Anti-Imperialism & Anti-Humanist Rhetoric of Gilad Atzmon

[barracuda]

From here

Could somebody please explain why the OP is ok, but what Gilad Atzmon writes is not?

Well, one difference to be noticed is this does not offend JAZZ or APAIC

Another difference might be that although the OP rather clearly shares certain parallels with Mr. Atzmon's writings, in that it appears to be a racially charged essay delineating with glee the faults and hoped for downfall of a specific racial group - in this case priviledged western whites - no one of that group of priviledged western whites on this particular forum, which is populated primarily by priviledged western whites, seems to find it offensive in the least. I'm certain it would be entirely possible to find forums at which this article would be met with intense scorn and angry derision (e.g., white supremacist sites or hard core teabag outlets), just as I'm certain it's entirely possible to find a forum at which Mr. Atzmon's views would be rather universally cheered. It's even entirely possible those hypothetical forums might overlap in some venues. I realise that's sort of a "reader response" or survey type of critique, but it tells me something that has to do with appropriateness of context and content within the scope or narrowness of the political outlook of a particular setting.

Then there's the whole holocaust revision/Christ-killers thingy. Some folks 'round here just have a inexplicable aversion to that sort of stuff.

The members of RI do not represent the majority, even of Americans, let alone western white people. It's not true that only the members of white supremacist fringe groups and "hard core teabag outlets" would find the OP highly objectionable. Try printing it out and handing out copies to random white Americans on the street, even (especially) in working-class neighborhoods -- I'd love to hear about their reactions (after you get out of the hospital).

So far, you seem to be agreeing with the main point of my comment - that there are appropriate and inappropriate settings in which to air particular political perspectives if you wish be understood and accepted. This is the answer to the question you posed: the OP is ok, but what Gilad Atzmon writes is not (at least the part of what he writes that is not) because Mr. Wise's essay is entirely appropriate within the political climate of the Rigorous Intuition discussion forum. No one here, in this venue, is apparently shocked, dismayed or offended by the essay as they might be at a white supremacist site or a conservative republican neighborhood, or if they were, their dismay was nnot significant enough to cause them to object to it in context. It is the nature of the group, the politic of the seminar, that it defines its identity by its passages through questioning such issues of standing, and by reaction confirms or changes that identity. I put forth that the general consensus of this group you and I are both members of here and now in this place is that Mr. Wise's propositions are largely acceptable, and in fact obvious, and therefore okay. There may be disagreement about his conclusions - the inevitable downfall of the oppressors - but there is little disagreement about his general statements, even if they are, in fact racially tinged.

I certainly agree with you that we are most decidedly NOT the majority, unfortunately. That'll be the day.

In fact, those who would find the OP highly offensive are more numerous than you assume. Furthermore, they are not at all likely to agree that western, white people are privileged in the first place. On the contrary, a lot of them feel terrorized, hated, attacked and very much endangered, both from "America-haters" within their own country and from outsiders. They're hated for their freedom, for their religious beliefs, for being white, they are envied for their collective accomplishments and hard-earned success. Or they're hated by the people who steal their jobs and the welfare bums, and the criminals and drug addicts and immigrants (legal and/or illegal) who are making their neighborhoods and their country unsafe. Or they're hated for their government's well-meaning interventions abroad, in which they sacrifice their own lives and taxpayer money for ungrateful savages and terrorist sympathizers and appeasers who hate them all the more and blame them for all their problems. Or they're hated by the radical femi-nazis and militant abortionists and gays who are destroying the family and the very fabric of their society.

You may dismiss their fears as irrational or misplaced, and I would agree with you; these fears may even have been deliberately induced, but that does not make these fears any less real to them.

Yes, I know the essay would be found offensive by many people. That's one of the reasons I enjoyed it the small amount that I did (it wasn't exactly fantastic, after all). The people who's be offended by it are just the kind of people who need to hear it and come to terms with their misplaced fears and very real privilege. They would be offended by ninety-nine percent of what passes for polite discourse here, if they were able and willing to adjust their world image enough to read it, and that's one of the reasons I like this site.

