreting out individual Zionists. How
will that stop the genocide? Israel isn’t even concerned about killing its own
hostages. Why should it be concerned about Miller’s fans tracking down
individual Zionists? He says ‘there are Zionists everywhere. In every town and city. Find out
where they are.’ And then what?
Leaving aside his paranoia, are individual Zionists in Britain,
many of whom are Jewish, really responsible for what Israel does? Is that how imperialism operates?
But if like Miller you dismiss imperialism as an interconnected
system of war and political domination motivated by economic exploitation,
then it is far easier to focus on individual Zionists. In so doing you let off
the hook US imperialism and the complicity of Arab regimes such as Saudi
Arabia’s MBS.
Because Miller fails to understand why Western capitalism supports
Israel, he believes that it is all due to ‘infiltration’ of government bodies.
Since about two-thirds of Jews are Zionists this will inevitably be portrayed
as Jew hunting. Is that what Palestine solidarity is about?
Miller’s call for targeting individual Zionists lays him open to Police
attacks. Of course the hysterical reaction
of the Zionists is hypocritical. For years now Zionist organisations like the
misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and UK Lawyers for Israel have gaslighted and doxxed
anti-Zionists and Palestinians like Miller himself and Shahd Abusalama.
Of course if the Police were to act as the Board of Deputies enforcers
then of course we would defend Miller despite his stupidity.
I am currently being prosecuted for support for the Palestinian
Resistance. I was targeted by Heidi Bachram,
who follows in a long tradition of Zionist informers who in countries under
Nazi occupation betrayed Jews to the Gestapo.
Heidi Bachram would have been in her element feeding the Stasi or the Gestapo with 'useful information' on their enemies
Scottish PSC has tried to arrange a debate between Miller and myself without
success. Miller has shied away from debating his ideas. David knows that what
he is saying is indefensible.
The idea that the West supports Israel because Zionists have crept into powerful
positions barely merits a response. Are the Christian Zionists in Trump’s
cabinet all infiltrators? Is Marco
Rubio, US Secretary of State a Zionist infiltrator?
Does the German state support Israel and attack Palestine solidarity demonstrations
because of Jews? Why does the AfD, which
is riddled with neo-Nazis and holocaust deniers, love Israel so
much?
Far-right and neo-Nazi groups are happy to support Zionism and Israel, not
because they love Jews but because they hate Muslims and love imperialism. In
appearing on anti-Semitic and White Supremacist platforms like Stew Peters he is
mixing in some very unsavoury company. Miller seems to have no sense of
self-awareness.
A
Reply to Some of David Miller’s Comments
In his first controversial tweet
Miller made 3 points:
Jewish
Power and Discrimination Against Jews
1.
Jews
are not discriminated against.
2.
They are
over-represented in Europe, North America and Latin America in positions of
cultural, economic and political power.
3.
They are therefore, in a
position to discriminate against actually marginalised groups.
In reaction to criticism of this tweet I defended it although I had
grave misgivings, in particular about the third point.
Miller was correct to say that Jews are not discriminated against or
experiencing racism. There is no state anti-Semitism in Britain. Anti-Semitism
is a marginal prejudice not a form of racism with all its power dynamics. I was
saying this long before Miller, as was Norman Finkelstein and others. I could
even go along with his observations on Jewish 'overrepresentation' in
positions of power, because statistically and sociologically it is true.
However where I parted company was Miller's third point that this
enabled Jews to discriminate against those who were oppressed. If Jews in
powerful positions discriminate against others they do it as part of the group
or organisations they are part of, not as Jews. In private communication with
Miller I made my position clear
In this long rambling tweet Miller
declared that ‘the State of Israel is at war with you’. That when activists
or Muslims are arrested by 'counter-terror' police, “that is being done directly on behalf of the State of Israel”
Miller is arguing that Islamaphobia in the West is a product of Zionism
and Israel. “the soldiers of Zion have
penetrated the security establishment of your state to make its policy.”
How they managed to achieve this is not explained. To call this conspiratorial
is an understatement.
