Unable to sue, Dr James MacMillan CBE spits vulgar abuse and reveals himself as a Zionist ultra

James MacMillan caught lying about Ken Loach

Dr James MacMillan CBE can’t sue, so retreats to the pages of the Telegraph
MacMillan email to SPSC aligns his positions with those of Israeli extreme right

The Glasgow legal gossip grapevine has it that 'national treasure' Dr James MacMillan CBE was told by his lawyer recently that he should not try to carry out his November 29 threat to sue the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign. He has resorted instead to the pages of the Telegraph to attack his critics and sent SPSC a long, meandering email trying to justify his far-right positions on the Israel-Palestine conflict. MacMillan had reached for his lawyer after an article appeared on the SPSC website labelling him as a 'serial liar and hypocrite'. The legal eagle informed Dr. MacMillan that his chances of winning were 'zero'.
Mick Napier
18 January 2011

The response to Dr MacMillan by the SPSC's Chair, Mick Napier, followed on the composer's furious broadside at film director Ken Loach for supposedly working to 'censor' an Israeli film due at the 2009 Edinburgh International Film Festival, a charge the director refutes. The SPSC article accuses Dr MacMillan of knowingly slandering Mr Loach and, for good measure, of fabricating an anti-Semitic outbreak on the Parkhead terraces during a pro-Palestine demonstration there. Not just one film maker, but many Celtic football fans, were libelled by the lay Dominican, say SPSC.

Catholic moralist who says Israel should take all of Palestine

The retreat from legal action against SPSC has led Dr. MacMillan to attack Scottish PSC in today’s Telegraph as 'brain dead Scottish Trots' bent on 'Holocaust desecration' and much else besides. Readers may remember that the group hosted Auschwitz survivor Hajo Meyer last year in an attempt to link the memory of the Holocaust with Israel's ethnic cleansing of most of Palestine. Many members of SPSC will be surprised to learn they are followers of a famous Jewish revolutionary. It's a well-known ploy of dictators to label all opponents as 'communists'; categorising supporters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as revolutionaries fits with MacMillan's Zionist ultra political positions.

MacMillan has followed up his Telegraph rant, in which he jeers at the entire Scottish left, with a long email to Mr. Napier – eloquently headed "silly man". The email propagates the political positions of the Israeli extreme right
(all mis-spellings in original):

  • "Israel has an independent legal right to acquire and settle on State and waste land not required for public purposes located West of the Jordan River
  • "Israel's occupation of the West Bank arose in consequence of a pre-emptive defensive military action against Arab aggression in 1967
  • "Israel's right to hold and occupy the West Bank is NOT ILLEGAL (sic)"

Rather bizarrely, Dr MacMillan tries to convince a pro-Palestine group with claims made by the Israeli Army:

“your assertion of the murder of 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza is unfounded...according to the data gathered by the Research Department of the Israel Defense Intelligence, there were 1166 names of Palestinians killed during Operation Cast Lead. 709 of them are identified as Hamas terror operatives."

Mr MacMillan claims the Israeli Army were pacifist until the end of 2009. We are urged to acknowledge

“the reality of unceasing Arab terrorism which the Israeli civilan population has been compelled to absorb without retaliation until Operation Cast Lead. You are also blind to the Palestinian intransigence in the peace negotiations. All Israeli offers have been spurned.”

MacMillan supports the ethnic cleansing and forced expulsion of indigenous people:

“The Palestinan leadership- especially HAMAS refuses to achkowledge Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state in territory the Arabs claim ... a mass Palestinian exercise of a so called ‘right of return’ if excercised would undermine the demographics and political stability of the only state in the Middle East that attempts to be democratic.”

He ends by rhetorically asking, "what incentive does Israel have for returning any territory to Palestinan control?" to defend Israel’s retention of the entire West Bank

The pompous Catholic moralist is revealed, one who spits in the eye of Palestinian Christians, and Muslims. Two Ayrshire men, Willie Fisher and Dr James MacMillan CBE – two ‘Holy Willies’ whose rank hypocrisy needs the pen of a poet to do them justice. When hypocrite MacMillan thinks of brave Palestinian, Fr Musallam in Gaza, does he pray like his fellow Ayrshireman?


Lord, in Thy day of vengeance try him,
Lord, visit them who did employ him,
And pass not in Thy mercy by them,
Nor hear their prayer,
But for Thy people's sake destroy them,
An' do not spare.
(Robert Burns, Holy Willie’s Prayer, slightly amended)