Incidentally, as I was writing this, I felt hungry, so I made myself a sandwich. Since I couldn't type and eat at the same time, I decided to take a short break and turned on the tv. Talk about synchronicity! I don't watch American tv, but my kids watch do, all the time, and they'd left the tv on a channel that shows only American shows and movies. Click: it's a show I've never heard of, called "The Condemned" (it says so, on the top right of the screen). An all-American, muscular, clean-cut military type is yelling, "I want an Arab! A child-killing, Koran-spouting, suicide-bombing Arab!" Seriously. Then, they cut to a horrible, dungeon-type prison somewhere in Latin America, where a sleazy-looking warden is standing in front of a filthy, dark cell. He yells out, "Hasheem!" (no need to bother using a real Arab name -- "Hasheem" sounds Arabic, right?) Cut to a dark corner of the cell, and the back of a man with long, matted, greasy hair, who slowly turns around, raising dead eyes to the warden. Back to "headquarters", where the all-American guy says something about how anti-Americanism is becoming "rampant" around the world, then some other stuff, but I'd finished eating and turned it off.

Damn. That's horrific. Yet another reason to thow away the television.

Give me a few minutes to address the remaining part of your post, please.

[barracuda]

Let's start with the "Christ killers" thingy. I believe it began with this essay, which he wrote in 2004. It's well worth reading.

I was thinking more of this quote from his blog, here:

"The ideology that carried out execution-style killings on the Gaza aid flotilla the 'Mavi Marmara' is the same ideology that carried out the massacres at Deir Yassin, Qibya, Sabra and Shatilla, Qana, Gaza, Jenin and the murder of Rachel Corrie — more than that it is the same ideology that killed Christ."

If I remember correctly, Christ was perfunctorally sentenced to death by the Roman prefect of Judea for the crime of claiming to be king (and rabble rousing), and executed in a most desultory fashion by some Roman soldiers on his order. However, a more profound understanding of the event is that Christ was killed by God, allowed and caused himself to be killed, to take away the sins of the world and essentially make possible the redemption of man. Assigning blame for the death of Christ on the Jewish people is a particularly medieval and repugnantly picturesque thing for Mr. Atzmon to do and, in my opinion, is more or less an ancient slur which cheapens the value of the mystery of faith, and has been used for millenia as an excuse to persecute them.

You are free to agree or disagree with some or all of Atzmon's views, but to just slap some facile labels on him and dismiss his thoughts about his background and his attempts to understand and grow beyond it as "anti-humanist rhetoric" is ridiculous.

First of all, any labels I slapped on Mr. Atzmon's writings are hardly what you'd call facile or simplistic, as your statements around the nature of historical revisionism makes clear. But another thing is, I hope, clear: there is no essential aspect of being Jewish, or being Roma, or being homosexual, or of any other of the civilian individuals which Adolph Hitler and his nazi minions took hold of and holocausted into oblivion which in itself or of their nature gave cause to make this tragedy to occur. That was the work of a horror-making politician who thought he could grasp and consolidate power for himself and his ends by creating false enemies for his people to hate and committing those false enemies to terror. To put forth that the Jews or any other of Hitler's victims somehow brought the pogroms and the death camps on themselves by a lack of introspection is as unacceptable at this forum as it would be to say there are really no Palestinian peoples, or to imply that a raped woman was somehow at fault for her manner. To infer, or imply or declare that it might be so is not the course of stolid and academic searching for historicity. It is something else entirely.

This is not the stuff of struck-dumb dogma. It is a basic moral understanding here that there is never such a justification for such crimes which may be placed upon the victims. But you know this.

[AlicetheKurious]

I'll be very busy for the next couple of days, but just wanted to say that it's very important to listen to Gilad Atzmon and to try to understand what he's saying. I've been reading him for years, and never really understood, though in retrospect I was on the right track. But this discussion on RI has led me to really, really think about the message he's trying to get across, to read his words, not just as words on the page, but heart to heart, with the 'primacy of the ear', and to realize that there are echoes from others, all over the place, and finally, finally get it.

I think it's a terrible mistake to dismiss his message simply because it triggers a knee-jerk response. Get over it and listen. He doesn't "hate Jews", he hates what's been done to them and what's being done to them, because it was done to him before his passion for music provided a key that allowed him to escape from his trance. Go back and re-read that article I linked to, the one that discusses the "Christ-killers" accusation. What he's describing is collective psychosis -- romanticized and advertised and sugar-coated for Western consumption initially, but only until it could achieve sufficient power to make this no longer necessary.

According to Atzmon, zionism is this psychosis in the form of a political/religious ideology, used to justify building a state in which this psychosis could be incubated using the Jews as human vehicles, then unleashed, first against the Palestinians, but eventually against everybody else. Looked at it this way, it makes sense: trauma + stripping of the identity + replacement of the old identity with a new, artificial one + nationalist/military indoctrination + constant existential threat + Holocaust religion = ?.

