Prominent Left Wing Columnist Fired By The Guardian For Tweet Criticizing Israel

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Socialist writer Nathan J. Robinson, a fixture in the Bernie Sanders movement, has been fired from his job at the “progressive” newspaper The Guardian after authoring tweets criticizing Congress for prioritizing military aid to Israel over COVID relief for struggling Americans. 

The Guardian prides itself as one of the most left-wing mainstream media outlets in the English-speaking world. Robinson started working for the British publication’s US branch in 2017 until his dismissal last Tuesday.  

Political blacklisting and censorship is usually framed as an attack by oversensitive leftists against the right, but left-wing critics of war and Zionism are shut down just as quickly, Robinson has written in response.

Jewish organizations driving “cancel culture” are racially motivated, not politically partisan. They seek to uphold the Jewish “post-war consensus” (domestic liberalism and Zionist foreign policy) by silencing opponents of mass immigration, globalization, mass media, finance, Jewish overrepresentation and gender ideology on the right along with Muslims and leftists who oppose Zionism and ethnic cleansing by Israel on human rights grounds.  

In his tell-all article about the incident, Robinson states that he was confronted by Guardian editor John Mulholland in December over the two tweets, which read ““Did you know that it’s the law that whenever Congress authorizes new spending it has to buy Israel a new weapons system? It’s true!” (2) “Well, if not actually the law, at least so customary as to be functionally identical.”

Soon after, Muholland sent him an angry email titled “private + confidential,” lambasting him for “singling out financial aid to Israel” and promoting the “fake news” that Jews have enormous influence over our discourse and politics. 

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According to Robinson, Mulholland wanted the December exchange to be kept confidential in order to avoid accusations that the so-called left-wing paper was suppressing critics of Israel. It’s more likely that a wealthy donor pulled strings to get him cancelled and they don’t want it to be traced back to Jews.  

Robinson states that he deleted the tweet and made a groveling apology for mistakenly crossing Jews to Mulholland because he was financially dependent on the $15,000 a year he was making as a columnist. The editor accepted his apology, but started phasing him out anyway. 

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This week, Robinson was finally able to speak to Mulholland, who informed him that he was fired and blacklisted from ever contributing to The Guardian again. 

The author has claimed innocence, saying that he was not aware of an official policy strictly regulating discourse around Israel, as it is not in the style guide or rule book. Instead, they have an “unwritten” rule where columnists commenting against a Jewish or Zionist interest in an unauthorized way, including on their personal twitter accounts, lose their jobs. The Guardian was one of the most prominent left-wing proponents of the idea that Labour Party’s socialist firebrand, Jeremy Corbyn, was an “anti-Semite.” 

Robinson correctly attacks the hypocrisy of institutional conservative free speech defenders who are curiously silent when leftists are punished for taking up the Palestinian cause. Robinson is not innocent, he has himself published articles in support of cancelling opponents on the right. As editor of Current Affairs, he has commissioned a number of Jews and “Antifa” radical liberal types, including one, Lyta Gold, who has written pieces celebrating cancel culture. 

It remains to be seen what the full extent of Robinson’s fallout with powerful “progressive-except-Palestine” Jews will be. He shouldn’t be surprised if some of his powerful friends and positive appraisals he has received from Jewish platforms like the New York Times and Daily Beast  start to vanish. 

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