Anti-Imperialism & Anti-Humanist Rhetoric of Gilad Atzmon

[AlicetheKurious]

Please note that I put up a long post on the previous page. I hope people will take the time to read it.

[Simulist]

I'd planned to boycott any thread begun by anybody on my "foe" list, and this thread was obviously a deliberate provocation, but my conscience obliges me to speak up.

http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2012/02/gilad-atzmon.html

Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Gilad Atzmon
People have been asking me about him a lot as of late: in the UK and the US. I make it very clear: this is somebody that we should reject from the pro-Palestinian advocacy movement. He is anti-Jewish and his offensive language against Jews and Judaism should be categorically rejected. I would put the name of Israel Shamir in the same category. Anti-Semites belong to the Zionist side, and not to our side.
Posted by As'ad AbuKhalil at 8:54 AM

As a regular reader of both Prof. Abu Khalil and Gilad Atzmon, both of whom I've been following for years, I found this post outrageous. I normally have a lot of respect for Prof. Abu Khalil, but what struck me upon reading this, first, was that clearly Abu Khalil is very unfamiliar with the writings of Atzmon, and second was its sheer hypocrisy. There's that double standard again: Abu Khalil makes it his mission to strip away the language of exclusivity, the religious mystification, the nationalist fog, to shine a spotlight on what Arabs, Muslim and Christian, do and think and say. No cow is too sacred, no line too red, when it comes to Arabs, to stop him from forging ahead and holding up the offending item to criticism and frequently, scathing ridicule. In admonishing us to get over ourselves, Abu Khalil sometimes steps over the line into outright bad taste (in my opinion), insufferable arrogance and glibness, and often descends into what could be viewed as racist language and tactics, but I for one always understood that he was motivated by anger, yes, but also a deep love for people and for justice and a frustrated desire to see us break the mental, ideological and religious barriers behind which so many of us are trapped, all the better to manipulate and exploit us into harming ourselves and others.

In a real sense, Gilad Atzmon is Abu Khalil's Jewish alter ego. Though not a scholar, Atzmon writes and speaks from his heart, a heart that is filled with love but also deep anger and frustration at the willingness of many Jews to embrace an ideology that purports to preserve their "specialness" but which is in fact nothing more than a primitive tribalism in modern "identity" guise, which in his view tragically cuts them off from humanity -- their own and that of others. This is not an academic or "internal" problem for Atzmon, something that concerns only Jewish people, but an immediate tragedy of catastrophic proportions, because this tribalism, with its celebration of raw power and negation of others, has achieved its fullest expression with the establishment of Israel. Attitudes and somewhat hostile world-views that are not uncommon among religious or other minorities trying to resist the pressures of assimilation or persecution have very different implications when these are combined with the formidable apparatus of a super-militarized, colonial state, especially one with the means to systematically promote and exploit this supremacist tribal loyalty among citizens of other countries. In Atzmon's view, this is very bad for the Jews, very bad for the Palestinians and other designated non-'Chosen' targets of the zionist state, and very bad for humanity.

Rather than respect the red line, the taboo, the sacred cow, he steps over them as though they weren't there and, like Abu Khalil, goes right up to the holy of holies and drags it out of its shrouded, incense-scented mystery into the light of day. Like Abu Khalil, his purpose is not to harm, but to heal; not to raise barriers between people, but to break them down. He is motivated not by hatred, but on the contrary, by a deep love for humanity, including for those who have been tricked, just as he was in his youth, into abdicating some of theirs.

Which brings us to Angry Arab's second post on the subject of Gilad Atzmon:

http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2012/03/israeli-soldier-wants-to-lecture-me.html

Saturday, March 03, 2012
An Israeli soldier wants to lecture me about the crimes of Zionism
I never thought that I would live to a day when an Israeli who fought (or provided "medical work") in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Yes, that kind of a guy is qualified to teach me about the crimes of Zionism, when I was at the receiving ends of his bombs and car bombs and shells in 1982. I wrote again and I will write it again: there is no room in the pro-Palestinian movement for anti-Semites--and I am not saying that they may even be Israeli infiltrators sent to sabotage and stigmatize the movement. I have declared Gilad Atzmon an anti-Semite (using the general word for anti-Jewishness). Go read some samples of his anti-Jewish statements on the entry on him at Wikipedia. I signed a petition against him and will sign more petitions against him, if asked. I don't throw labels of racist or anti-Semitic lightly but the case against this former member of the Israeli armed terrorist forces is rather clear. Atzmon thinks he can offer me lessons on anti-Zionism. He is as qualified as the Saudi King giving me lessons about feminism. He and others should get the message: the Palestinian cause is too just and too precious to be polluted by haters of any kind. Anti-Semites are never welcomed in our movement. The Zionist cause is your natural home.
Posted by As'ad AbuKhalil at 7:35 AM

If I found Abu Khalil's first post about Atzmon outrageous, his second, which casually dismisses Gilad Atzmon as "an Israeli soldier" and a "hater" is just stupid, and cheap. To fully comprehend how cheap, I'll re-post the article that first brought Gilad Atzmon to my attention, back in 2008, and which I posted here at RI. I hope everybody will take the time to read it and understand where he comes from and open their heart to what he is trying to communicate. I find it eloquent and beautiful, as he describes his musical and spiritual journey into an "exile", in reality an escape from exile that brought him home:

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Gilad Atzmon - The Primacy of the Ear
The Road from Music to Ethics

Rather often I face the same question when interviewed by Arab media outlets: “Gilad, how is it that you observe that which so many Israelis fail to see?” Indeed, not many Israelis interpret the Israeli ethical failure as an inherent symptom. For many years I didn’t have any answer to offer. However, recently I realised that it must have something to do with my Saxophone. It is music that has shaped my views of the Israeli Palestinian conflict and formed my criticism of Jewish identity.

Today I will talk about the road from music to ethics.

It is known that life looks like a meaningful event when reviewed retrospectively from its end to its very beginning. Accordingly, I will try to scrutinise my own battle with Zionism through my late evolution as a musician. I will explore my struggle with Arabic music. I will try to elaborate retrospectively on the role of music on my understanding of the world that surrounds me. To a certain extent, this is the story of my life to date (at least one of them).

I grew up in Israel in a rather Zionist secular family. My Grandfather was a charismatic poetic veteran terrorist, an ex prominent commander in the right wing Irgun terror organisation. I may admit that he had a tremendous influence on me in my early days. His hatred towards anything that failed to be Jewish was a major inspiration. He hated Germans; consequently he didn’t allow my dad to buy a German car. He also despised the Brits for colonising his ‘promised land’. I assume that he didn’t detest the Brits as much as he hated the Germans because he allowed my father to drive an old Vauxhall Viva.