Some, including old-time Leftists like Uri Avnery, believe that zionism initially was something else, and then changed. But others, including the historian Ilan Pappe, strongly disagree; from the point of view of its victims, zionism has always shown the same face, used the same methods. Nevertheless, there are a growing number of Israelis and former Israelis who agree that there is no doubt about what it is, or where it's leading us.

Atzmon and the others are issuing urgent warnings, but who's listening, when there is so much noise drowning out their voices?

The radicalization of Yossi Gurvitz
by Phil Weiss and Scott Roth on March 9, 2012 18

On our recent trip to Israel and Palestine, several people told us to meet the blogger Yossi Gurvitz because he is such a freethinker.

We met up at a restaurant in Tel Aviv 2 weeks ago and Gurvitz did not disappoint-- he held forth for an hour about Israel's coming crisis and how little we as secular American Jews could understand about what was happening.

A former yeshiva boy who started blogging 10 years ago and gained a following for his unblinking ideas about politics and religion and is now in the stable at +972, Gurvitz, 39, said he has become radicalized by Israel's crisis and is working to prepare his society for a one-state political future. Recently he was investigated by the government for incitement for comments about violent resistance.

What is Israel's crisis? Israeli society has been taken over by Jewish supremacists, Zionism and liberalism are finished, and it is just a matter of time before Israel loses American liberals and later the Christian right.

Oh, and a messianic view of the Jewish religion that was suppressed for millennia by the rabbinical tradition now dominates the Israeli psyche-- "and every demon that was pushed into the basement is up and has an M16."

There's an upside. But you'll have to read the interview...

Below you'll find a typescript of Gurvitz's comments. And above is a 12 minute video we did at the end of the meal, with Gurvitz's requiem for the two-state solution.

The video contains some ideas not expressed in the interview below. To summarize:


Zionism is a spent force in Israeli society. "There are now three Revisionist Zionists left in the Knesset and the rest of Likud sees them as dangerous leftists."

What about liberal American Jews coming to save Israel? "That’s a doomed project... They will be seen as foreigners."

Can Israel save itself? The awakening of socialism is the best sign. Liberalism has always meant equal but separate. Socialists are calling for equality. Maybe the social democrats of J14 can save us.

"I’m not sure Partition is possible anymore. There are 400,000 settlers in the West Bank. No one has the political will and capital to remove them. Trying to remove them will result in a civil war. I don’t think it’s an option anymore.

"I’m pretty sure the two state solution is dead and we have to work on a one state solution. How that will work I honestly have no idea."

What should Obama do? Remember what George H.W. Bush said about Yitzhak Shamir? "That's the number. When you're serious, call us. Until you're serious, don't come to us."

Now here is the typescript of our untaped conversation with Gurvitz on Israel's crisis. Our comments in italic.

I think we’re going to meet a crisis. Last fall I actually believed it would involve the UN -- that it would grant Palestinians some sort of rights, some sort of state. I think there’s a very good chance Netanyahu government will attack Iran. I believe they're priming the public for that possibility. Ehud Barak was pictured fondling a missile.

The situation is unsustainable but I think most Israelis willfully blind themselves to this. The more the public understands the situation is unsustainable, the more it locks itself into a non-seeing, non-hearing position.

The crisis around the statehood initiative?

I believe this would make the very presence of the settlements illegal, the very presence of soldiers guarding the settlements illegal… If the P. A. demanded that they withdraw, Israel would be under pressure from the world to leave. Of course this didn’t happen. I think Obama was swindled or actually coerced by Netanyahu and I think this was a strategic mistake because it undermines the US position in the Middle East.

Now it looks like the old status quo. The US government is the embodiment of the Israeli position. The only reason we’re not hearing more about this is because of the crisis in Syria.

What are we going to see? I think we will see an Obama second term and inexorable pressure on Israel to grant civil rights to everyone in mandatory Palestine or to end the occupation. Obama will be much more combative than the Obama of the first administration. Mostly I see Israel losing the support of the liberal establishment in the US. And once it loses the support of the liberals, it becomes the South Africa situation, and that is not sustainable.

Meantime, in Israel we are seeing the Jehovahiztion of the Israeli public. Ignorant, radical Jews are turning more to symbols of Jewish superiority than actual Jewish values. It’s getting harder to be a liberal except in Tel Aviv. Everyone is thinking about a second passport.

This is a spiral that will leave Israel more fanatic, more religious, less able to communicate with the western world-- and ironically more part of the extremism of the Middle East. I’ve been writing about the Jewish Brotherhood. Unlike the Muslim Brotherhood, our extremists have never had to face reality and soften. Because even when they wield power they claim that the real power is the hands of the liberal elites.