At a stroke Miller erases the racism that results from colonialism
and imperialism. Trump’s Muslim ban was a
consequence of the Israeli state not racism in America. What of the racism against Hispanics in the
United States? Did Trump labelling all
Mexicans as rapists arise from the soldiers of Zion? Are the deportations to Latin America all Israel’s
fault? Apparently so.
It is not difficult to see how this kind of conspiratorial
fantasy degenerates into anti-Semitism. When I was young British fascists
condemned Israel. Not because of what it did to Palestinians but because in
their eyes it was a ‘Jewish’ state. The Palestine solidarity movement wanted
nothing to do with them but Miller with his appearance on the Stew Peters Show
and other tweets seems to be embracing them.
Racism in the West is not the product of support for Israel and
its soldiers of Zion. It is home
grown. Of course today Islamaphobia in
the West is goes hand in hand with support for Israel, which is seen as an
anti-Islamic state. But that is a very different thing. Miller says
‘Take Geert Wilders, in the Netherlands, ... Wilders can be
said to be a creation of the State of Israel and its foreign
intelligence assets.’
This is completely unsupported by anything in the way of
evidence. Geert Wilders is the product of racism in The Netherlands. He is a
home-grown fascist. His support for Zionism and Israel flows from that. In his
own words
If
Jerusalem falls into the hands of the Muslims, Athens and Rome will be next.
Miller
therefore exonerates the British and other states of racism by saying that
their racism is not the product of their own class societies but solely that of
Israel.
Miller talks about ‘the global struggle against Jewish supremacism’. In this phrase Miller
conflates all Jewish people with the Israeli state like the Zionists. That
Israel is a Jewish Supremacist state is a fact which Israel’s human rights
group Bt’selem testifies to.
Again it is difficult not to take this as a call to oppose Jews everywhere and to
brand them all as Jewish Supremacists.
Even accepting that two-thirds of diaspora Jews support Israel
and Zionism, for a whole number of historical reasons, I doubt if any but a
fraction are open Jewish supremacists. Most Jews see Israel, wrongly, as some
form of refuge against anti-Semitism. Of course a minority are overt racists
and Jewish supremacists but even they are not arguing for Jewish supremacism within the societies they live in.
Despite his academic status Miller’s language is sloppy, vague
and open to misinterpretation. It is not helped by the fact that instead of
putting his ideas down on paper he tweets out his latest undigested ideas and
thoughts.
Miller confirms that he is no anti-imperialist or socialist when
he says that the British and US states don’t do what they do because of
imperialism and their need to subjugate, exploit and conquer, but because of
infiltration. He even says that
there's no such thing
as 'foreign' policy. The British state has made a colossal miscalculation by
participating so directly in this genocide,... The British people will have to
repair this trajectory by taking British political and public institutions out
of the grip of Zionist fanatics. This is the only way to preserve the balance
of British society in the long-term. It is essential that Britain is de-Zionised,
In other words he is arguing that the support of the British state for Israel
is on account of a handful of Zionist fanatics.
Without them the state would be quite a benign institution. It wouldn’t be
imperialist or racist, cut disability benefits or privatise the NHS. Instead
A de-Zionised Britain
could be an example to other post-imperial states in how to confront centuries
of imperial violence and chart a course away from the suicidal client
relationship with the US.
This is utter garbage and has nothing to do with a principled
opposition to imperialism, let alone Zionism. It ignores the economic
imperative behind imperialism. Anyone who thinks Miller is on the left is wrong.
I responded to this here and JVL
republished it as Looking down the wrong end
of the telescope.
The global Left is occupied
and infiltrated by Zionist fanatics
In another conspiratorial tweet
we are told that the ‘global left is
occupied and infiltrated by Zionist fanatics.’ For someone who is a
Professor Miller is remarkably imprecise in his language. Who is this global
left? One of the problems with the left is that it isn’t united but in Miller’s
fevered imagination it is homogenous!
The left is
divided into Marxists, Stalinists, Trotskyists, Social Democrats and the
unaligned. There is little agreement between them. But in Miller’s fantasies we
are all infiltrated.