He was also pretty cross with the Palestinians for dwelling on the land he was sure belonged to him and his people. Rather often he used to wonder about the Palestinians: “these Arabs have so many countries, why do they have to live exactly in the land we want to live in?”

But more than anything, my grandfather hated Jewish Leftists. However, it is important to mention that since Jewish leftists have never produced any cars, this specific loathing didn’t mature into a conflict of interests between himself and my dad. Being a follower of Zeev Jabotinsky, my Grandfather obviously realised that Leftist philosophy and the Jewish value system is a contradiction in terms.

Being a veteran right wing terrorist as well a proud tribal Jew, he knew very well that tribalism can never live in peace with humanism and universalism. Following his mentor Jabotinsky, he believed in the “Iron Wall” philosophy. He supposed that Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular should be confronted fearlessly and fiercely. Quoting Betar’s anthem he repeatedly said, “in blood and sweat, we would erect our race”.

My Grandfather believed in the Jewish race, and so did I in my very early days. Like my peers, I didn’t see the Palestinians around me. They were no doubt there, they fixed my father’s car for half the price, they built our houses, they cleaned the mess we left behind, they were schlepping boxes in the local food store, but they always disappeared just before sunset and appeared again around dawn. They had never socialised with us. We didn’t really understand who they were and what they stood for. Supremacy was no doubt brewed in our being, we gazed at the world via a racist, chauvinist binocular.

When I was seventeen, I was preparing myself for my compulsory IDF service. Being a well-built teenager fueled with Zionist spirit and soaked in self-righteousness, I was due to join an air force special rescuing unit. But then the unexpected happened. On an especially late night Jazz program, I heard Bird (Charlie Parker) with Strings .

I was knocked down. It was by far more organic, poetic, sentimental and yet wilder than anything I had ever heard before. My father used to listen to Bennie Goodman and Artie Shaw, these two were entertaining, they could play the clarinet, but Bird was a different story altogether. He was a fierce libidinal extravaganza of wit and energy. The morning after, I decided to skip school, I rushed to ‘Piccadilly Record’, Jerusalem’s No 1 music shop. I found the jazz section and bought every bebop album they had on the shelves (probably two albums). On the bus, on the way home, I realised that Bird was actually a Black man. It didn’t take me by complete surprise, but it was kind of a revelation, in my world, it was only Jews who were associated with anything good. Bird was a beginning of a journey.

***

At the time, like my peers, I was pretty convinced that Jews were indeed the chosen people. 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. But somehow within this extravaganza of omnipotence, to my great surprise, I learned to realize that the people who excited me the most were actually a bunch of Black Americans. People who have nothing to do with the Zionist miracle. People that had nothing to do with my own chauvinist exclusive tribe.

It didn’t take more than two days before I hired my first saxophone. The saxophone is a very easy instrument to start with, and if you don’t believe me you better ask Bill Clinton. However, as much as the saxophone was an easy instrument to pick up, playing like Bird or Cannonball looked like an impossible mission.

I started to practice day and night, and the more I practiced, the more I was overwhelmed with the tremendous achievement of that great family of Black American musicians, a family I was then starting to know closely. Within a month I learned about Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson, Hank Mobley, Monk, Oscar Peterson and Duke, and the more I listened the more I realised that my initial Judeo-centric upbringing was totally wrong.

After one month with a saxophone shoved up my mouth, my Zionist enthusiasm disappeared completely. Instead, of flying choppers behind enemy lines, I started to fantasize about living in NYC, London or Paris. All I wanted was a chance to listen to the great names of Jazz and in the late 1970’s, many of them were still around.

Nowadays, youngsters who want to play Jazz tend to enroll in a music college, in my days it was very different. Those who wanted to play classical music would enroll in a college or a music academy, however, those who wanted to play for the sake of music would stay at home and swing around the clock. Nonetheless, in the late 1970’s there was no Jazz education in Israel and in my hometown Jerusalem there was just a single Jazz club. It was called Pargod and it was set in an old converted [picturesque] Turkish Bath. Every Friday afternoon they ran a jam session and for my first two years in jazz, these jams were the essence of my life.

Literally speaking, I stopped everything else, I just practiced day and night preparing myself for the next ‘Friday Jam’. I listened to music, I transcribed some great solos, I even practiced while sleeping. I decided to dedicate my life to Jazz accepting the fact that as a white Israeli, my chances to make it to the top were rather slim. Without realising it at the time, my emerging devotion to jazz had overwhelmed my Zionist exclusive tendencies.

Without being aware, I left the chosenness behind. I had become an ordinary human being. Years later, I realised that Jazz was my escape route. Within months I felt less and less connected to my surrounding reality, I saw myself as part of a far broader and greater family. A family of music lovers, a bunch of adorable people who were concerned with beauty and spirit rather than land and occupation.

However, I still had to join the IDF. Though later generations of Israeli young Jazz musicians just escaped the army and ran away to the Jazz Mecca NYC, for me, a young lad of Zionist origin in Jerusalem, such an option wasn’t available, a possibility as such didn’t even occur to me.

In July 1981 I joined the Israeli Army but, I may suggest proudly, that from my first day in the army I was doing my very best to avoid any call of duty. Not because I was a pacifist, not because I cared that much about the Palestinians or subject to a latent peace enthusiasm, I just loved to be alone with my saxophone.

When the 1st Lebanon war broke, I was a soldier for one year. It didn’t take a genius to know the truth, I knew that our leaders were lying. Every Israeli soldier realised that this war was an Israeli aggression. Personally I couldn’t feel anymore any attachment to the Zionist cause. I didn’t feel part of it. Yet, it still wasn’t the politics or ethics that moved alienated me, but rather my craving to be alone with my horn. Playing scales at the speed of light seemed to me far more important for than killing Arabs in the name of Jewish redemption. Thus, instead of becoming a qualified killer I spent every possible effort trying to join one of the military bands. It took a few months, but I eventually landed safely at the Israeli Air Force Orchestra (IAFO).

The IAFO was made of a unique social setting, you could join in either for being an excellent promising Jazz talent or just for being a son of a dead pilot. The fact that I was accepted, knowing that my Dad was amongst the living reassured me for the first time that I may be a musical talent. To my great surprise, none of the orchestra members took the army seriously. We were all concerned about one thing, our very personal musical development. We hated the army and it didn’t take time before I started to hate the state that had such a big army with such a big air force that needed a band that stopped me from practicing 24/7. When we were called to play in a military event, we always tried to play as bad as we could just to make sure that we would never get invited again. In the IAFO orchestra I learned for the first time how to be subversive. How to destroy the system in order to achieve immaculate personal perfection.

In the summer of 1984, just 3 weeks before I took off my military uniform, we were sent to Lebanon for a tour of concerts. At the time, Lebanon was a very dangerous place to be in and the Israeli army was dug deep in bunkers and trenches avoiding any confrontation with the local population.

