The RP’s Battle with Jonathan Miller Featured at JTA’s “The Telegraph”

JTA, the leading international Jewish news agency featured a piece written by the RP last week in which he lambasted his fellow Jonathan Miller (the British playwright) for signing what The RP termed an anti-Semitic letter.

So reports JTA:

From one Jonathan Miller to another: Your Israeli boycott call is anti-Semitic

By Ami Eden · April 6, 2012

 

Let’s start with the first Jonathan Miller in the headline.

He’s a former state state treasurer in Kentucky and failed candidate for governor. He’s the creator of theRecovering Politician blog. And (full disclosure) he’s a JTA board member and basketball commentator.

He’s also very upset with another Jonathan Miller.

Not:

… Jonathan Miller, the News Corp executive, Jonathan Miller, the Birmingham Rabbi, Johnathan Miller, the Iran-Contra felon, or even Jonathan Miller whom God called to run for Congress in West Virginia.

Instead, Jonathan Miller (Blogger-Ky.) writes, his “deep disappointment is directed toward the most famous Jonathan Miller.”

For those of you who are under the age of 50 and have never tried to Google me, THE Jonathan Miller is “is a British theatre and opera director, actor, author, television presenter, humorist and sculptor,” best known for being a frequent guest in the early 1980s on The Dick Cavett Show.

Turns out Jonathan Miller (Actor-UK) has signed on to a call for a British theater (oh, fine, theatre) to exclude an Israeli troupe over the situation in the West Banlk. And Jonathan Miller (Blogger-Ky.) thinks this crosses into anti-Semitic territory:

But he did not protest the inclusion of a Turkish theater in the production (despite that country’s controversial occupation of parts of Cyprus), or China’s theater (despite their much-documented record on human rights in Tibet and other provinces), or Iran’s theater (despite their horrible treatment of minorities, especially gays and lesbians), or Russia’s theater (despite its violent occupation of Chechnya), or the Palestinian theater (despite its support for indiscriminate bombing of Israelis), or even the United States’ theater (despite our continued presence in Afghanistan and Iraq).