Unlike the US, we have no constitution. No Basic Law grants equality. The Israeli religious right has blocked that. The only reason we have freedom of the press is because of the Supreme Court decisions. The right is already using this as a way of attacking the Supreme Court, which is becoming more fearful, less willing to use its power.

Unless something drastic changes, and it could happen-- I'm betting on the J14 movement-- liberal Israel is dying, and it won’t be in existence in 5, or 10 years. Some elements will be kept as a figleaf, for the Zionist Jehovahist regime. The liberals will leave, those who can.

When that happens, the liberal part of the US will no longer be so willing to defend Israel and its policies. Then without the US, Israel will be hanging by its threat to use nuclear weapons. It will become a second North Korea.

There's a history here. In 2004 a Maariv columnist demanded that the government nuke France. Because France is an enemy of Israel, and about to collapse into a Muslim Republic, a supporter of Iran-- so we should nuke them first. The editor was fired for publishing it after the French ambassador made an official protest. The Foreign Minister [Avigdor Lieberman] suggested when he was in the opposition, that Israel nuke the Aswan dam. So there's a reason the Egyptians won’t meet him.

Gurvitz also suggests Israel could lose the American right.

Four days ago a church was desecrated in Jerusalem. As part of a pricetag attack. This happens all the time. When the pricetag people run out of Muslim targets, they will concentrate more on Christian targets. When that happens, the American Christian right will realize that the Israeli right is hostile to Christianity.

Why is all this inevitable?

Zionism as a force is dead. The people who are actually speaking in the name of Zionism are speaking in religious and metaphysical and mystical truths. They are not speaking in the secular Zionist tradition. A poll two weeks ago—about 70 percent consider themselves to be the chosen people. American Jews think we as Jews are chosen to carry out tikkun olam [social justice]. Israeli Jews think something different—we are the chosen people of God, we are chosen to do anything we damn well please. To take people’s land. Take peoples lives. There is actually no mainstream force standing against the Jewish brotherhood.

This is not just the religious people, it’s a large part of the secular people buying into it. Israel’s Jews refuse to accept the legitimacy of the marriage of Jews and non-Jews. You American Jews really don’t understand us. They think we’re gutsier... American Jews... think of Zionist liberals. They’re older, they’re still thinking about the late 70s, early 80s, the golden age of Israel’s liberalism.

You have to understand what the religious right means when they say of leftists, the multitude, they are the erav rav. This means the ones who left Egypt, the mixed multitude. It is a concept in Kabbalah-- the Amalekite Jew. A Jew who isn’t really a Jew. He looks like a Jew, thinks he’s a Jew, but he's an enemy of God. It’s been used in the Knesset, the word erav rav.

If you think this Judaism is the wisdom of Israel, it’s not. This is the Judaism forced underground by the Christian regimes, censored time and again. It’s coming to the surface. Just about everyone knows this code here. What may change the picture is the J14 movement. It’s alive. It will be coming back after Passover. J14 has its faults, but it is the only movement that has put Israeli Arabs speakers out front. Many Palestinian Israelis are not quite happy with the result, but.... once Israelis realize that inequality harms everyone in Israel aside from the 1 percent, then they will begin to see the Palestinian as a partner in struggle. We’ve seen it in the north, if the movement isn't crushed.

Liberals are dead, socialists are coming up. Most socialists are poised toward equality.

Tell us your story, Yossi.

I was born in January 1973 in Petah Tikva. My parents are National Orthodox. My father is an electrical contractor who is in real estate. My mother is a housewife. I studied in the Yeshiva till I had a personal crisis and left the Yeshiva for the army in 1989. It looked like a liberation, strangely enough.

I started to do my bit for leftist ideology and got transferred to the Gaza Strip so I could stop the atrocities. That didn’t work very well. They hid them from me. I did manage to get my commander tried for slapping a Palestinian child. And one day they tried to abandon me in a refugee camp. [An officer] drove me to a refugee camp and told me to step out of the car, "your brother’s over there, go join him." I cocked the gun, putting a bullet in the chamber. I didn’t point it at him, but he got the message, and he told me to drive back.

Everything I did was supportive of the occupation in every waking moment. I'm still doing penance. That’s the liberal trap. They say to you, You want to change the world, go there, be there. But it’s always compromising. It’s much bigger than you. You will go to prison if you don’t order the bulldozers to demolish the house.

I'm in the Meretz party. Meretz used to embody this liberal thinking. If you want to prevent atrocities, join the fighting units, serve in the territories where you can see atrocities, prevent them. That simply doesn’t happen.