On the 2nd day we arrived at Ansar, a notorious Israeli concentration camp on Lebanese soil. This event changed my life.

It was a boiling day in early July. On a dusty dirt track we arrived at hell on earth. A huge detention centre surrounded by barbed wire. On the way to the camp headquarters we drove through the view of thousands of inmates being scorched under the sun. It is hard to believe, but military bands are always treated as VIPs. Once we landed at the officer command barracks we were taken for a guided tour in the camp. We were walking along the endless barbed wire and the post guard towers. I couldn’t believe my eyes. “Who are these people?” I asked the officer. “They are Palestinians” he said, here are the PLO on the left and here on the right are the Ahmed Jibril’s ones, they are far more dangerous (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine PFLP-GC) so we keep them isolated.

I looked at the detainees and they looked very different to the Palestinians I saw in Jerusalem. The ones I saw in Ansar were angry. They were not defeated and they were many. As we moved along the barbed wire and I was gazing at the inmates, I realised that unbearable truth, I was walking there in Israeli military uniform. While I was still contemplating about my uniform, trying to deal with some severe sense of emerging shame, we arrived at a large flat ground in the middle of the camp. We stood there around the guide officer and learned more from him, some more lies about the current war to defend our Jewish haven.

While he was boring us to death with some irrelevant lies I noticed that we were surrounded by two dozen concrete blocks the size of one square meter and around 1.30 cm high. They had a small metal door and I was horrified by the fact that my army may have decided to lock the guard dogs in these constructions for the night. Putting my Israeli Chutzpah into action, I asked the guide officer what these horrible concrete cubes were. He was fast to answer. “These are our solitary confinement blocks, after two days in one of these you become a devoted Zionist”.

This was enough for me. I realised already then in 1984 that my affair with the Israeli state and Zionism was over. Yet, I knew very little about Palestine, about the Nakba or even about Judaism and Jewishness. I just realized that as far as I was concerned, Israel was bad news and I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. Two weeks later, I gave my uniform back, I grabbed my alto sax, took the bus to Ben Gurion airport and left for Europe for a few months. I was basking in the street. At the age of 21, I was free for the first time. In December it was too cold and I went back home with a clear intention to make it back to Europe.

***

It took me another 10 years before I could leave Israel for good. In these years I started to learn closely about the Israeli Palestinian conflict, about oppression. I started to accept that I was actually living on someone else’s land. I started to take in that devastating fact that in 1948 the Palestinians didn’t really leave willingly but were rather brutally ethnically cleansed by my Grandfather and his ilk.

I started to realize that ethnic cleansing has never stopped in Israel, it just took different shapes and forms. I started to acknowledge the fact that the Israeli legal system was totally racially orientated. A good example was obviously the ‘Law of Return’, a law that welcomes Jews to come ‘home’ after 2000 years but stops Palestinians from returning to their land and villages after 2 years abroad. All that time I had been developing as a musician, I had become a major session player and a musical producer. Yet, I wasn’t really involved in any political activity. I scrutinised the Israeli left discourse and realized that it was very much a social club rather than an ideological setting motivated by ethical awareness.

At the time of Oslo agreement (1994), I just couldn’t take it anymore. I realized that Israeli ‘peace making’ equals ‘piss taking’. It wasn’t there to reconcile with the Palestinians or to confront the Zionist original sin. Instead it was there to assure the secure existence of the Jewish state at the expense of the Palestinians. The Palestinian Right of Return wasn’t an option at all. I decided to leave my home, to leave my career. I left everything behind including my wife Tali, who joined me later. All I took with me was my Tenor Saxophone, my true eternal friend.

I moved to London and attended postgraduate studies in Philosophy at Essex University. Within a week in London I managed to get a residency at the Black Lion, a legendary Irish pub in Kilburn High Road. At the time I didn’t understand how lucky I was. I didn’t know how difficult it is to get a gig in London. In fact this was the beginning of my international career as a Jazz musician. Within a year I had become very popular in the UK playing bebop and post bop. Within three years I was playing with my band all over Europe.

However, it didn’t take long before I started to feel some homesickness. To my great surprise, it wasn’t Israel that I missed. It wasn’t Tel Aviv, Haifa or Jerusalem. It was actually Palestine. It wasn’t the rude taxi driver in Ben Gurion airport, or a shopping center in Ramat Gan, it was the little Humus place in Yafo at Yesfet/Salasa streets. It was the Palestinian villages that are stretched on the hills between the olive trees and the Sabbar cactuses. I realized that whenever I felt like visiting home, I would end up in Edgware Road, I would spend the evening in a Lebanese restaurant. However, once I started to explore my thoughts about Israel in public, it soon became clear to me that Edgware Road was probably as close as I could ever get to my homeland.

***

I may admit that In Israel, I wasn’t at all interested in Arabic music. Supremacist colonials are never interested in the culture of the indigenous. I always loved folk music. I was already established in Europe as a leading Klezmer player. Throughout the years I started to play Turkish and Greek music. However, I completely skipped Arabic music and Palestinian music in particular. Once in London, in these Lebanese restaurants, I started to realise that I have never really explored the music of my neighbors. More concerning, I just ignored it, though I heard it all the time. It was all around me, I never really listened. It was there in every corner of my life, the call for prayers from the Mosques over the hills. Um Kalthoum', Farid El Atrash, Abdel Halim Hafez, were there in every corner of my life, in the street, on the TV, in the small cafes in old city Jerusalem, in the restaurants. They were all around me but I dismissed them disrespectfully.

In my mid thirties, away from my homeland, I was drawn into the indigenous music of my homeland. It wasn’t easy. It was on the verge of unfeasible. As much as Jazz was easy for me to take in, Arabic music was almost impossible. I would put the music on, I would grab my saxophone or clarinet, I would try to integrate and I would sound foreign. I soon realized that Arabic music was a completely different language altogether. I didn’t know where to start and how to approach it.

Jazz music is a western product. It evolved in the 20th century and developed in the margins of the cultural industry. Bebop, the music I grew up on is made of relatively short fragments of music. The tunes are short because they had to fit into the 1940’s record format (3 min). Western music can be easily transcribed into some visual content within standard notation and chord symbols.

Jazz, like every other Western art form, is partially digital. Arabic music, on the other hand, is analogue, it cannot be transcribed. Once transcribed, its authenticity evaporates. By the time I achieved enough humane maturity to face the music of my homeland, my musical knowledge stood in the way.

I couldn’t understand what was it that stopped me from encompassing Arabic music. I couldn’t understand why it didn’t sound right. I spent enough time listening and practicing. But it just didn’t sound right. As time went by, music journalists in Europe started to appreciate my new sound, they started to regard me as a new Jazz hero who crossed the divide as well as an expert of Arabic music. I knew that they were wrong, as much as I tried to cross the so-called ‘divide’, I could easily notice that my sound and interpretation was foreign to the Arabic true colour.