Miller
doesn’t realise that attitudes on the Left towards Israel have changed. In the
wake of the Nazi holocaust most people on the left saw the establishment of the
Israeli state as some form of recompense. They were wrong not to see that an
ethno-nationalist Jewish state could not help but become an echo of everything
they had escaped from. I summed this up when I said that ‘Israel was Hitler’s bastard offspring’.
The Labour
left around Tribune saw Zionism and Israel as progressive. The Labour Party saw
settler colonialism as a positive thing and the natives were invisible. This
was why people like Hyndman of the Social Democratic Federation supported the Boers in the Second Boer War.
Much of the Trotskyist
movement adopted a position of neutrality during the Nakba seeing the 1948 war
as one between British imperialism and its Arab allies and Israel. The
Communist Party, after Stalin’s about turn in 1947 supported UN resolution 181
partitioning Palestine and with it the creation of the Israeli state.
However
times have changed and the key point was the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 when
both Tony Benn and Eric Heffer resigned from
Labour Friends of Israel. The scales fell from their eyes. In 1948 most people
knew nothing of the Nakba. What they saw were those who had survived Hitler’s genocide
struggling again to survive. They were wrong. As we now know Zionism had much
in common with the Nazis ideologically and had collaborated with them, as my
book Zionism During the Holocaust
explains. Israel’s fledgling army had been trained by the British and easily
saw off the ramshackle Arab armies with the exception of Transjordan’s Arab
Legion commanded by Glubb Pasha.
With the
rise in support for anti-imperialist struggles, the revolution in Cuba and opposition
to the Vietnam War and Apartheid in South Africa, the left moved into the
Palestinian camp internationally. Israel
was seen as an arm of US imperialism.
In the
Labour Party it was the right-wing which had historically been pro-Arab and
pro-Palestinian. People like Christopher Mayhew, David Watkins and
Andrew Faulds. After 1982 the Right began
to realign and Tony Blair made support for Zionism virtually a condition of New
Labour.
So Miller is
wrong on this point. The global left is less occupied by Zionists than it ever
has been. He says that ‘'Pro-Palestinian' is a meaningless term’. Perhaps to David but not to Palestinians.
Miller says that ‘A basic
tenet of anti-imperialism is to begin with suspicion when confronted by
possible agents of Empire.’ Really?
A basic tenet of anti-imperialism is support for the oppressed against
the oppressor. We are told that:
leftists around the
world are constantly deferring to Jewish 'allies' for analysis on Zionism... Not only do these
leftists refuse to protect their movements from entryism, they actively
solicit, privilege and even worship Jewish opinion about Jewish supremacist
crimes.
It is impossible to interpret this as anything other than
anti-Semitic and a symptom of Miller’s hostility to the left. Jews supporting
the Palestinians should be treated with suspicion. Miller fails to acknowledge
that Jews might have good reason to oppose Zionism in the same way as Jewish communists
and the Bund opposed Zionism in their time.
Jews are part of the Palestine solidarity movement. Of course Jews,
including Israeli Jews, might have a special understanding of Zionism having
gone through a process of deprogramming but that isn’t because they are Jewish.
It is a recognition that anti-Zionist Jews have a special expertise.
We only have to think of people like Moshe Machover, Ilan Pappe,
Avi Shlaim, Haim Bresheeth – even myself! It was the Israeli group Matzpen
which was first began
calling Israel a settler colonial state.
Jewish activists have been to the fore in occupying
Congress. Whilst Jewish Voice for Peace have been organising thousands
of its supporters David Miller has been waging war against Jewish
‘infiltrators’ on Twitter.
This kind of attack, which can only turn the solidarity movement
against itself is divisive and destructive. Miller is effectively doing the
Zionists’ work.
American Jews are divided as never before, especially young Jews.
Jewish students have been an integral part of the campus protests in the United
States and Britain. Jonathan Ben-Menachem was one of many Jewish students who joined the protests at
Columbia and other universities across the US calling for their
institutions to cut ties with companies linked to Israel. In an interview he
described his
amazement
as the media and political figures have attempted to characterise the protests
as antisemitic and dangerous, despite Jewish student organisations playing a
central role in them.’
