I linked last week to David Hirsh's short piece in the JC on Bristol University's David Miller. Hirsh now has a longer article at Fathom on The Meaning of David Miller.
An extract:
David Miller includes his own Jewish students, anyway those who participate in their Jewish Society or UJS, as part of the Zionist project to prevent anti-Black racism and Islamophobia from being taken seriously, and to subvert UK public institutions on behalf of Israel....
What David Miller is doing here is defining members of UJS and the Bristol J Soc – that is to say his own students – as ‘Zionist’, by which he means racist, imperialist and dishonest. He has imposed the identity onto them without their consent. They may or may not define themselves as ‘Zionist’, and each may have a unique different understanding of the meaning of the Zionism that they themselves embrace. The Zionism of UJS and of J Socs has nothing in common with the demonising identity that Miller thrusts upon them. In truth, for the overwhelming majority of Jews, some kind of relationship to Israel, where half of the world’s Jews live, is a part of their Jewish identity. But that does not make them racists or unpatriotic to their country, or to whatever other identity Miller thinks they should be loyal.
David Miller’s work is reminiscent of the writing of the classic antisemite who sets himself up as an expert on ‘the Jews’. Miller warns Muslims at the East London Mosque to beware of Jews doing ostensibly innocent interfaith work with them. He constructs intricate diagrams which illustrate in copious detail the connections, which he claims his work uncovers, between Jewish individuals and institutions which he designates as ‘Zionist’. He portrays his work as shining a light into the hidden dark world of the racist and murderous conspiracy.
But sociology is fundamentally an empirical discipline. It starts with a rigorous and structured investigation of the world. Only then does it move on to create concepts and theories which may help to understand and make sense of what has been observed. Conspiracy fantasy works the other way round. It starts with the sense that is to be made, and then it proceeds to find the invented and fantastical patterns in the external world....
But read it all.
David Hirsch has been reading too many dusty old second-hand books if he thinks that sociology is still an “empirical discipline”. Maybe it was once, but not for the last 50 years or so.
Posted by: Martin Adamson | March 02, 2021 at 06:02 PM