The Guardian’s Holocaust Memorial Day Special

January 29, 2012 13:24 by Simon Plosker

The Guardian is never going to miss an opportunity to attack a Conservative government minister and a Jewish organization all in the same go. Let the story appear on Holocaust Memorial Day and just to rub it in, make sure that your source happens to run some anti-Semitic websites. The perfect storm which shows that The Guardian’s obsessive ideological behavior blinds it to carrying out basic journalist professionalism.

Even when The Guardian is clearly in the wrong.

As Toby Young blogs at the Daily Telegraph:

Oh Dear. The Guardian is so intent on doing down Michael Gove that it has scored a spectacular own goal.

In today’s paper, there’s a report that Gove, in his capacity as Secretary of State for Education, has awarded a £2m grant to the Community Security Trust, a charity that provides security to Britain’s Jewish communities. The reason this is a “story” is because Gove has been on the “advisory board” of CST since 2007.

In fact, there’s nothing untoward about this. The CST doesn’t itself receive any donations; rather, it distributes the money it receives to various security companies, none of which Michael Gove is on the board of. Indeed, it’s such a non-story that Ed Balls issued the following Tweet last night: “I’ve had many disagreements with Michael Gove, but on this one he’s right: CST do a great job on security for Jewish schools.”

If you drill down into the story, it’s clear that the source is someone called David Miller, professor of Sociology at the University of Strathclyde. He is quoted in the piece talking about Michael Gove as follows:

It is blindingly obvious that he should have stood aside, as this is a potential conflict of interest. This is another example of transparency rules in the UK being ineffectual and in serious need of overhaul.

But who is this Professor Miller? According to Harry’s Place:

David Miller also runs a series of websites, one of which reproduced the thesis of a notorious neo-Nazi, Kevin MacDonald. MacDonald believes that Jews are genetically predisposed to scheme and conspire against non-Jews. The article was eventually removed, after this was pointed out to them. But, as far as we can tell, nobody was “sacked” from Miller’s project for promoting neo-Nazi antisemitism.

Young goes on to say that this highlights The Guardian’s willingness to regurgitate anti-Semitic propaganda. Tell us something we didn’t already know.

Category: Backspin The Guardian UK News Tags:CST, Daily Telegraph, David Miller, Holocaust Memorial Day, Michael Gove, The Guardian, Toby Young
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