But then, I found an easy trick. In my gigs, when trying to emulate the oriental sound, I would first sing a line that reminded me the sound I ignored in my childhood, I would try to recall echoes of the Muezzin sneaking into our streets from the valleys around. I would try to recall the astonishing haunting sound of my friends Dhafer Youssef and Nizar Al Issa. I would hear myself the low lasting voice of Abel Halim Hafez.

Initially I would just close my eyes and listen to my internal ear, but without realizing I started gradually to open my mouth and sing loudly. I then realised that if I sing while having the saxophone in my mouth I would achieve a sound that was very close to the mosques’ metal horns. Originally I tried to get closer to the Arabic sound but at a certain stage, I just forgot what I was trying to achieve; I started to enjoy myself.

Last year, while recording an album in Switzerland, I realized suddenly that my Arabic sound wasn’t embarrassing anymore. Once listening to some takes in the control room I suddenly noticed that the echoes of Jenin, Al Quds and Ramallah popped naturally out of the speakers. I tried to ask myself what happened, why did it suddenly started to sound genuine. I realized that I have given up on the primacy of the eye and reverted to the primacy of the ear. I didn’t look for an inspiration in the manuscript, in the music notes or the chord symbol. Instead, I was listening to my internal voice. Struggling with Arabic music reminded me why I did start to play music in the first place. At the end of the day, I heard Bird in the radio rather seeing him on MTV.

I would like to end this talk by saying that it is about time we learn to listen to the people we care for. It is about time we listen to the Palestinians rather than following some decaying textbooks. It is about time. Only recently I grasped that ethics comes into play when the eyes shut and the echoes of conscience are forming a tune within one’s soul. To empathise is to accept the primacy of the ear.

Thought-provoking. And quoted in its entirety for the new page.

[Searcher08]

As you said, Alice that piece (peace) deserves reading in its entirety. As the only things of his I had read before were a couple of blog entries, this was superb. Thank you for posting it.

Dealing with identity at the level he is talking about is very uncomfortable. (*)

I wonder if most people center themselves in their heads, not their hearts to avoid facing it this visceral discomfort; when one has a massive set of mental superstructures in place, all human to human contact gets mediated through that. When that isn't present, you see that the Other is actually a real life human being, and one who might be angry for how your culture's mental superstructure ends up with the physical, emotional and mental shit kicked out of him and his family. Like in Palestine.



(*)Irish and even Celtic identity has many parallel issues of unacknowledged neglect, greed, exploitation, disunity and sorrow that we did to ourselves (read the journey of O'Sullivan Beare) and others. And the holocausts that we had done to us that we ignore (like the Famine) or wrap in faux nationalism or interpretations. And the holocausts we ignored or inflicted on others.

[Allegro]

...

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Gilad Atzmon - The Primacy of the Ear
The Road from Music to Ethics

Rather often I face the same question when interviewed by Arab media outlets: “Gilad, how is it that you observe that which so many Israelis fail to see?” Indeed, not many Israelis interpret the Israeli ethical failure as an inherent symptom. For many years I didn’t have any answer to offer. However, recently I realised that it must have something to do with my Saxophone. It is music that has shaped my views of the Israeli Palestinian conflict and formed my criticism of Jewish identity.

Today I will talk about the road from music to ethics.

< snip to the bottom paragraph by Allegro >

I would like to end this talk by saying that it is about time we learn to listen to the people we care for. It is about time we listen to the Palestinians rather than following some decaying textbooks. It is about time. Only recently I grasped that ethics comes into play when the eyes shut and the echoes of conscience are forming a tune within one’s soul. To empathise is to accept the primacy of the ear. [REFER.]

Jeff, I’m so grateful for RI.

Alice, I am moved to tears. I escaped the computer because they were thick. I couldn’t see clearly. I didn’t have to. Atzmon wrote, “To empathise is to accept the primacy of the ear.” That’s my life, and my life in music. I’m one big ear, in case someone didn’t already know. Atzmon’s experiences have been so not like mine, yet very similar in the context of doing music.

I've not read this yet, but will.

~ A.

[barracuda]

Rather than respect the red line, the taboo, the sacred cow, he steps over them as though they weren't there...

Fortunately, on this forum there are red lines which are expected to remain uncrossed, and I should hope that tacit endorsement of Atzmon's revisionist insinuations that the Jews somehow share culpability for the purges of the 1930's would clearly be among them. I fail completely to see the benefit to the Palestinian cause of this type of language.

[JackRiddler]

Rather than respect the red line, the taboo, the sacred cow, he steps over them as though they weren't there...

Fortunately, on this forum there are red lines which are expected to remain uncrossed, and I should hope that tacit endorsement of Atxmon's revisionist insinuations that the Jews somehow share culpability for the purges of the 1930's would clearly be among them. I fail completely to see the benefit to the Palestinian cause of this type of language.

Atzmon seems to be saying not just the Jews of that time, as per-se Jews, but the Jews of any time shouldn't be surprised given how other and bad their being Jews makes them - singular, worse than "ordinary" colonialist empires, in fact.

I keep noting no one defending Atzmon (or trying to distract away from him as the subject of this thread) wants to deal with the quoted matter in the OP, as MacC did last page. Because it's entirely possible to write beautiful words and yet ruin it with incredible statements that truly are beyond the pale.

Were Jewish Marxists and cosmopolitans open to the notion of brotherhood, they would have given up on their unique, exclusive banners and become ordinary human beings like the rest of us.

Oh FFS. Has this guy read any European history at all? Does he know how profoundly assimilated most German and Austrian Jews actually were? Has he noticed that many of them named their children "Siegfried" and "Bertha"? Has it struck him that many of them were, to all intents and purposes, atheists, with even less interest in their "Jewish identity" than (say) Bismarck had in his own nominal Christianity?

Freud's first name was Sigmund. Wilhelm Reich ran free clinics for the impoverished workers and women of the Viennese working-class, and it goes without saying that he did it for all of them, whatever their religion or "ethnic" origin. He actually risked his life marching with striking workers. That's human brotherhood in action (and - not fucking least - sisterhood too.) As someone pointed out, "Wilhelm Reich" is an almost absurdly German name: "If he'd been French, it's as if he were called 'Napoleon France'."

And yet they both had to flee Germany! Not because they were not "open to the notion of brotherhood" (on the contrary!), but because they were (FFS) allegedly tainted in their very blood. (How's that for being "open to the notion of brotherhood"?)

Two examples among millions.

they didn't understand why the Europeans stood against them in the 1930s.

"Stood against them". He actually writes that. Not "robbed them, spat on them, oppressed them sadistically, and finally carted them off to the slaughter". FFS.

Were Jewish Marxists and cosmopolitans open to the notion of brotherhood

This is beyond satire, and beneath contempt.

