Oscar-winning filmmaker urges Arsenal to reconsider kitman's dismissal over Gaza posts

Oscar-winning Jewish filmmaker Jon Blair urges Arsenal to reinstate kitman Mark Bonnick, warning the club’s dismissal over Gaza posts risks legal defeat and reputational harm. | Contesto: cronaca

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• Oscar-winning filmmaker urges Arsenal to reconsider kitman's dismissal over Gaza posts

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An Oscar-winning Jewish filmmaker has publicly called on Arsenal Football Club to reverse its decision to sack a long-serving kitman who was dismissed for social media posts criticizing Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Jon Blair, director of the Academy Award-winning documentary *Anne Frank Remembered*, sent a letter to the Premier League club urging it to reconsider the firing of Mark Bonnick, a youth academy kitman who had worked at Arsenal for 24 years before his dismissal in 2024. Blair told Middle East Eye that his Jewish identity and decades-long support for the club motivated his intervention, and he described Arsenal’s handling of the case as a threat to its reputation. Bonnick, who worked alongside players including Bukayo Saka and Myles Lewis-Skelly, is currently pursuing an employment tribunal against Arsenal, with proceedings expected in the coming months. The club concluded that his social media posts could be perceived as “inflammatory or offensive” and risked bringing Arsenal into disrepute. Bonnick has rejected that characterization, and Blair argued that the posts reflected a “genuine and perfectly legal philosophical belief” critical of Zionism and Israeli actions in Gaza—views shared by a significant portion of global public opinion. Blair, who also won a BAFTA for his film *Schindler* about Oskar Schindler, said his own feelings about events in Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank had grown increasingly despondent. “It is profoundly disturbing to find a state based on Jewish ideals guilty of the very acts that were perpetrated against Jews by Nazi Germany,” Blair told MEE. He acknowledged that Hamas has also committed war crimes but argued that being a victim of such crimes cannot justify a response involving ethnic cleansing and genocide, which he called “a complete corruption of Jewish identity and beliefs.” The filmmaker warned Arsenal that it risked losing at an employment tribunal, drawing parallels with the case of David Miller, a former University of Bristol professor who was ruled unfairly dismissed over his anti-Zionist views in 2024. Miller’s views were deemed protected under UK equality law, and Blair argued that Bonnick’s case...

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Categoria: cronaca