Former Eton teacher Will Knowland. Photo: YouTube

A former teacher from Britain’s elite Eton College is embroiled in controversy after he conducted a softball interview with a writer who claimed “the Jews were always behind pornography” among other racist statements.

Online UK news site inews reported that E. Michael Jones made the comments during a YouTube interview hosted by Will Knowland, who taught at Eton before being dismissed after a controversy regarding a lecture widely derided as sexist.

Jones made a series of rambling and vaguely antisemitic comments to Knowland, asserting, among other things, “critical race theory is Jews;” philosopher Stanley Fish suffered from “Jewish animus;” “talmudic” Jewish scholarship “led to the demise of literary criticism;” “the group that took over” cinema were “the Jews in Hollywood” who “were using this as a form of control;” Americans are “upset” because “the Jews are corrupting the morals;” “the Jews were always behind pornography;” and that opposition to pornography and the sexual revolution was “crushed by the Jews, the ADL, who had the counterattack calling anything they didn’t like hate speech.”

Knowland expressed no objection to Jones’ antisemitic statements.

The ADL has criticized Jones in the past, saying that he “promotes the view that Jews are dedicated to propagating and perpetrating attacks on the Catholic Church and moral standards, social stability, and political order throughout the world.”

Knowland said in a statement, “Clearly many Jews are aghast at pornography, but suppressing discussion is not healthy. Accordingly, Jewish involvement in pornography has been discussed in the Jewish Quarterly.”

“People should be free to make up their own minds about Dr. E. Michael Jones’ statements,” he said, and if Jones “is mistaken in his views, giving them a platform is the best way to expose those mistakes.”

Knowland was fired from his teaching position at Eton when he posted a lecture to YouTube that said “patriarchy is, rather than being merely socially constructed, partly based in biology” and “biologically speaking, the idea that men exert power over women is nonsense.”

Women, he added, “exploit their power of sexual choice to get males to compete to do things for them.”

Knowland condemned his dismissal as an attack on his freedom of speech.