Seriously, who wants to defend the above stuff, or claim it has utility in the present struggle, or excuse it on the basis of other worthwhile contributions, or excuse it on the basis of it's only tit-for-tat, or tell us it doesn't matter because someone else is doing something worse somewhere?

I found Atzmon's own response to the OP to be evasive, and childish. Childish may explain this tendency of his as a whole: an enjoyment in saying things that are taboo (whether right or wrong) and watching people react to the provocation. Especially silly, and not in a funny way, was reproducing the list of signatories against him, but renaming "Angry Arab" as "Angry Collaborator." Hardly a case of the "listening ear."

.

[Searcher08]

Were the quotes of the OP in context from the book?

I presume you have read him. I have not. As I said some of the quotations I agree with, some I certainly dont disagree with and some I find irrelevant, but I certainly do not consider myself in a position to create an informed view of him - regardless of WHAT he was quoted as saying, I don't care if ten thousand activists signed a letter against him, I'm not a collectivist - if some find that unrigourous and lame, I dont give a shit, I'll make me own mind up.

If you consider him a Holocaust denier and if Cuda himself is now posting his name in the Sturmfr3nt style, WTF is this thread not locked? R.I. isnt a 'free speech' forum, (which I have no problem about), so I'm baffled why Atzmon stuff is aired here and find it bizarre in the extreme for AD to have posted it here.
<snark on> FFS What's next on the menu? Statements signed by activists saying Ernest Zund3l is not a friend of the Palestinians? No Thanks.

[JackRiddler]

Were the quotes of the OP in context from the book?

The quotes are from various sources. The OP has citations for each quote; most of these are to Web publications. Atzmon furthermore stands behind and further explicates each quote in his own piece, which you posted.

I presume you have read him. I have not.

I have read pieces by him on Counterpunch that I found dubious for the same reasons as those outlined in the OP. If you haven't read him, why is having an opinion here so important?

If you consider him a Holocaust denier

The line about Jews in the 1930s not understanding why they were getting what was coming to them sounds more like an approver, or a rationalizer, than a denier.

and if Cuda himself is now posting his name in the Sturmfr3nt style, WTF is this thread not locked?

Is this a joke question? Let us recall this thread started with an OP critical of Atzmon, not a defense of him. Of course it should remain unlocked.

<snark on> FFS What's next on the menu? Statements signed by activists saying Ernest Zund3l is not a friend of the Palestinians? No Thanks.

If Zundel goes on a tour among Palestinian solidarity groups in the United States, like Atzmon, activists will doubtless feel motivated to do that.

How do you manage to miss all this context, in each post? When I asked if you're really this dense, it was because I don't believe you're dense at all. Just selective about what you choose to acknowledge seeing.

[Simulist]

I appreciated reading Alice's post; many of Gilad Atzmon's words remain offensive to me (especially his oft-quoted remark about burning a synagogue), but he seems much more of a person to me now than he would have without it.

[slimmouse]

It would appear to me, at least from Alices recent post by Atzmon, that his clearly mistaken opinions are the direct result of his upbringing - raised as he was and where he was - namely within a family that took the "teaching" that Jews are somehow superior to the rest of humanity all too literally, within a land that egregiously since its inception has reinforced that claim by its actions and contempt towards its neighbours. One might have hoped that he had subsequently met enough of "his tribe", to understand that this is certainly NOT the case overall.

It is of course one of many such "teachings" across the pseudo religious spectrum which I personally believe were inititially created to serve thie interests of the few, and if they werent are doing a pretty damn good job of it.

"God" save us all from organised religion.

[bluenoseclaret]

Maybe of interest:

OBAMA, AIPAC AND THE REST OF US
TUESDAY, MARCH 6, By Gilad Atzmon

Yesterday at AIPAC annual conference, the American president had to go out of his way to appease his Jewish crowd. He used every trick in the book, he even peppered his talk with some Yiddish sporadic words and he did it all just to justify his decision not to launch a World War as yet.

One should ask, how come a lobby of a small state that practices the most appalling racist expansionist politics and practices has managed to gain so much political power in the USA.

As it happens, more and more academics and political commentators indeed ask themselves the exact question – they wonder what is it in American culture and political system that allowed it to happen? I am also interested in a very similar quest. I actually try to identify the different elements within Jewish culture and identity politics that have led to the rise of AIAPC into the dominant force within American politics and foreign policy.

In my latest book, The Wandering Who, a book that both Zionist and Jewish Anti Zionist Zionists (JAZZ) are desperate to stop, I explore those themes. I for instance, elaborate on the significant role of the ‘Book of Esther’, in shaping Jewish Lobbing in the West and beyond. The Book of Ester is an Old Testament text that preaches lobby culture and tribal infiltration into foreign administrations.

I also explore the Exilic nature of Judaism. I maintain that Judaism, as we know it, was founded in Babylon in conditions that, from Jewish perspectives, were very similar to 19th century Europe and the birth moment of Zionism. In both cases it was the fear of assimilation that led towards the invention of an isolationist and separatist cult.

Seemingly the exilic nature of Judaism transcended itself into Jewish secular and nationalist politics- rather than being concerned with the ‘here and now’, the Diaspora Zionist Jew explores his or her aspiration towards a different place and different time i.e. Zion. Unlike other migrant lobbies in the West that are engaged in issues to do with the interests of their respective migrant communities (in terms of social rights, religious freedom, education and so on), the Jewish Lobby is actually solely concerned with the interest of a remote state and a remote community. This fact alone, explains the uniqueness of AIPAC. It also means that it is unlikely that any other political lobby would ever compete successfully with AIPAC except another Jewish Lobby.

Yet one may wonder whether AIPAC’s hegemony over American foreign policy is ‘good for the Jews’. In fact, more than a few commentators including myself are convinced that that it is actually a total disaster. It doesn’t take a genius to notice that the domination of Jewish elite in the USA is similar to the condition of German Jewish elite in late 1920’s Weimar Republic. In fact Jewish history is saturated with similar occurrences in which Jewish elite’s overwhelming influence led to the birth of rapid growing of anti – Jewish sentiment.

Israeli historian Shlomo Sand points out that in between the 1st and early 19th century Jews didn’t engage in writing history. Not a single Jewish historical text saw daylight in that period. According to Sand, the Rabbinical Jew didn’t need history text. The Bible provided a sufficient explanation. The meaning of it is clear, there is an element of Jewish cultural denial to historical thinking. Such an interpretation may help us to grasp the surprising fact that Jewish communities in the West are not at all alarmed by the growing influence of the Jewish lobbies in West and AIPAC or CFI in particular.

