Anti-Imperialism & Anti-Humanist Rhetoric of Gilad Atzmon

[barracuda]

I think it is a very useful video because I think it shows a reality that needs to be looked at.

We'll have to disagree, then. I find it about as useful as pointing out anti-semitic cartoons like these...





...or cherry-picking from here, and holding these up as representative of the general Egyptian feelings regarding Jews. It's a cheap shot. Do we really want to play this game of finding the worst example of behaviors we can to generalise about an entire country? I don't think so.

[Searcher08]

I appreciated the link for these LULZ

On April 12 2001 , the English language Egyptian Gazette stated that the Pokemon children’s game figures are a tool in the hands of the Jews to incite Egyptian youth to licentious behavior.

[Sounder]

http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/kevin-b ... ry15356675

Keven Barret wrote...

There is only one argument the Zionists cannot possibly win: The argument over whether there should be a “Jewish state” in Palestine in the first place.

Defenders of this bizarre notion must argue that it is perfectly fine for a religious-ethnic group to invade and occupy another group’s land, halfway across the world, on the basis of the aggressor group’s ancient mythology. And that it is perfectly fine for the aggressor group to dispossess and destroy the people living on that land, and to create an ethnic-specific apartheid system under which the invaders are first class citizens, while the victims are either second-class citizens or permanently exiled from their homeland.

To defend Zionism, you would also have to grant American Celts (like me) the right to invade, occupy, and erect a “Celtic state” in the Baltic or Western France or wherever our mythology says we originated. You would have to allow Andalusian Muslims (another ethnic-religious category I identify with) to invade, occupy, and ethnically-cleanse Spain. You would have to allow Protestants, whose mythology tells them that they are the true Christians, to invade and occupy the Vatican – and Palestine, for that matter. You would have to allow virtually all of the 3,000 ethnic groups on earth to invade, occupy, and ethnically cleanse someplace halfway across the world that they can claim is their “ancient homeland.”

Obviously, any and all “invade-and-occupy-our-mythological-ancient-homeland” projects are equally indefensible and equally insane.

Zionism is genocidal insanity.

It must be ended.

No more Jewish state in Occupied Palestine.

Period.

This is the bottom line. This is the line that all the Zionists, from right-wingers like Netanyahu to left-wingers like Chomsky and Finklestein and Amy Goodman and Matt Rothschild and Michael Lerner and Rob Kall and Chip Berlet and all of the hundreds of other Zionist gatekeepers that dominate the “alternative” as well as mainstream media DO NOT WANT YOU TO CROSS. These are the Police Lines that the Zionist thought police have erected, and are working overtime to maintain.

It is actually fairly easy to tell the difference between the oppressed and the oppressor.

But after all the 'smart' people become involved, of course things are no longer so clear.

No personal slur is intended there, its just in the nature of 'smarts' to be both well conditioned by normative thinking and motivated to be involved with contentious social issues.

[AlicetheKurious]

I think it is a very useful video because I think it shows a reality that needs to be looked at.

We'll have to disagree, then. I find it about as useful as pointing out anti-semitic cartoons like these...

No, it is useful, because it was in response to this rather disingenuous statement:

I can't think of a single reason why your average Israeli would have any conversant relationship with Matthew 27:25.

I could have just answered, "Duh", but instead I provided evidence. You maybe think this kid is unique, that he came up with his crap all by himself? If so, instead of blaming me, you should educate yourself about some of those religious settlers that your tax-money supports, how very sick and disturbed many of them are, and how they really, really hate Christians, just as much as they hate Muslims, how everybody's a nazi who doesn't agree that they should be allowed to do anything they feel like doing, to anybody. Especially but not only, in their land, that "God gave them". It's not like they're shy about expressing themselves. They throw garbage and feces into Palestinians' houses, get drunk and smash their windows and beat up their kids, even kill people; it's all part and parcel of the Israelis' occupation. But I guess you don't want to know about that, because it's not "useful".

...or cherry-picking from here, and holding these up as representative of the general Egyptian feelings regarding Jews. It's a cheap shot. Do we really want to play this game of finding the worst example of behaviors we can to generalise about an entire country? I don't think so.

First, that is just dishonest: if you don't want to "play this game", then don't. Especially the part about linking to a zionist agit-prop website. Note that it provides no links and no way to check whether the quotes have been accurately translated, or even if they exist, though most of them reference Al-Ahram, which has been online for years.