I went to the university and got a degree in history. I had a personal crisis about not getting a master’s degree. I spent several years working in a chemical factory [in a clerical position]. I started blogging in 2002. I was writing on various forums in the 90s. Even before. In 2006 I stared my own blog. Friends of George. It is mainly a Hebrew blog. It quickly gathered steam. During the Second Lebanon war I started writing critically in ways that were not common. That attracted a lot of readers, also including a few death threats.

Recently I had my run in with the law. I was investigated for incitement two months ago.

Tell us about the radicalization of the left.

We see a radicalization on both sides. The leftists are becoming more radical and the right wingers, too. When I radicalized—and I did—I attracted more radicals. I'm going to the demonstrations; that’s the definition of a radical around here. Bil'in is basically a reenactment of the first intifada. Everyone is playing a part. No Palestinian is trying to throw a grenade, and generally in Bilin the soldiers don’t use lethal force....

I have really high hopes for what will happen in the next few months. I'm doing what I'm doing because I think it’s the right thing to do, but the Israeli government is using us to legitimize itself. 'You see, we’re a democracy.' The protests have very little influence on the general public. But they're important because solidarity is important and it gets international coverage, which is always important.

You say we American Jews don't understand this Judaism. Elaborate.

Rambam [Maimonides in the 12th century] writes, If a Jew has intercourse with a gentile child three years old and a day, the child should be executed for misleading the Jew, making him sin. Those texts are still valid. We don’t understand them, but they are valid.

These Jews ... took the elements of the religion that were nationalistic and have been slumbering for 100s of years and awakened it. They took the hatred of mankind which had persisted in Judaism for millennia and gave it voice and force. [In the former rabbinical tradition] the rabbis tried to housetrain Jewish messianism. The old way of thinking was, the messiah will lead Jews to victory. The rabbis made the messiah a supernatural being capable of talking to birds and animals. This mystical being was a dam against Jewish messianism in Ashkenazi Judaism, and the eliminationist elements against Christianity were held down by this teaching.

But once Israel was created, many Jews saw it as the end of the three oaths, the Shloshet Ha'Shvuot. Two of these oaths enjoin the Jews not to mass-emigrate to Eretz Yisrael and not to provoke the gentiles. The third orders the gentiles not to treat the Jews too badly.

Now Israel has the right to use force, and every demon that was pushed into the basement is up and has an M16. Link

[compared2what?]

I think it's a terrible mistake to dismiss his message simply because it triggers a knee-jerk response. Get over it and listen. He doesn't "hate Jews", he hates what's been done to them and what's being done to them, because it was done to him before his passion for music provided a key that allowed him to escape from his trance. Go back and re-read that article I linked to, the one that discusses the "Christ-killers" accusation. What he's describing is collective psychosis -- romanticized and advertised and sugar-coated for Western consumption initially, but only until it could achieve sufficient power to make this no longer necessary.

According to Atzmon, zionism is this psychosis in the form of a political/religious ideology, used to justify building a state in which this psychosis could be incubated using the Jews as human vehicles, then unleashed, first against the Palestinians, but eventually against everybody else. Looked at it this way, it makes sense: trauma + stripping of the identity + replacement of the old identity with a new, artificial one + nationalist/military indoctrination + constant existential threat + Holocaust religion = ?.

It's to your credit that you read that into it. But it's not really what's there, which is an amalgamation of every anti-Judaic and/or antisemitic screed that's ever been issued by anyone since (approximately) Saint John Chrysostom's "Adversus Judaeos" in the fourth century.

I don't actually object to it on those grounds, though. (Or at least not per se.) In fact, I'd like to take this opportunity to say I regret characterizing the materials on which Icke bases his worldview as "Nazi propaganda." Because while they were, it's both more accurate and more-to-the-point for practical, political purposes to call them what they were before the Nazis used them and what they have been ever since. To wit:

(Very) extreme and reactionary right-wing propaganda.
_____________________

Because whatever else a narrative that uses the same basic traditional components as the works that reintroduced them to the world in the early 20th century -- eg, The Protocols,, The Hidden Hand -- that's always and inevitably what they are. And that's totally irrespective of what name is given to the insidious, deceptive, vile, untrustworthy and corrupting global force being demonized as the cause of all ills/war/despair/immorality/&assorted other forms of woe in the world. Sometimes it's been commies, sometimes it's been Arab terrorists, and sometimes it's been Jews (or zionists, or Israel, or psychiatrists, or the Secret Team, etcetera). It doesn't matter. Because ultimately, widespread agreement on such points is always and inevitably and exclusively beneficial to proponents of very extreme (and usually very violent) authoritarian state control. It's never been anything else. And it never will be. It's inherently disempowering and inimical to self-government to focus so much energy on the satanic other. And that's just that.