In fact, the complete opposite is correct. Jewish communities are often in the press boasting of their Lobbying victories. Jewish communities also invest a lot of energy silencing any attempt to point at the growing danger entangled with the emergence of Jewish power. This is far from being new. Jewish history is saturated with attempts to shoot the messengers and whistle blowers: Jesus found himself nailed to the wood, Spinoza was excommunicated, Bernard Lazare was largely ignored, Otto Weininger was dismissed, Mordechai Vanunu is locked behind bars again and as my followers know, I am also chased by the like of Alan Dershowitz, and the Jewish Anti Zionist Zionists (JAZZ).

Like many other commentators on Middle East current affairs, I also don’t have any doubt that we are facing a volatile situation. Considering its influence and its open advocacy to attack on Iran, AIPAC is a grave threat to world peace. In the open it pushes for another war that can easily escalate into a nuclear global conflict. AIPAC clearly endangers American interests and American people but it is also very dangerous for Jewish communities all over the world.

If America loves itself and cares for its future, it must immediately find within itself the means to dismantle the power of this lobby. America owes it to its people, to world peace but also to its Jews who largely have nothing to do with this appalling warmongering genocidal campaign.

[slimmouse]

Indeed. Unfortunately, what Atzmon fails to recognise here, is that many jews find themselves castigated as self haters and completely ignored by the MSM, for questioning the legitimacy of Zionism, in exactly the same way that the general combined voice of Western sanity against the madness of never ending wars is crushed like bugs by the power of the 0.00001%, through a complicit media and the X factor.

Im wondering who how many catholics, to extend the example, approve of the ongoing coverup of decades of abuse, peodophilia etc suffered by so many at the hands of the few ( not to mention centuries of slaughter "in the name of god") - something which the Vatican hierarchy covers up via its similar ( or should that be shared ? ) influences over the media - and of course, even worse is introducing legislation to put the perps beyond any laws that the vast majority would find reasonable ? Rather like Bushco did with torture and war crimes litigation against them.

Meanwhile, As SLAD has gone to great pains to emphasise, the British Empire in its history is probably responsible for more collective genocide than anyone else in history, from the pilgrims decimation of Native Americans, through to Asia, Australia etc.

In summary if the average human being was fully aware of what is being done in so many of their names, they'd probably be puking along with those of us that do know. The difference being, that once enough people become aware of this, its probably the 0.00001% whod be starting to puke.

That to me is the job at hand. Making them accountable and dealing with them all .

[Sounder]

Alice, thanks for the Gilad/Lerner you-tube interview.

Dr. Volin wrote…

Racialism, the idea that there are significant and informative differences between human descent groups.

Because this is an anti-fascist forum, it would seem that most readers of Gilads experience would be inclined to salute his efforts to rise above the exclusivity and exceptionalism that seemed to him to be a common mark of his countrymen.

Gilad says in reference to his granddad;

Being a veteran right wing terrorist as well a proud tribal Jew, he knew very well that tribalism can never live in peace with humanism and universalism. Following his mentor Jabotinsky, he believed in the “Iron Wall” philosophy. He supposed that Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular should be confronted fearlessly and fiercely. Quoting Betar’s anthem he repeatedly said, “in blood and sweat, we would erect our race”……

A hardening of the communal heart is inevitable with this as ones background.

…..At the time, like my peers, I was pretty convinced that Jews were indeed the chosen people. 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.

This secular Zionism might strike some as echoing the platforms of Marxism.

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. But somehow within this extravaganza of omnipotence, to my great surprise, I learned to realize that the people who excited me the most were actually a bunch of Black Americans. People who have nothing to do with the Zionist miracle. People that had nothing to do with my own chauvinist exclusive tribe.

This is a mark of growth away from racism, and would seem to be recognized as a ‘good’ by folk on an anti-racist forum. As I assume anyone will concede that this point in Gilad’s growth was a ‘good’ thing, can anyone please show us where it is that Gilad has turned ‘bad’?

Without being aware, I left the chosenness behind. I had become an ordinary human being. Years later, I realised that Jazz was my escape route. Within months I felt less and less connected to my surrounding reality, I saw myself as part of a far broader and greater family. A family of music lovers, a bunch of adorable people who were concerned with beauty and spirit rather than land and occupation.

Only recently I grasped that ethics comes into play when the eyes shut and the echoes of conscience are forming a tune within one’s soul. To empathize is to accept the primacy of the ear.

These are word combinations that edify. I do not get that out of Gilad’s naysayers, although I did catch a connection between AD’s Marxism and an institutional formula for lying by inversion, so that’s cool.

And yet, my detractors seem to be devastated. My personal Defamation League is clearly outraged by some of my statements — they insist that I am a ‘racist’ and ‘anti Semitic’. They contend that people like me do not have room in the ‘Palestinian solidarity movement’. Is it that they know better who is ‘kosher’ and who is not?

Ask AD. He knows with certainty that Gilad Atzmon is not to be associated with because he would certainly be ‘bad’ for the ‘Palestinian’ cause. And that is so fuckin rich coming from one who’s greatest journalistic accomplishments are to ask pisant questions as a substitute or distraction from the fact that ideology severely limits his relationship to rationality.

Yet, in spite of their efforts they have still failed to find even a single racist or anti semitic statement in my entire body of work. As embarrassing as it may be, in the list of quotes they cherry picked, I actually refer to Jewish ideology, Jewish culture and Jewish heritage — but I never criticise Jews as a race, a people or an ethnicity. The reason is obvious: I am a humanist and an anti racist. I oppose Jewish racism and exceptionalism, whether it is Zionist or ‘anti’ Zionist.

That is not what your critics say Gilad.

If anything, the list of quotes that was initially put together to defame me, actually achieves the complete opposite: it stands as a glimpse into Jewish Marxist morbid philosophy. And it certainly suggests what the topics are that the Anti Zionist Zionists want us to avoid.

Yes I imagine that AD wishes he had never brought this subject up. Thank-you AD.

They for instance, do not want us to explore the colonial hoax — They quote my attack on one of their ideological mentors, the archaic Two-Stater Marxist, Moshe Machover:

“Machover’s reading of Zionism is pretty trivial. ‘Israel,’ he says, is a ‘settler state.’ For Machover this is a necessary point of departure because it sets Zionism as a colonialist expansionist project. The reasoning behind such a lame intellectual spin is obvious. As long as Zionism is conveyed as a colonial project, Jews, as a people, should be seen as ordinary people. They are no different from the French and the English, they just happen to run their deadly colonial project in a different time.” (http://www.gilad.co.uk/)

Where is the problem exactly? Is it really anti-Semitic or racist to suggest that the Marxist colonial paradigm is a lame spin? Clearly not: it may be right or wrong but it isn’t anti-Semitic. The truth of the matter is that Israel and Zionism are not colonial projects and have never been. Colonialism presents a clear materialist and spiritual exchange between a Mother State and a Settler State. But the Jewish State has never had a Mother State. In other words, Israel is a Jewish nationalist settlement project and its Jewishness is inherent to its racist, tribal, exceptionalist nature.

