Criticize Israel, lose your job: A little light into the murky world of the Guardian

Craig Murray
craigmurray.org
Wed, 10 Feb 2021 00:00 UTC

Nathan Robinson lost his employment as a Guardian columnist on US politics for these tweets:

They were, according to the editor of Guardian US John Mulholland, "clearly antisemitic". Criticising US military aid to Israel, according to Mulholland, was tantamount to arguing that Israel controls the United States.

This kind of circular reasoning, by which all criticism of Israel is anti-semitic so any criticism of military support to Israel is anti-semitic, is evidently invalid. But this tells you a great deal about how the Guardian now operates, in addition to it being the main media conduit for the UK security services. But actually, the part of Mr Robinson's narrative I found most enlightening about his employment by the Guardian was:

I only had a column spiked for content reasons once, as far as I can remember, which occurred when I criticized Joe Biden over Hunter Biden's corrupt business ties.

That tells you everything about the massive hypocrisy of the so-called "liberal" media, which actually is anything but liberal. The fact that the Biden administration has decided to pursue the prosecution of Julian Assange confirms that the people are getting the same slops, in a different bucket.

The lack of media interest in the fact that Hunter Biden was receiving $720,000 a year, plus a one off $850,000, from a Ukrainian company he never visited nor did any identifiable work for, was not just laziness. They were actually spiking the stories. The BBC reported Trump's efforts to get information on it from the government of Ukraine as an abuse of position by Trump (arguably correct), but managed to report the story without ever revealing the facts about Hunter Biden. It was not just the mainstream media - when I tried to blog on the subject, both Twitter and Facebook subjected my posts to whole new levels of suppression.

Now the Bidens are in power, the Establishment can return to methods of corruption which are well-honed, and which are kept hidden by a web of comfortable elite relationships, after the much ruder interlude from Trump. We should be grateful for Mr Robinson for a tiny glimpse into the propaganda machine that keeps the people ignorant and manufactures their consent.

Comment: Mr. Nathan Robinson claimed that his tweets were intended as a joke and apologized to John Mulholland. after which The Guardian decided to fire him:

In a post Wednesday for Current Affairs, the progressive online magazine he founded, Robinson says he lost his job after tweeting what he said was a joke about U.S. military aid to Israel in December 2020, shortly after Congress approved a Covid relief bill and, separately, $500 million in military aid to Israel, pursuant to a 2016 agreement between the U.S. and Israel.

"I am — to my constant shame — moderately active on Twitter, so I relieved my anger with a joke tweet," Robinson says, providing screenshots of the tweets, which have since been deleted.

"Of course, tweet 1 was sarcasm (which is common on Twitter), but to absolutely make sure that nobody thought this was some kind of actual law, I appended a second tweet to make it crystal clear that I was joking, this was 100 percent a joke, let there be no room for misinterpretation about this joke [emphasis in original]," Robinson writes in his Current Affairs post.

Robinson says he wasn't immediately aware of backlash to the tweet, which included some calling him an anti-Semite, an allegation he immediately dismissed.
...
Robinson apologized to Mulholland via email, adding that he had deleted the tweet and clarified.

Shortly thereafter, Mulholland thanked Robinson for his reply, and for deleting the tweet, adding: "I greatly appreciate your thoughtful response."

Robinson said that based on his exchange with Mulholland, he felt that the issue had been addressed, and he expected to move forward with his column.

See also:

• Debunking the myth that anti-Zionism equates to antisemitism
• State Dept shields Israel from criticism: Updates antisemitism definition to include comparisons to Nazi Germany
• International campaign, involving multiple governments, criminalizes criticism of Israel as 'antisemitism'