(Incidentally, The Egyptian Gazette is so bad that it can't really be called a newspaper. I can't even think of something to compare it to, it's that pathetic. Here's a clue: I once met the editor-in-chief of this "English-language newspaper", and it turns out he doesn't understand a word of English. Yet he's paid a high salary by the state to keep this paper going, even though nobody reads it. You figure it out.)

Second, the two cartoons are not anti-semitic, in my opinion. Without the caption helpfully telling us how anti-semitic we're supposed to feel it is, I think the first one expresses a perfectly valid point of view about the very well-documented role of fanatic zionists in the US' serial wars of aggression and invasions of Arab/Muslim lands. Or is that yet another uncomfortable truth you don't find 'useful'.

The second one refers to the revelations that came out around then, about the Israelis' rather sadistic murder of more than a thousand Egyptian POWs during its 1967 war of aggression. The details about how, after they had surrendered and disarmed, they were forced to dig their own graves and then shot, or crushed alive by Israeli army tanks, or kept under the burning sun for days without any food or water (while the Israelis deliberately poured water into the sand to taunt them) came out in an Israeli documentary that was aired on Israeli tv. We already knew what had happened from survivors' accounts, but now the Israelis were themselves confirming it. We had faces and names for the war criminals. Many of them are high-ranking officers in the Israeli army; at least one was a current cabinet minister.

The top caption says: "The Israeli killers of POWs"; one Israeli soldier says to the other, "Hey, we're not killers, we're Nazis!"

Needless to say, despite the eyewitness, physical (from mass graves in the Sinai) and documentary evidence, including the filmed admission of the Israeli war criminals themselves, nobody has ever been held accountable. Instead of being punished, all the war criminals have been rewarded. They've been committing war crimes every since, as the world looks on. But your panties are in a twist because Egyptians drew a cartoon?

[barracuda]

It seems like you're the one with the bunched-up chonies. If you don't find those cartoons to be anti-semitic by the mere nature of their Jewish caricatures, you need to reassess your definitions of anti-semitism.

[AlicetheKurious]

It seems like you're the one with the bunched up underpants. If you don't find those cartoons to be anti-semitic by the mere nature of their Jewish caricatures, you need to reassess your definitions of anti-semitism.

I define anti-semitism as discrimination against or hostility to people on the sole basis that they are Jewish. You do realize that both caricatures were about war criminals?

Egypt didn't commit any war crimes, it's not occupying anybody else's land, still less robbing, pillaging and terrorizing anybody. So, let's vilify them for daring to draw caricatures of those who are! Now that's what I call high moral standards.

BTW, how would you draw "zionist/Israeli fanatics" in a caricature?

[compared2what?]

Generally speaking, actually fulfilling Biblical prophecy in one's lifetime just isn't an expectation -- or requirement, or law, or priority, or even concept -- that's very important in Judaism. Because there's no afterlife, to speak of. And the Messiah will come eventually. But that's just that. There's nothing to be done about it, except be Jewish, if you are/because you are.

Surely: yes and no. Because every time may have its innovators* who might re-interpret the custom, decide to take a scripture literally, or convert a reigning literal interpretation into metaphor. And clearly, every time does. And every time in Judaism, as in the other world religions, shows different sects, beliefs, regional traditions, lifestyles, and drives. And most every time in a world religion has its
- messianics and heretics (whether they are viewed as nutty by the mainstream or otherwise) as well as
- liberals (here meaning: those who seek to integrate with or adapt to secular society or other religions, or whatever it takes to do business in peace),
- conservatives (from the simply traditional to the radically reactionary),
- episcopies and pharisees and hierophants and central boards,
- gnostics (or those who tend more to a range of scholarly-philosophical approaches)
- apathetics and conformists (who go along with whatever prevails in their family or place and don't think about it) and
- outright renegades who want to tear it all down (e.g., converts to radical rejection of the childhood religion, also including atheists who are more passionate about rejecting the religion they personally were zapped with as children than other religions, etc.).

Observably there are today Jewish groups who take the Messiah concept seriously as an imminent matter, or (even more so) who are extremely literal-minded about God's promise of Israel to the Jews. As well as Christian Zionists who are just as excited by both concepts.


* - neutral term

Religion is a living and dynamic thing, not a dead and static thing, I quite, quite agree.

I was just trying to convey a sense of Judaism as a religion that -- astonishingly -- is not Christianity in some form that wasn't actively wrong that might be comprehended and remembered. Actually.

