Current Affairs editor and former Guardian US columnist Nathan Robinson
The Guardian has fired one of its columnists for its US edition, Nathan Robinson, because Robinson jokingly tweeted about US military aid to Israel. The Guardian’s US editor-in-chief, John Mulholland, charged Robinson with spreading “fake news.” Worse, Mulholland suggested that his columnist was promoting antisemitic tropes about Israel’s influence on the US government.
In a since-deleted tweet (12/23/20), Robinson had written, in response to the $500 million in military aid for Israel in the spending that included Covid relief:
Did you know that the US Congress is not actually allowed to authorize any new spending unless a portion of it is directed toward buying weapons for Israel? It’s the law.
Lest anyone fail to recognize this as typical Twitter sarcasm, Robinson immediately appended a clarification: “or if not actually the written law then so ingrained in political custom as to functionally be indistinguishable from law.”
Later that day, Robinson received a note from Mulholland, whom he had never before heard from. (Robinson revealed his communication with Mulholland and wrote about his firing in Current Affairs—2/10/21—the socialist magazine Robinson edits.) Mulholland insisted that, “given that no such law exists,” the tweet was “fake news”—”irrespective of the later tweet when you say that it is ‘indistinguishable from law.'” And he went on to link Robinson to antisemitic conspiracy theories:
Given the reckless talk over the past year—and beyond—of how mythical “Jewish groups/alliances” yield power over all forms of public life, I am not clear how this is helpful to public discourse.
Guardian US editor John Mulholland
Mulholland also complained that Robinson’s remark on Twitter—a medium that limits its contributors to 280 characters at a time—did not explore the question of aid to Israel more deeply, with a cross-national historical perspective:
I am not sure why singling out financial aid to Israel in a tweet and devoid of any context—and without mention of aid to other countries either currently or historically—is a useful addition to public discourse.
“It dismays me that someone who presents themselves as a Guardian columnist would make such a clearly erroneous statement without…any context/justification,” Mulholland concluded.
It’s not a particularly persuasive critique, but as Mulholland was his boss, Robinson deleted his tweet and promised to be more careful in the future. “I greatly appreciate your thoughtful response,” Mulholland replied—but it was soon made clear that the Guardian would be publishing no more of Robinson’s columns, and that the tweet, deleted or not, was the reason.
Robinson told FAIR that Mulholland was policing his conduct beyond his role as a columnist. “It is very clear that John Mulholland wants the ability not just to curate the content of the paper, but to curate the public thoughts of all writers affiliated with the paper,” he said.
Robinson joins the ranks of journalists and intellectuals who have been “canceled” because of their criticism of Israel. Notable subjects include professor Marc Lamont Hill losing his job at CNN (11/30/18) and Steven Salaita having a job offer rescinded by the University of Illinois (Chicago Tribune, 11/12/15).
Beyond the flagrant abuse of the charge of antisemitism against any criticism of Israel (which in this case was actually a joke about US spending on Israeli arms), the incident raises a troubling question about the Guardian. When high-speed internet access became more prevalent at the dawn of the new millennium, English-language outlets outside the United States became go-to sources for left-leaning readers frustrated by the pro-Israeli and pro-US bias in US Middle East coverage (FAIR.org, 1/1/01; 1/28/11; 4/19/12). The websites of the BBC, the Guardian and the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz have, in recent decades, become important sources for broader coverage of Israel/Palestine.
The Guardian, like the Independent, has been considered one of Britain’s left-of-center publications, favored by Labour Party voters. The Guardian formalized its US online edition 10 years ago (Guardian, 9/14/11).
Of course, the Guardian’s storied anti-imperialism in the Middle East is sometimes rooted in more myth than fact: The paper (1/18/03) championed US and British-led military action in Iraq and even gave John Bolton, a prominent hawk in both the Bush and Trump administrations, space to look back approvingly on the war (2/26/13). The author page for former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who led the nation into the war and moved the Labour Party sharply rightward, has 75 articles.
At the same time, pro-Israel outlets have accused the Guardian of having an anti-Israel bias (Jewish Journal, 12/4/03; Algemeiner, 7/23/20). Pro-Israel media watchdogs like CAMERA and Honest Reporting have catalogued what they describe as a pro-Palestinian slant in both opinion and news coverage at the Guardian.
Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, media officer for Britain’s Jewish Voice for Labour, told FAIR that the group has seen a steady decline in the paper’s Middle East coverage, most recently with what the group saw as a downplaying of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem’s statement that Israel is, indeed, an apartheid state. The Guardian’s editorial (1/17/21) on the subject “was of the mealy-mouthed ‘on the one hand on the other hand’ variety,” she said:
It was left to Middle East Eye (1/14/21), one of very few independent platforms in the UK with the courage to allow open expressions of a radical, anti-colonial perspective on Israel/Palestine, to highlight the significance of B’Tselem’s work.
She pointed out that the Guardian’s opinion pieces “have in recent years become virtually closed to advocates for Palestine,” while pro-Israel “lobbyists seem to have free rein”:
The choice in October 2016 of the Israeli Ambassador to author its commemoration of 80 years since the battle of Cable Street (Guardian, 10/6/16), comparing the threat of fascism in the 1930s with that of “left-wing antisemitism” now, was the last straw for me as a life-long Guardian reader.
Wimborne-Idrissi argued that this trend mirrored the paper’s negative slant against former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, as he fought accusations from the party’s centrist faction that he allowed antisemitism to fester in the party:
Influential columnist Jonathan Freedland, executive editor for a time, has played a huge role in pushing forward the anti-Corbyn agenda. Editor-in-chief Katherine Viner, despite evidence of past pro-Palestinian sympathies, has done nothing to rein in attacks on the left, including on Jewish critics of Israel who have attempted in vain to generate discussion about the so-called IHRA definition of antisemitism. The definition conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and is being aggressively deployed to close down expressions of support for Palestine.
Current political correspondent in the Westminster lobby team is Jessica Elgot, who joined the Guardian in 2015, having cut her teeth at the Jewish Chronicle, authoring many an attack on the Labour left under Corbyn. In her current role, she has continued her enthusiastic support for the smear campaign. A feature of her coverage has been to quote uncritically (Guardian, 3/8/18) from right-wing zealots with a clear anti-Palestinian—some might say Islamophobic—agenda, such as David Collier (understood to be part of the @gnasherjew collective on Twitter) and Joe Glasman of the misnamed Campaign Against Antisemitism. The latter caused consternation by responding to Corbyn’s defeat in the 2019 general election with a video celebrating how the CAA’s “spies and intel” had “slain the beast.”
Declassified UK (9/11/19): “The Guardian, Britain’s leading liberal newspaper with a global reputation for independent and critical journalism, has been successfully targeted by security agencies to neutralize its adversarial reporting of the ‘security state.’”
A lengthy investigation by DeclassifiedUK and the Daily Maverick (9/11/19) noted that after the Guardian (6/11/13) revealed Edward Snowden’s leaks about National Security Agency surveillance, the paper’s investigatory abilities in regard to state security operations became compromised. It said that at the time of the leaks, “Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger withstood intense pressure not to publish some of the Snowden revelations.” However, in March 2015, “the situation changed when the Guardian appointed a new editor, Katharine Viner, who had less experience than Rusbridger of dealing with the security services.” The investigation pointed out that Viner previously worked at the
fashion and entertainment magazine Cosmopolitan and had no history in national security reporting. According to insiders, she showed much less leadership during the Snowden affair.
Justin Schlosberg, a senior lecturer in journalism and media at the University of London, echoes this in a chapter in a forthcoming book about the paper: “Following the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, the Guardian’s relationship with the security state began to look increasingly more cooperative than antagonistic,” he wrote, adding that “between 2016 and 2019, the paper was awarded three ‘exclusives’ with spy agency and counter-terror chiefs,” which were “largely devoid of the kind of interrogative scrutiny characteristic of the Rusbridger era.”
At the same time, Schlosberg noted, the paper moved to the right during the years Corbyn led the Labour Party (2015–20). “On the whole, comment pieces were aggressively hostile towards the Corbyn leadership,” Schlosberg wrote, and “the selection of issues and sources in news coverage overwhelmingly favored the accounts and agendas of Corbyn’s detractors.”