I find it really, really disturbing that so many people don't recognize this stuff for what it is, after all this time. Or....Maybe they do. But that hardly makes it any less disturbing.

There are other terms in which uncompromising opposition and condemnation can be expressed. After all. So why do the fascists' work for them? Wake up, sheeple, etc.

[DrVolin]

And it is even more disturbing when applied to an ethnic or racial category, because of the specter of genocide, and because the victims don't even have option of (even deceptive) apostasy. You can be an ex-communist, or an ex-banker. You can even be an ex-nazi. You can't be an ex-member of an ethnic or racial group. Even if you claim to be, no one will let you.

[compared2what?]

Incidentally, wrt Atzmon specifically:

I'm sure beyond a reasonable doubt that he's being dishonest on purpose -- ie, that it's his intention to deceive his readers in order to advance some unstated aim. I have no idea why. It could be an intel thing. Or he could just be a huckster. But there are too many obviously false or out-of-place touches in his work to admit another plausible reading, imo.

For example:

My generation was raised on the Six Day War magical victory, we were totally sure of ourselves. Since we were secular, we associated every success with our omnipotent qualities. We didn’t believe in divine intervention, we believed in ourselves. We believed that our might is brewed in our resurrected Hebraic soul and flesh.

The Palestinians, on their part, were serving us obediently and it didn’t seem at the time as if this was ever going to change. They didn’t show any real signs of collective resistance. The sporadic so-called ‘terror’ attacks made us feel righteous, it filled us with some eagerness to get revenge.

That makes no sense whatsoever, from an Israeli perspective. Even a right-wing and hawkish Israeli perspective. For one thing, not only have I never heard (and can't ever recall hearing, reading or seeing) any Israeli ever EVER express a sense of military omipotence, I've never even heard any Israeli (right-wing, hawkish or otherwise) express a sense of military security. It's just totally antithetical to being Israeli to think in those terms. And that was never truer than it was during the era Atzmon's talking about, ffs. It was all hand-wringing, and wistful yearning/hard-nosed scheming for a friendly Arab buffer state, and endless talk about the inherent defensibility and/or inherent undefensibility of borders.

Plus, if you were raised in Israel on the magical Six-Day War, you also would have been raised on the much-less-magical War of '73, and you wouldn't think of them as distinct from one another. And the thing is: The Six-Day War might easily have exactly the kind of epochal significance he's ascribing to it when viewed from the other side.

^^

That's one of the things that makes me sure he's suiting his story to his hearers. His use of the word "Bolshevik" also springs to mind. But there are many, many others, too. However, since I couldn't really claim that it was anything other than my opinion that he's not on the real if I listed every single one of them, I guess I'll just leave it at that.

[compared2what?]

And it is even more disturbing when applied to an ethnic or racial category, because of the specter of genocide, and because the victims don't even have option of (even deceptive) apostasy. You can be an ex-communist, or an ex-banker. You can even be an ex-nazi. You can't be an ex-member of an ethnic or racial group. Even if you claim to be, no one will let you.

The general truth of that is beyond dispute. But it therefore can't hurt to observe that peoples of non-native ethnic or racial descent have sometimes been largely assimilated into societies that were initially hostile to them, in the fullness of time and/or during periods when circumstances were exceptionally favorable to it.

But I guess I just feel obligated to point that out by the spirit of optimism. It's not like I'd argue that the world is headed in that direction right now.

[compared2what?]

It obscures the reality that Zionism is an imperialist and colonialist enemy of Jewish people and Palestinians, as well as the Arab people generally and all those oppressed and exploited by imperialism.

It sounds like Gilead would say this is a cover for Jewish exceptionalism.

There's no such thing as Jewish exceptionalism. There's just exceptionalism.

[Ben D]

Just a quick comment concerning,.."eg. The Protocols".

Regardless of who wrote the Protocols, the amazing thing to me is the apparent prescience shown therein as to the actual developments of the 20th century. So for that reason alone, the subject deserves serious consideration as to how this could be?

Iow, was the apparent prescience not prescience at all, but based on a real down to earth hegemonic plan that was being implemented, and for which the real perps were setting up the Zionists as the fall guys?

It's the prescience of the work that marks it as something that can't be dismissed by talk of forgery, and so I'm left wondering. If anyone has any leads to help me understand this better, it would be appreciated.