[American Dream]

It seems like you're the one with the bunched up underpants. If you don't find those cartoons to be anti-semitic by the mere nature of their Jewish caricatures, you need to reassess your definitions of anti-semitism.

I define anti-semitism as discrimination against or hostility to people on the sole basis that they are Jewish. You do realize that both caricatures were about war criminals?

By the same standard, any and all racialized attacks on Obama must be somehow "not racist".

Pretty ridiculous, really...

[compared2what?]

It seems like you're the one with the bunched up underpants. If you don't find those cartoons to be anti-semitic by the mere nature of their Jewish caricatures, you need to reassess your definitions of anti-semitism.

I define anti-semitism as discrimination against or hostility to people on the sole basis that they are Jewish. You do realize that both caricatures were about war criminals?

Egypt didn't commit any war crimes, it's not occupying anybody else's land, still less robbing, pillaging and terrorizing anybody. So, let's vilify them for daring to draw caricatures of those who are! Now that's what I call high moral standards.

BTW, how would you draw "zionist/Israeli fanatics" in a caricature?

Not in any way that looks like the kid in that video, because he probably isn't a zionist and might not care about the nationhood of Israel other than incidentally, due to being a Haredi Hasid.

IOW: About as representative as a Wahhabist. How could you possibly not know that? Do you not know that? Do you want and/or need an introductory course on the subject? Please advise.

[compared2what?]

I think it is a very useful video because I think it shows a reality that needs to be looked at.

If so, it also needs to be comprehended, though. I mean, anyone can see that he's an angry kid talking the ugliest trash he can think of, while laboring under the mistaken assumption that his profanity is well calculated to hurt and wound the stranger with the camera when (in fact) it just reveals how painfully little he knows of modernity and -- ftm -- humanity.

Let's not emulate him.

[compared2what?]

I can't think of a single reason why your average Israeli would have any conversant relationship with Matthew 27:25.

I could have just answered, "Duh", but instead I provided evidence.

You also could have admitted that you were mistaken to say that Jews who feel bound by the Commandments have to accept the oath made by the Ancient Hebrews in the New Testament as part of "a package deal".

Because you were.

You maybe think this kid is unique, that he came up with his crap all by himself?

I don't. Do you maybe think that he's average, and that the crap he's spewing is just typical Israeli/zionist/Jewish cultural expression?

If so, instead of blaming barracuda, you should educate yourself about some of those religious settlers that our tax-money supports, how very sick and disturbed many of them are, and how they really, really hate Christians, just as much as they hate Muslims, and/or fear all outsiders, whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish or aetheist, all aspects of the secular world, and very possibly all women, without exception, too.

Please try to grasp that the kid in that video is not any more representative of "Israeli" or "zionist" or "Jewish" culture than his Wahhabist equivalent (or, ftm, his equivalent in the Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas/Hezbollah, or, ftm, his equivalent in the White Aryan Movement, et cetera, et cetera [/b]) is of "Arabian"/"Egyptian"/"Islamic"/"American"/"Christian" culture.

IOW: That kid is part of a very extreme and reactionary right-wing theocratic cult. The world is full of them. All the major religions have their share of them.

I apologize if I misplaced a stray nationality or religious/political orientation somewhere in there.

I've never understood how you can root for Hamas and root against the Muslim Brotherhood, btw. How is that not asking the Palestinians to live under terms you think of as too oppressive for Egyptians?

how everybody's a nazi who doesn't agree that they should be allowed to do anything they feel like doing, to anybody. Especially but not only, in their land, that "God gave them". It's not like they're shy about expressing themselves. They throw garbage and feces into Palestinians' houses, get drunk and smash their windows and beat up their kids, even kill people; it's all part and parcel of the Israelis' occupation.

.
In a way, it is, yes. Who knows what they really believe, though? (I mean, the nazi stuff, and so on.) Members of closed, isolated, fanatical religious communities don't express themselves openly to outsiders, and might not even be able to in any way that could be easily and meaningfully understood. (Argot. Cults. Yada, yada.)

But I guess you don't want to know about that, because it's not "useful".

Alice, how is it fucking useful to focus exclusively on the part of the parcel occupied by some poor fucked-up, savage, ignorant kid in a religious cult in one country while resolutely and willfully remaining deaf, dumb and blind to those in others? How? Whom does it help?

Think about it for a second. Please.