My Private Defamation League also wants to prevent us from looking into Jewish heritage and the role of the Old Testament in shaping the unethical Israeli attitudes, politics and practices. They quote me saying,

“The never-ending robbery of Palestine by Israel in the name of the Jewish people establishes a devastating spiritual, ideological, cultural and, obviously, practical continuum between the Judaic Bible and the Zionist project. The crux of the matter is simple yet disturbing: Israel and Zionism are both successful political systems that put into devastating practice the plunder promised by the Judaic God in the Judaic holy scriptures”. (“Swindler’s List: Zionist Plunder and the Judaic Bible,” Redress Information & Analysis, April 5, 2008)

I am trying to figure it out: why, exactly, are a bunch of alleged ‘progressive’ Jews and one Angry Arab opposing a search into the topic?

The answer is immediate: they obviously realise that in my writing I do not differentiate between Zionism and Anti Zionist Zionists. As far as I am concerned, they are both equally racist and supremacist.

Yes, it becomes clear why some minds infected with a rabid materialism do not care for Gilad’s material.

“Sadly, we have to admit that hate-ridden plunder of other people’s possessions made it into the Jewish political discourse both on the left and right. The Jewish nationalist would rob Palestine in the name of the right of self-determination; the Jewish progressive is there to rob the ruling class and even international capital in the name of world working class revolution”. (Ibid)

Damn Gilad, that is really going to far, well hey I didn’t say it.

…..The message is clear: The Atzmon Defamation League contends that Jews are somehow special and beyond criticism — but they won’t allow us explore this specialness

The Atzmon Defamation League is pretty amusing, in spite of the fact that the league is engaged in a rabbinical excommunication exercise against me. They are criticising me for pointing out what the Jewish Herem exercise is all about.

“Neither the Zionists nor the ‘anti Zionists’ managed to drift away from the disastrous herem culture. it seems that the entire world of Jewish identity politics is a matrix of herems and exclusion strategies. In order to be ‘a proper Jew,’ all you have to do is to point out whom you oppose, hate, exclude or boycott.” (“The Herem Law in the context of Jewish Past and Present,”)

Huh go figure, but Dr. Volin said..... shit now i'm confused, I mean; he's a fuckin Doctor! Do you do vaccinations also Dr, Volin?

Dr. Volin wrote…

Racialism, the idea that there are significant and informative differences between human descent groups.

Tragically enough, the Atzmon Defamation League, refrains from engaging in an intellectual or ideological exchange. The meaning of it is devastating. Like the Zionists, the so called Jewish ‘anti’ Zionists have managed to exclude themselves from the most crucial discourse regarding Jewish identity politics. Voluntarily and consciously they set themselves apart from the public discourse. They react exactly like the Israelis; they build around themselves a wall of deafness and blindness. This wall is consistent with their Jewish ideological philosophy but it is also symptomatic of their growing irrelevance.

Supremacists are so silly. Thankfully a world cannot be made with only 'super' people in it.

Although the ones that masquerade as being of the common folk are slightly more irritating.

It’s probably for the best that AD has me on ignore.

[DrVolin]

Because this is an anti-fascist forum, it would seem that most readers of Gilads experience would be inclined to salute his efforts to rise above the exclusivity and exceptionalism that seemed to him to be a common mark of his countrymen.

Is your claim that Atzmon is beyond racism because he recognizes that The Jews aren't?

[AlicetheKurious]

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).

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.

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.

Anyway. I was going to talk about demagoguery.

Demagoguery: impassioned appeals to the prejudices and emotions of the populace.

Demagoguery by-passes our critical thinking and gets to work right on our emotions, exploiting emotional triggers like the yearning to belong, nostalgia or best of all, fear, to sabotage our capacity to gather and evaluate data, and to use that data to arrive at rational conclusions.

Demagoguery is how people can find themselves "hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing," even when "the people doing the oppressing" are actually oppressing them.

So, how does that work? How do you use demagoguery to persuade oppressed people to passionately defend a small, privileged elite, even one that exploits them shamelessly, and to perceive any threat to that elite or its privileges as a threat to themselves?

Easy: the goal is to get them to identify with this elite, by highlighting one trait that the non-privileged and the privileged people share, and then constantly reinforcing this identification.

There are four ways to do this, and they work best when they're all used together:

The most important way is by making people believe that by sole virtue of this trait they and the elite face a common threat. The more immediate and frightening the threat is, or can be made to appear, the more powerful its uniting effect.

The second way is for the elite to pose as defenders of the "little people" -- keeping the focus always on the threat that they face together, based on this common trait. That way, the disproportionate power of the elite paradoxically makes the "little people" feel more secure, and identify even more strongly with them.

The third way is for the elite to persuade the oppressed that the trait they share with the elite confers innate superiority and provides a greater chance of upward mobility and other advantages. As a result, instead of resentment, even conspicuous displays of wealth and prestige by the elite are enjoyed vicariously by the non-privileged, and can become a source of pride.

And the fourth way is for the elite to use its wealth and power to exile, excommunicate or otherwise punish those who threaten its privileged status. This not only intimidates dissidents, but if the elite plays it right, can be used to reinforce solidarity between the little people and the elite, by demonstrating the constant need for vigilance against external and internal threats faced by the collective whole.

If we look around, all of us will find these four methods being applied in various contexts, with varying degrees of success.

Which brings us back to Gilad Atzmon and the "holocaust revision/Christ killers thingy".

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.

Now for the holocaust revision. The Holocaust actually refers to two very distinct things: one is the German Nazi persecution and genocide against European Jews that took place from 1933 to 1945, in Germany and other Nazi-ruled territories. It is an historical event. In dealing with historical events, revisionism is not only a legitimate, accepted practise, it is necessary.

Pulitzer Prize winning historian James McPherson, writing for the American Historical Association, described the importance of revisionism:

The 14,000 members of this Association, however, know that revision is the lifeblood of historical scholarship. History is a continuing dialogue between the present and the past. Interpretations of the past are subject to change in response to new evidence, new questions asked of the evidence, new perspectives gained by the passage of time. There is no single, eternal, and immutable "truth" about past events and their meaning. The unending quest of historians for understanding the past—that is, "revisionism"—is what makes history vital and meaningful. Without revisionism, we might be stuck with the images of Reconstruction after the American Civil War that were conveyed by D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation and Claude Bowers's The Tragic Era. Were the Gilded Age entrepreneurs "Captains of Industry" or "Robber Barons"? Without revisionist historians who have done research in new sources and asked new and nuanced questions, we would remain mired in one or another of these stereotypes. Supreme Court decisions often reflect a "revisionist" interpretation of history as well as of the Constitution.[1] Link

But "The Holocaust" has another, even more commonly used meaning: it refers to an officially-sanctioned narrative about an historical event, which it is forbidden to question, investigate or reinterpret in light of new evidence. Any such attempt, by professional historians or anybody else can and often will lead to public dishonor, the loss of one's job and even prison sentences of several years, in many countries.

