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It seems as if in the minds of David Miller, Kevin MacDonald and Hilary Aked, a mysterious Jewish cabal is responsible for all the world’s ills.
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Even Tony Blair, Miller argues, is in league with a sinister “international network” of Israeli settlers and American “Islamophobes.”
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“A liberal Muslim is their trussed-up version of the enemy, the alien, the ‘other’.” — Nick Cohen, journalist.
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Hilary Aked describes moderate Muslims as “native informants.” She also believes that a hidden Jewish network is responsible for the “Islamophobia industry.” She has frequently written for a Qatari-funded media group that is accused by Egyptian newspapers of being a Muslim Brotherhood front group.
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Electronic Intifada is a prominent pro-Hamas publication, whose founder, Ali Abunimah, describes Palestinian leaders who talk with Israel as “collaborators.”
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To fund his obsession with the “propaganda” ostensibly spread by Jews and anti-Islamist Muslims, Miller has received grants from the Economic and Social Research Council, a body funded by the British government. In 2012, Miller received £400,000 from the Council, as well as grants from groups affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.
From his office at the University of Bath, David Miller, an academic and writer, researches organizations and activists that he believes, in his words, work to “distort public debate and undermine democracy.”
The results of this research, done with the help of his students and assembled into detailed profiles of the shadowy figures behind this lobbying, are published across a number of websites run by Miller, including PowerBase and SpinWatch.
A visitor to these websites will quickly note one particular constant: a vast number of Miller’s profiles focus on Jews and Muslims who are working to fight extremism and terrorism.
Counter-terrorism groups, “neocons” and various political organizations are all accused of belonging to a “covert propaganda operation” for various Jewish organizations. Even Tony Blair, Miller argues, is in league with a sinister “international network” of Israeli settlers and American “Islamophobes.”
As one blogger notes, any of Miller’s “fellow academics” who do not present strong convictions against Israel, are “smeared… as neocons.”
Shiraz Maher, a counter-terrorism expert, has written: “Despite the ‘close to ten thousand’ entries on SpinProfiles [another Miller project] you will find nothing on [Islamist pressure] groups. … The problem is with SpinProfile’s apparent obsession with ‘Jewish power’ or, if you will, ‘the Jewish lobby’.”
At a recent conference organized by Miller, American academic Deepa Kumar denounced Muslims working to combat extremism and terrorism within their communities as “native informants.” And as the journalist Nick Cohen observed: “For the religious [Islamic] right and the political and academic left, a liberal Muslim is their trussed-up version of the enemy, the alien, the ‘other’.”
Another David Miller site, Neocon Europe (now defunct), published the works of Kevin MacDonald, a prominent white supremacist who claims that Jews control the media and politicians to “transform the country to serve their interests.” In a list entitled, “characteristics of Jewish intellectual movements,” MacDonald has claimed that Jews “form a cohesive, mutually reinforcing core” that has “access to prestigious and mainstream media sources, partly as a result of Jewish influence on the media.”
Other conspiracy theories promoted on Miller’s websites include those of Miller’s colleague, Idrees Ahmed, who claims that the Darfur crisis has been prolonged by a powerful Jewish lobby.
In 2009, David Miller provided accommodation for Joel Kovel, an anti-Jewish American academic who has written that, “The Holocaust has been repressed from history and converted into moral capital to cover and justify whatever the Jewish people would do in the way of domination themselves, whether this be the pell-mell immersion in American bourgeois life or the policies of Israel.”
David Miller and his network also work with Muslim Brotherhood operatives. In 2009, Miller secured taxpayer funding to run a project examining British Islam in collaboration with Osama Saeed, a Muslim Brotherhood activist. Saeed was previously the spokesperson for the Muslim Association of Britain, the main organization for the Muslim Brotherhood in Britain. In 2005, Saeed called for the re-establishment of the Islamic caliphate; and in 2006, Saeed expressed praise for the late Al Qaeda leader Anwar Al-Awlaki.
Miller’s protégés include Hilary Aked, a blogger with a strong interest in British Jewish groups. Aked apparently believes that a hidden Jewish network is responsible for the “Islamophobia industry,” and that there is a distinct “overlap between Islamophobia and Zionism.” She also describes moderate Muslims as “native informants.”