[compared2what?]

http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/kevin-barrett-why-hate-gilad-atzmon.html#entry15356675

Keven Barret wrote...

There is only one argument the Zionists cannot possibly win: The argument over whether there should be a “Jewish state” in Palestine in the first place.

Defenders of this bizarre notion must argue that it is perfectly fine for a religious-ethnic group to invade and occupy another group’s land, halfway across the world, on the basis of the aggressor group’s ancient mythology. And that it is perfectly fine for the aggressor group to dispossess and destroy the people living on that land, and to create an ethnic-specific apartheid system under which the invaders are first class citizens, while the victims are either second-class citizens or permanently exiled from their homeland.

To defend Zionism, you would also have to grant American Celts (like me) the right to invade, occupy, and erect a “Celtic state” in the Baltic or Western France or wherever our mythology says we originated. You would have to allow Andalusian Muslims (another ethnic-religious category I identify with) to invade, occupy, and ethnically-cleanse Spain. You would have to allow Protestants, whose mythology tells them that they are the true Christians, to invade and occupy the Vatican – and Palestine, for that matter. You would have to allow virtually all of the 3,000 ethnic groups on earth to invade, occupy, and ethnically cleanse someplace halfway across the world that they can claim is their “ancient homeland.”

Obviously, any and all “invade-and-occupy-our-mythological-ancient-homeland” projects are equally indefensible and equally insane.

Zionism is genocidal insanity.

It must be ended.

No more Jewish state in Occupied Palestine.

Period.

This is the bottom line. This is the line that all the Zionists, from right-wingers like Netanyahu to left-wingers like Chomsky and Finklestein and Amy Goodman and Matt Rothschild and Michael Lerner and Rob Kall and Chip Berlet and all of the hundreds of other Zionist gatekeepers that dominate the “alternative” as well as mainstream media DO NOT WANT YOU TO CROSS. These are the Police Lines that the Zionist thought police have erected, and are working overtime to maintain.

It is actually fairly easy to tell the difference between the oppressed and the oppressor.

But after all the 'smart' people become involved, of course things are no longer so clear.

No personal slur is intended there, its just in the nature of 'smarts' to be both well conditioned by normative thinking and motivated to be involved with contentious social issues.

Sounder --

What do you understand him to mean by "No more Jewish state in Occupied Palestine" that makes it distinct from (and/or better than) what opponents of the Israeli occupation of Palestine like Noam Chomsky and Amy Goodman say?

Thanks.

[compared2what?]

Also, can we add the little diatribe posted by Sounder to the evidence introduced in support of Atzmon's extreme right-wing tendencies, which he frequently expresses the good old-fashioned way by indiscrimately tarring and feathering a bunch of leftists (and, especially, Jewish leftists) just for existing?

Thanks.

[compared2what?]

This is exactly like debating KWH for life-and-death stakes.

[Sounder]

Sounder --

What do you understand him to mean by "No more Jewish state in Occupied Palestine" that makes it distinct from (and/or better than) what opponents of the Israeli occupation of Palestine like Noam Chomsky and Amy Goodman say?

I do not know what Noam or Amy say about Israeli occupation but I do not consider that what people say always matches what people really believe and would therefore actually be working toward.

This may be some ‘diatribe’ to you, as I seem to not be able to control that, however I would be more interested in a response to the assertion that there was and can never be sanction for Israel to steal and continue to kill and steal the ancestral land of Palestinians.

And if anyone does want sanction, they can’t get it until after the arrival of the Messiah anyway. I mean if that is the way you want to roll.

Also, can we add the little diatribe posted by Sounder to the evidence introduced in support of Atzmon's extreme right-wing tendencies, which he frequently expresses the good old-fashioned way by indiscrimately tarring and feathering a bunch of leftists (and, especially, Jewish leftists) just for existing?

I do try to leave ideology out of it C2W? When reading all kinds of material it is necessary to identify both useful and spurious or non-useful elements in the work. You may well be right about some of the holes in Gilad's psyche, but he is the one on the receiving end of death threats.

I think that your inference that I am connected by association to right-wing extremism to be quite inflammatory, and possibly an expression of some underlying passive aggressive issues. But I'm no doctor, so of course pay no mind.

It's too bad C2W?, there are philosophical issues that won't be dealt with until people with different styles of expression for consciousness can sit at the same table and speak and deal honestly rather than manipulatively toward each other.

Some day maybe.