[eyeno]

Just a quick passing comment concerning,.."eg. The Protocols".

Regardless of who wrote the Protocols, the amazing thing to me is the apparent prescience shown therein as to the actual developments of the 20th century. So for that reason alone, the subject deserves serious consideration as to how this could be?

Iow, was the apparent prescience not prescience at all, but based on a real down to earth hegemonic plan that was being implemented, and for which the real perps were setting up the Zionists as the fall guys?

It's the prescience of the work that marks it as something that can't be dismissed by talk of forgery, and so I'm left wondering. If anyone has any leads to help me understand this better, it would be appreciated.

I just got caught up on this thread. I read every single word of it. It took a long damn time but I did it anyway...wheewww

Ben there is no doubt that the Protocols are a forgery. Nobody, as far as I can tell, claims that the Protocols are a fantasy, but always a "forgery." What are they a forgery of?

Forgery definition: Copy of an original.

Whose plan is it? If that is not obvious to most around here then all can say is...duhhhhh

If the average run of the mill common good upstanding Jewish people ever get tired of this forgery in their name, all I can is, the game is over. Game, set, and match. Because, just like world war 2 Germany who had to pay? That is correct, it was the average run of the mill Jew that had to pay for the bullshit perpetuated in their name.

Its no different for the American people of today and all the bullshit proffered in their name. Its the same set of assholes doing both of these things and the Americans and average Jews caught in the middle.


As for the rest of this thread...score...

Alice 10

Detractors Zero

Alice you are really something else girl...

[Simulist]

This has been a difficult topic for me, so I sincerely appreciate your well-considered analysis on this, Compared2what.

[compared2what?]

Let's start with the "Christ killers" thingy. I believe it began with this essay, which he wrote in 2004. It's well worth reading.

I was thinking more of this quote from his blog, here:

"The ideology that carried out execution-style killings on the Gaza aid flotilla the 'Mavi Marmara' is the same ideology that carried out the massacres at Deir Yassin, Qibya, Sabra and Shatilla, Qana, Gaza, Jenin and the murder of Rachel Corrie — more than that it is the same ideology that killed Christ."

He recurs to that theme often.

On the front page of his website right now, for example:

JEWISH IMPERIAL NEWS

This last weekend brought with it some vile manifestations of Jewish politics in its most horrific forms.

In the USA, the owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, Andrew Adler, suggested that Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu should consider ordering a Mossad hit team to assassinate U.S. President Barack Obama so that his successor will defend Israel against Iran.

Actually, it wasn’t just Obama whom Adler suggested to eliminate, the Atlanta Jewish Times listed three lethal options to help Israel counter Iran’s nuclear capability. The first, to launch a pre-emptive strike against Hamas and Hezbollah, the second to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities and the third is to assassinate the current American president.

Devastatingly, Adler’s murderous attitude towards politics is wholly consistent with some Biblical and Talmudic anti-gentile teaching. It recalls clearly certain Old Testament genocidal verses such as Leviticus 26:7-8:

‘You will chase your enemies, and they shall fall by the sword before you. Five of you shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight; your enemies shall fall by the sword before you.’

It is also consistent with the appalling way in which Palestinians are abused by the Jewish State. But it is also consistent with the Jewish cultural wrath towards the dissenting Jesus and towards dissent in general. May I remind readers that the word Yeshu – Jesus in Hebrew – is the abbreviation of the Hebrew phrase

“may his name and memory be blotted out”.

Without comparing president Obama to Jesus, Adler’s homicidal inclination is somewhat similar.Seemingly, some Jews have yet to forgive Jesus – nor President Obama. .

^^That's even better proof of his inauthenticity than the Six-Day War thing is, because:

(a) That "Yeshu" thing is not of Jewish origin. Rather, it came into the world via a 17th-century antisemitic screed called "Judaism Unmasked," which also included allegations of blood-libel and well-poisoning

Or so I was fascinated to learn just now from Wikipedia, being wholly unable to account for or explain it on my own. Because regular old formal Judaism, as a whole, really has no readily perceptible attitude toward Jesus of any kind, as a fairly straightforward consequence of His being part of an entirely different and much later tradition.

Anyway. Atzmon sure didn't learn that because his mom used to say, "Ouch! Jesus -- I mean, "Yeshu, acronym of Y'mach Sh'mo V'Zichro(no), meaning "may his name and memory be obliterated" -- that hurts!" when she stubbed her toe back in ole Tel Aviv. (Or wherever.)

