An Irish lawyer, Aoife Carroll, wrote: “I’d love to know how many editors that article got through before being published. I’ll take a wild guess that none were women.”
Lionel Barber, the editor of The Financial Times, also denounced the article on Twitter.
Undiluted anti-semitism and misogyny in one paragraph in a newspaper…#Britain 2017 https://t.co/9aSsqPVyFg
— Lionel Barber (@lionelbarber) July 30, 2017
A good start to apologise for the antisemitism, but where is the apology for the odious misogyny of that piece?
— Karolina Sutton (@KarolinaSutton) July 30, 2017
By midmorning local time, the article had been removed from the website, which The Sunday Times shares with The Times of London, both part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.
Shortly afterward, Martin Ivens, the editor of The Sunday Times, apologized on Twitter:
“The comments in a column by Kevin Myers in today’s Irish edition of The Sunday Times were unacceptable and should not have been published. It has been taken down, and we sincerely apologize both for the remarks and the error of judgment that led to publication.”
A separate statement from Frank Fitzgibbon, the editor of the paper’s Irish edition in Dublin, said in part:
“As the editor of the Ireland edition I take full responsibility for this error of judgment. This newspaper abhors anti-Semitism and did not intend to cause offense to Jewish people.”
That statement, however, was criticized for not addressing what many saw as Mr. Myers’s misogyny.
Calls to Mr. Myers’s cellphone and home numbers went unanswered on Sunday. He also did not immediately respond to a voice mail message and email.
On Sunday afternoon, the paper confirmed that Mr. Myers was let go. A spokesperson said: “We can confirm that Kevin Myers will not write again for The Sunday Times Ireland. A printed apology will appear in next week’s paper.
“The Sunday Times editor Martin Ivens has also apologized personally to Claudia Winkleman and Vanessa Feltz for these unacceptable comments both to Jewish people and to women in the workplace.”
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The condemnation of the article comes amid a wider discussion in Britain about the need to confront anti-Semitism, in particular on the far left. The issue came into sharp relief last year, after the Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was attacked and accused of not doing enough to combat anti-Semitism.
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A party member, Naseem Shah, was suspended for endorsing anti-Israel posts on social media in 2014, before becoming a member of Parliament. Ms. Shah had endorsed a Facebook post showing a graphic of Israel’s outline superimposed on a map of the United States under the headline “Solution for Israel-Palestine conflict — relocate Israel into United States.”
In another post, Ms. Shah compared Israeli policies to those of Hitler.
After the posts were publicized last year, Ms. Shah apologized, in an article for Jewish News: “I understand that referring to Israel and Hitler as I did is deeply offensive to Jewish people for which I apologize.”
While debate about anti-Semitism has flared in recent years, so, too, has discussion about sexism at a time when Britain has a female prime minister, Theresa May. In December, when Mrs. May was photographed wearing a $1,250 pair of “desert khaki” leather pants, some critics accused her of showing elitism during a period of austerity — a criticism that some her defenders attributed to ageism and sexism.
Some asked if anyone would have questioned her taste in fashion or the hefty cost of her trousers if she were a man.
Born in England to Irish parents, Mr. Myers has long been a strident and at times deeply controversial voice in the Irish news media, first as a columnist for The Irish Times (which is not connected to The Sunday Times of London), and then later The Irish Independent group.
In 2009, he wrote a column for The Belfast Telegraph, part of the Irish Independent group, which said, “There was no Holocaust, and six million Jews were not murdered by the Third Reich.” The article accepted that there had been a deliberate mass genocide against the Jews of Europe, but said that the term “holocaust” was inaccurate and that the exact number of dead could not be known.
According to the Irish Independent group’s website, that article was also taken down from archives on Sunday.
In 2005, Mr. Myers was widely criticized for a column in The Irish Times in which he referred to the children of single parents as “bastards.” Writing about foreign aid to Africa in The Irish Independent in 2008, he said that in contrast, “Africa, with its vast savannahs and its lush pastures, is giving almost nothing to anyone, apart from AIDS.”
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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/30/world/europe/uk-sunday-times-kevin-myers-anti-semitic.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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