Quote of the day 24th February 2021

"Professor David Miller’s work has long been deeply offensive to me and to many Jews but that is not remotely a conclusive argument for his dismissal. However, I fear the same cannot be said for his recent response to controversies about his work.

Miller has chosen to attack the Bristol University Jewish Society — proper, actual students at his own university — as being part of a co-ordinated campaign of censorship directed by the state of Israel. He further told the Jewish Chronicle that: “There is a real question of abuse here — of Jewish students on British campuses being used as political pawns by a violent, racist foreign regime engaged in ethnic cleansing”.

Bristol University may regard Professor Miller’s amazing theories about power elites as part of the rich tapestry of political sociology and as merely a home for views on Israel I don’t happen to share.

It cannot, however, allow some 19- year-old student who comes up from Radlett to study, I don’t know, 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.

If Bristol cannot tell the difference between such an assault and the normal cut and thrust of academic and political discourse then it doesn’t have any business even teaching political sociology."


(Danny Finkelstein, extract from an article in the Times on Professor David Miller. See previous post on this blog for my take on the same gentleman.) 

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