For some of the Guardian’s critics, this editorial switch can be felt today in much of its coverage and commentary of the Labour Party and in the Middle East. And that decline matters, because the Guardian has long been seen as providing much-needed nuance and broader reporting to the US newspaper market, and as a direly needed alternative to a British newspaper market that is dominated by nationalistic, Tory-aligned tabloids. Robinson’s firing is just the latest example of what these critics have seen for a while.
“What this shows is that even at the Guardian, the editors want to very tightly police what writers say on Israel/Palestine,” Robinson told FAIR, adding that its editors “want to make sure the criticism is carefully approved and stays only within certain bounds.”
Of course the paper has published criticism of Israel, Robinson said, but he noted, “It has also shown that it is willing to cede ground to those who treat legitimate criticisms of the country’s policies as bigoted.”
FAIR published an open letter (2/18/21) to the Guardian‘s John Mulholland calling on him to reinstate Nathan Robinson as a columnist. You can write to Mulholland at john.mulholland@theguardian.com or via Twitter: @jnmulholland. Remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
Literally “left out”
Does Jill Abramson stlll columnize for the [US] Guardian?
She’s hardly a real liberal, and started there right after the NY Times fired her. Of course in 2015/16, Ms Abramson backed the rightist HRC for the Democratic Party’s nomination.
The Grauniad (as it’s sarcastically known in Britain) is equally awful
in its coverage of Latin America, especially Venezuela and Nicaragua.
Add Cuba and Bolivia’s progressive governments: any enemy of
Whitehall (and Foggy Bottom) is ripe for Guardian targeting.
Cancel culture eats its own!
Just to be clear, I am against cancel culture – either direction.
Let the regulars attack me for saying something that any traditional liberal would have said 10 years ago.
To chatbot “Tim/tim”,
You say:
“Cancel culture eats its own!”
As if “Cancel Culture” is something endemic to the “liberal” or “leftist” movement, when it’s you eliminativist, right wingers, whose illiberal and sociopathic policies are the very definition of “cancelling.”
Why haven’t you answered my question about the Montgomery Bus Boycotts…????
Easy there.
Tim is what he appears to be: someone who, after 300 years of government subsidies to white people at the expense of other ethnic groups, now suddenly wants there to be “no bias in legal & government” affairs/policies.
He wants free speech uber alles, while ignoring that the people targeted by hate speech don’t look like him, and he is unlikely to suffer violence from hate speech, as those people will.
Seeing him comment on this was fairly predictable, one would say.
Hate speech. LOL. Spoken like a snowflake. Nobody suffers violence from hate speech.
I couldn’t care less what this journalist looks like. Only you on the left are obsessed with skin color. Yes to Free Speech Uber Alles! Long live liberty.
How is Joshua Irish’s fascist demand for censorship of speech that he hates “on the left?” It seems the corporate media, in defining every issue as a question of skin color to distract from real economic conflicts, have stripped “left” and “right” of all utility in political discourse.
Hate speech is something that only leftists talk about. We on the right couldn’t care less about hate speech. Hate speech is what the 1st amendment is all about. Nobody wants to protect “have a nice day.” You’ll never hear anyone on the right condemn hate speech. Same for hate crimes. Not too many violent crimes committed out of love. Hate is baked into most violent crimes. The only reason they were passed is for virtue signalling. Look what a good person I am. I really want to protect (fill in your favorite protected class today).
To understand the politics of The Guardian you need to understand the people who edit, write for and read The Guardian and English class culture. They are from the English middle class which is not politically uniform and The Guardian is from the part of the English middle class which is politically left of centre. It wants a left of centre government but only on its own terms: low personal taxes, increased public spending funded by increased public borrowing, no threats to the private education sector, nothing to jeopardise housing values, no restrictions to freedom of movement, restrictions to freedom of speech, stronger regulation of the media but not The Guardian. Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden were acceptable to them. Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders were unacceptable because they were too left-wing.