He's just lying, therefore. And I don't really see how another conclusion is possible.

(b) Despite which, just for good measure, I'd like to add that there's JUST NO WAY a secular Jew would have any witting awareness of Leviticus 26: 7-8 as anything, let alone as part of a larger and (ostensibly) characteristically Jewish "genocidal" and "anti-gentile" teaching.

Seriously. In the present day, you might find some virulently anti-gentile/Judeo-supremacist themes being expounded upon by ultra-orthodox extremely right-wing and reactionary Jews who feel exactly the same way about Jews who aren't a part of their tiny, fanatical sect and (in all likelihood) closely related by blood to those who are. (IOW, more than 99.9 percent of all other Jews in the world.)

But it's neither common, nor representative, nor traditional. Besides which, if a penchant for bloodthirsty, sword-wielding vengeance was an integral part of the Jewish faith amounting (in effect) to a religious obligation, there'd be a couple of millennia's worth of apostasy for which history simply offered no explanation of any kind.

However, that's just a hypothetical. Because there is no regular tradition of genocidal and/or anti-gentile religious teaching in Judaism.
_________________

That's all.

[compared2what?]

Just a quick comment concerning,.."eg. The Protocols".

Regardless of who wrote the Protocols, the amazing thing to me is the apparent prescience shown therein as to the actual developments of the 20th century. So for that reason alone, the subject deserves serious consideration as to how this could be?

Iow, was the apparent prescience not prescience at all, but based on a real down to earth hegemonic plan that was being implemented, and for which the real perps were setting up the Zionists as the fall guys?

It's the prescience of the work that marks it as something that can't be dismissed by talk of forgery, and so I'm left wondering. If anyone has any leads to help me understand this better, it would be appreciated.

If you don't believe that zionism is and/or was part of a secret international Jewish plot to control the world, the Protocols wasn't prescient.

If you do, it is (of course) a testament to the Protocols. But not to its prescience.

Because: Where the fuck in the Protocols does it say anything will happen that subsequently came to happen? In any prescient detail that's not manifestly more applicable to:

(a) social and political unrest in the 19th-century Russian Empire?; or

(b) an eschatologically oriented Russian Orthodox 19th-century world view?

Citation, please.

[compared2what?]

I just got caught up on this thread. I read every single word of it. It took a long damn time but I did it anyway...wheewww

Ben there is no doubt that the Protocols are a forgery. Nobody, as far as I can tell, claims that the Protocols are a fantasy, but always a "forgery." What are they a forgery of?

Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu or Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, a 1864 political satire by Maurice Joly, mostly. But some parts were also plagiarized from Biarritz, an 1868 novel by the antisemitic German novelist Hermann Goedsche.

On top of which, some parts of one or the other of the above were themselves plagiarized from Dumas. (One of the Three Musketeers books, I think. But I'm not sure.)

Forgery definition: Copy of an original.

There you go.

Whose plan is it? If that is not obvious to most around here then all can say is...duhhhhh

It was, is, always has been and always will be propaganda that was, is, always has been and always will be circulated as genuine by very extreme and reactionary right-wing proponents of authoritarian state control, such as the Tsar's secret police and the Nazis.

Very extreme and reactionary right-wing types weren't slow to notice that it was a very, very effective way of making their various authoritarian political goals appealing to a populist sensibility, however. So by the 20s, there were already versions in circulation that either added banking and Bolshevism to the mix or subbed it in for Judaism altogether.

One sees the direct legacy of that today in, for example, the presidential campaigning of Ron Paul.

If the average run of the mill common good upstanding Jewish people ever get tired of this forgery in their name, all I can is, the game is over. Game, set, and match. Because, just like world war 2 Germany who had to pay? That is correct, it was the average run of the mill Jew that had to pay for the bullshit perpetuated in their name.

What bullshit was that?

Its no different for the American people of today and all the bullshit proffered in their name. Its the same set of assholes doing both of these things and the Americans and average Jews caught in the middle.

On that much, at least, we can agree.

As for the rest of this thread...score...

Alice 10

Detractors Zero

I object to being characterized as a detractor of Alice's, honey. I love Alice. It's Atzmon I have the problem with.

Alice you are really something else girl...

Seconded.

[eyeno]

"I object to being characterized as a detractor of Alice's, honey. I love Alice. It's Atzmon I have the problem with."

I didn't call your name. You rang your own bell.


prescient

be careful with the definition. this has nothing to do with jews. nothing at all. and i mean nothing. real jews wouldn't touch this stink.


notice. i keep editing this, like ten times, but it took that many........