There has been this discourse that Columbia
is this hotbed of antisemitism,... It’s crazy how bad faith that discourse has
become.
Sarah, also a Jewish student at Columbia, was arrested for taking part
in the encampment. She was held by the NYPD for eight hours, with her hands in
zip ties. She was suspended the next day, but snuck back onto campus a few days
later to take part in a Passover Seder celebration with fellow protesters.
“It was definitely
one of the more joyful experiences I’ve had at Columbia,” she told The
Independent. “So many of us got arrested or suspended, it was really nice
to see so many Jewish faces at the Seder.”
Sarah had been
appalled by attempts to smear the Columbia protests as antisemitic, saying that
the term had been
weaponized
in a really deceitful way by political opportunists who insist on conflating
anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
There’s
never any substantive response to people like me who are anti-Zionist Jews,”
Sarah noted. “There’s a long tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism.
Nara Milanich,
professor of history at Barnard College, asked:
Are Jews on campus, or anyone else, safer
because hundreds of police in riot gear with firearms were invited to come onto
campus and haul our students off in zip ties? I don’t feel safer,” she
said.
According to
Miller all of those quoted above are
Jewish infiltrators whom
non-Jewish Palestine solidarity protesters are deferring to. Whereas to the press
and politicians like Starmer and Braverman anti-Zionist Jews are invisible.
What really
made me sit up and take note of Miller’s direction of travel was his retweeting of an
article by Richard Lynn, editor of Mankind Quarterly
‘On the high intelligence and cognitive
achievements of Jews in Britain’.
Mankind
Quarterly isn’t some obscure academic journal. It was was
established in 1960 with funding from White segregationists opposed
to civil rights in America. It has been described as a ‘white supremacist
journal’ and ‘a pseudo-scholarly outlet
for promoting racial inequality.’
When I first
saw the tweet I immediately saw that it smacked of the racial sciences:
Are Jews so
(relatively) privileged because of ‘intelligence’ or ‘culture’? Or are there
other explanations? And what are the consequences in terms of the power and
influence of Zionism and the production of genocide in Palestine and
Islamophobia in the West?
Miller saw a
connection between ‘Jewish intelligence’ and Zionism. I explained in my response that Zionism was the idea of
British imperialism and its Christian Zionist advocates not Jews.
A lead article in The
Times of 17 August 1840, called for a plan 'to plant the Jewish people in the land of their fathers' claiming that
it was under 'serious political
consideration' and commending the efforts of Lord Shaftesbury. When
Palmerston approached the Board of Deputies in August 1840 to inquire about co-operation
in Jewish settlement projects, he got a very lukewarm response. The only ones
who didn’t want to ‘return’ were the Jews themselves! In a resolution passed on
7 November 1842 the Board of Deputies resolved that it
'is precluded from originating any measure for carrying out the
benevolent views of Colonel Churchill respecting the Jews of Syria’.
In his
latest tweet Miller
simply digs himself further into a hole. We are told that ‘there are no 'Israeli' anti-Zionists’. Presumably my comrades Ronnie
Barkan and Stav, who are currently facing trial for participating in a Palestine
Action outing and who are already on suspended sentences don’t exist? Both of them are Israeli.
Miller also doubts that there are ‘more than a handful of Jewish anti-Zionists anywhere, particularly if
we assess anti-Zionism on a *material* basis.’ What is this material
basis? Apparently we must first become
martyrs! I wonder if this applies to non-Jews and if not why not?
Apparently I was one of the few Jewish anti-Zionists he conceded
did exist but I suspect that after this article I will also be relegated!
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. Anti-Semites too are happy to see Jews as Zionists with anti-Zionist
Jews rendered invisible.
It is extremely sad and regrettable that Miller is unable to see that Zionism was the
adopted policy of British and then US imperialism well before Jews. Jews provided
the imperialists with legitimacy. Winkling out Zionists is not a strategy.
Tony
Greenstein