A key feature of the part of the English middle class that The Guardian comes from is that they pretend to care about other people. They pretend to care about the poor, women, the young, ethnic minorities and immigrants but those people must know their place and accept that the white middle class people at The Guardian are their superiors. The Guardian’s attempt to establish itself in America has partly been based on pretending to care about black people but it didn’t care enough about the black writers it paid to write about Michael Brown to give them senior staff jobs rather than employ them as freelance writers. They pretend to care about other people but they only really care about themselves and what they really want to do is exploit other people. However, The Guardian is always desperate for money because it has been so badly run as a business because it has over-paid its senior staff whilst employing vast numbers of junior staff so The Guardian itself can be exploited and any political position that The Guardian takes can be changed or conveniently forgotten when commercially convenient.
The Guardian doesn’t have any principles: it has interests.
Don’t forget that the Guardian was raided by MI6 and other British and American “law enforcement” agencies after they, along with several other outlets worldwide, had published some of the documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Ever since then they’ve been state-controlled in all but name. Perfect example of the Chomsky quote where thought and speech have been limited to a smaller and smaller number of acceptable topics which are debated vigorously.
Here’s a pre-Snowden example of how The Guardian can be controlled by the state.
The Guardian likes to think of itself as a feminist newspaper. In recent years it has published thousands of news reports and opinion articles about sexual violence against women. It has written about the #MeToo movement, about Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh, about sexual violence on university campuses, about the failure of police, prosecutors and other state agencies to believe and support victims of sexual violence and investigate and prosecute the perpetrators and about rape culture, rape deniers and rape enablers.
In the early 2000s seven women from a town in England called Keighley told the town’s Labour Member of Parliament Ann Cryer that gangs of men had been plying their underage daughters with drink and drugs and raping them and gave her the names of 65 gang members. Those mothers and Ann Cryer repeatedly reported this to the police and other state agencies but very little was done and in 2004 only 5 members of the gang were convicted. In the late 2000s police and other state agencies in Keighley and other places began to take similar reports seriously and more investigations and prosecutions followed and in 2014 the Jay report was published which stated that between 1997 and 2013 in the town of Rotherham 1,400 children had been sexually abused by gangs of men.
The Labour government knew about the rape gangs operating in Rotherham because in 2000 it commissioned a report into “young people and prostitution” in Rotherham and elsewhere and when the researcher told the police, the Labour local government in Rotherham and the Labour national government about the rape gangs they covered up what was happening because if the story got out the Labour Party could have lost power. In the early 2000s The Guardian knew about the rape gangs operating in Keighley because it was told by Ann Cryer and later it was told about rape gangs elsewhere by the feminist campaigner Julie Bindel. However, rather than investigating the rape gangs and the failures of the authorities The Guardian spent years denying the existence of these rape gangs, downplaying the problem and diverting attention away from it.
One of the reasons why it did this is because in the late 1990s and the 2000s The Guardian was paid millions of pounds that it desperately needed every year by the Labour government to advertise job vacancies in state agencies such as the police, social services, the health service and state education, some of which had been told about the girls who were being raped by gangs of men but failed to protect them. The government didn’t want the public to know about the gangs committing mass rape and The Guardian didn’t want to tell them in case the voters killed the goose that laid the golden eggs for The Guardian. Many years on and even after many members of many rape gangs have been convicted The Guardian still doesn’t want to publish news reports or opinion pieces about these rapes and certainly doesn’t want the public to talk about it in case anyone points out that The Guardian was paid to help cover up the story of the mass rape gangs operating under the noses of a Labour government that promised to be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”.
What happened in Rotherham and elsewhere is worse than the Watergate scandal.
Not only a rightward drift, but a “state managed” and corporate drift. This is the just desserts for those who sat idly by as newsroom after newsroom became profit centers and the cancel culture waters were tested to the point that it’s now a viable means of censorship. Not only do most journalists know what’s off the table as far as their job goes, but also what they can or can’t say publicly. Think back to the woman who sarcastically tweeted that she wouldn’t get AIDS in Africa because she was white and was summarily destroyed online and fired from her job before her flight had landed and she was able to respond. Even The Bachelor on ABC has been affected, with the host having to step down for the temerity of urging compassion and a desire to hear the accused party’s side of the story before commenting on the subject matter, which at the time he wasn’t fully cognizant of.
Too bad, really, because with the de-platforming of Alex Jones, Parler, Donald Trump, etc. it only sets the stage for the same or worse tactics being used against left-leaning authors, politicians and individuals in the very near future…..again, it’s a viable means of erasing non-mainstream thought.
The article here covered the Israel angle well enough, and I am in agreement with all that has been written on that. Israel has long used the same or similar approaches to silencing criticism, most of it 100% legitimate and grounded in fact.
But here we are where only a few huge corporations control the mainstream media and social media. They can erase inconvenient content, invalidate and shame individuals, completely de-platform organizations and even ISPs and cloud-based hosting services and ICANN are not immune from being bullied into complying. This goes far beyond Israel criticism – it’s a massive threat to progress and another means of ensuring that wealth concentration continues unabated.
There are many things wrong with the tampering with journalism globally, but be assured it is a well thought out attack. And as truth only helps the honest, international corporate, “it” and fascist dictators despise the truth. So under them only the ugly truth that hurts the most people are being gagged! That homegrown terrorist like, kkk and police brutality if anything being opening sanctioned has gone up! PM Netanyahu of Israel, British and American governments are at war with the truth, obviously! Meaning premeditated, gruesome, massive crimes are still being planned and covered up! And the only way to do that is with the dirtbag government leadership, who share racist persuasion becoming kissing cousins conspiring to kill the messengers:) All thire response are tactics brought out from under the 1930 rocks by the same filth that attacked the US Capital in an attempted insurgency on 1/6/2021! The total disrespect for constitutional law, coupled with the 7th century “might makes right” bullyboy stuff. Further fueled by a growing spread of bought-dog corporate government leadership representing nations that were the worst victims of old intimidated nations, are now imitating their their tormentors! The few monied international interested have decided to basically kill us all, and law, truth that use to protect us is being gutted deliberately toward that end! While the open promotion of divide and conquer quotient is shifting into 4th gear, to keep the mass fighting among themselves! While the inanimate objects bought dogs, without any worry of responsibility continue dismantling all legal recourse or journalist disclosures of these growing global catastrophically planned agendas. Can not correct crimes against mankind without brave folks reconnoitering mankind’s enemies, gathering evidence, so we at least have a chance to better the world and the human lives in it, while starting to disinfect the monopoly fungus among us:) Joe6pK
Those of your readers who are shocked. shocked by the Guardian’s pro-Apartheid bias should look at the treatment the newspaper rendered to Abraham Lincoln and the Union during the US civil war, Lincoln being pursued literarily as the Anti-Christ.
Apparently, the (cotton-interested) owners of the Guardian didn’t care too much about the sudden disappearance through war of a slavery that would have a substantial impact on cotton prices, and wanted the British government to help the Confederacy, on the premise that slavery would disappear over time… through ‘constructive engagement’, as Margaret Thatcher used to say about South African Apartheid.
I always think of Phil Ochs singing “Love me, I’m a Liberal” now, when more Guardian malfeasance comes to mind – I quit reading after 30 years once they sold themselves to the ‘Labour antisemitism’ fraud..
Great analysis. But “rightward drift” implies a change in ideological perspective. The Guardian’s groveling before Zionist demands simply continues its permanent ideology: to ignore human rights and all other ethical considerations and follow the money.
For the benefit of readers who do not follow news in the UK much in recent days a journalist called Roy Greenslade revealed that for many years he had been a supporter of the IRA (by which he meant the Provisional IRA which existed from 1969 to 2005, although it declared a final ceasefire in 1997). For decades the IRA fought a military campaign to try to force the British government to relinquish sovereignty over Northern Ireland and to create a united Ireland. During what were called “The Troubles” more than 3000 people were killed and more than 1700 of them were killed by the IRA, including more than 500 civilians.
Roy Greenslade worked for various newspapers in the UK during his career but he is most noted for being editor of the Daily Mirror for a brief period before becoming a columnist for The Guardian specialising in commentary on the media. He wrote for The Guardian for twenty five years.
Which is considerably longer than Nathan Robinson who, to my knowledge, hasn’t supported a terrorist group which killed 21 people in two Birmingham pubs in 1974, killed 11 people attending a Remembrance Sunday memorial event in 1987 and killed two children out shopping in 1992.