Narratives that are not open to reexamination, questioning, correction or investigation are no longer history, but dogma.

dog·ma/ˈdôgmə/
Noun:
A principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true.

A dogma (from Greek: Doxa, "Opinion"; Dokein, "to seem to believe") refers to a religious teaching or doctrine that is held by an organization (usually a religion) to be authoritative and indisputable. Dogmas are considered to be explications of divinely-given truths and therefore their denial is usually seen as tantamount to a rejection of the religion. Dogmas are found in many religions where they are considered to be core principles that must be upheld by followers in order to belong to the religious community. Rejection of a religion's dogmas usually is considered to be heresy and may lead to an individual's expulsion from the group or other forms of punishment. Link

So, if by Holocaust you meant an historical event, then you would not be accusing Gilad Atzmon of "revisionism", since that would not have any negative connotations, on the contrary.

Clearly, you are referring to The Holocaust in its sense as a dogma, in which case Gilad Atzmon, by even daring to ask questions or express doubt about the dogma, is committing heresy. Calling it "revisionism" is therefore dishonest and obfuscatory. Religious heresy is no longer a prosecutable crime in most Western countries, but Holocaust heresy is.

her·e·sy/ˈherəsē/
Noun:

Belief or opinion contrary to orthodox religious (esp. Christian) doctrine.
Opinion profoundly at odds with what is generally accepted

But if The Holocaust is a dogma, then what religion does it belong to? Atzmon calls it "Jewish identity", or "Jewishness", as distinct from Judaism:

Clearly, Jewishness is neither a racial nor an ethnic category. Though Jewish identity is racially and ethnically orientated, the Jewish people do not form a homogenous group. There is no racial or ethnic continuum. Jewishness may be seen by some as a continuation of Judaism. I would maintain that this is not necessarily the case either. Though Jewishness borrows some fundamental Judaic elements, Jewishness is not Judaism and it is even categorically different from Judaism. Furthermore, as we know, more than a few of those who proudly define themselves as Jews have very little knowledge of Judaism, many of them are atheists, non-religious and even overtly oppose Judaism or any other religion. Many of those Jews who happen to oppose Judaism happen to maintain their Jewish identity and to be extremely proud about it[2]. This opposition to Judaism obviously includes Zionism (at least the early version) but it also is the basis of much of Jewish socialist anti-Zionism.

Though Jewishness is different from Judaism one may still wonder just what constitutes Jewishness: whether it is a new form of religion an ideology or if it is just a ‘state of mind’.

If Jewishness is indeed a religion, the next questions that have to be asked are, "what kind of religion is it? What does this religion entail? What do its followers believe in?" If it is a religion, one may wonder whether it is possible to divorce from it as much as it is possible to step out of Judaism, Christianity or Islam.

If Jewishness is an ideology, then the right questions to ask are, "what does this ideology stand for? Does it form a discourse? Is it a monolithic discourse? Does it portray a new world order? Is it aiming for peace or violence? Does it carry a universal message to humanity or is it just another manifestation of some tribal precepts?"

If Jewishness is a state of mind, then the question to raise is whether it is rational or irrational. Is it within the expressible or rather within the inexpressible?

At this point I may suggest to consider the remote possibility that Jewishness may be a strange hybrid, it can be all of those things at once i.e., a religion, an ideology and a state of mind.

The Holocaust Religion

"Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the philosopher who was an observant orthodox Jew, told me once: "The Jewish religion died 200 years ago. Now there is nothing that unifies the Jews around the world apart from the Holocaust." (Uri Avnery[3])

Philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the German born Hebrew University professor, was probably the first to suggest that the Holocaust has become the new Jewish religion. ‘The Holocaust’ is far more than historical narrative, it indeed contains most of the essential religious elements: it has its priests (Simon Wiesenthal, Elie Wiesel, Deborah Lipstadt, etc.) and prophets (Shimon Peres, Benjamin Netanyahu and those who warn about the Iranian Judeocide to come). It has its commandments and dogmas (‘never again’, ‘six million’, etc.). It has its rituals (memorial days, Pilgrimage to Auschwitz etc.). It establishes an esoteric symbolic order (kapo, gas chambers, chimneys, dust, Musselmann, etc.). It has its shrines and temples (Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum and now the UN). If this is not enough, the Holocaust religion is also maintained by a massive economic network and global financial infrastructures (Holocaust industry a la Norman Finkelstein). Most interestingly, the Holocaust religion is coherent enough to define the new ‘antichrists’ (the Deniers) and it is powerful enough to persecute them (Holocaust denial laws).

Critical scholars who dispute the notion of ‘Holocaust religion’ suggest that though the new emerging religion retains many characteristics of an organised religion, it doesn’t establish an external God figure to point at, to worship or to love. I myself cannot agree less. I insist that the Holocaust religion embodies the essence of the liberal democratic worldview. It is there to offer a new form of worshiping. It made self loving into a dogmatic belief in which the observant follower worships himself. In the new religion it is ‘the Jew’ whom the Jews worship. It is all about ‘me’, the subject of endless suffering who makes it into redemption.

However, more than a few Jewish scholars in Israel and abroad happen to accept Leibowitz’s observation. Amongst them is Marc Ellis, the prominent Jewish theologian who suggests a revealing insight into the dialectic of the new religion. "Holocaust theology," says Ellis, "yields three themes that exist in dialectical tension: suffering and empowerment, innocence and redemption, specialness and normalization."[4]

Though Holocaust religion didn’t replace Judaism, it gave Jewishness a new meaning. It sets a modern Jewish narrative allocating the Jewish subject within a Jewish project. It allocates the Jew a central role within his own self-centred universe. The ‘sufferer’ and the ‘innocent’ are marching towards ‘redemption’ and ‘empowerment’. God is obviously out of the game, he is fired, he has failed in his historic mission, he wasn’t there to save the Jews. Within the new religion the Jew becomes ‘the Jews’ new God’, it is all about the Jew who redeems himself. Link

Parallel with its sanctification and its removal from the normal study of history, The Holocaust dogma has become not only the defining basis of "Jewishness" since the mid-twentieth century, but has been transformed into the Manichean template for interpreting all of human history over the past two thousand years and beyond, and into the present day. According to this template, time and place are irrelevant -- human history consists of only one unchanging and unchangeable story: Jews being viciously persecuted by non-Jews.

Anti-Semitism is an "irrational disease" that remains just as virulent and resilient as it was in the previous century when the Holocaust consumed a continent and a people, Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel author, scholar and Holocaust survivor told the Anti-Defamation League's Conference on Global Anti-Semitism Thursday.

"The world has changed in the last 2,000 years, and only anti-Semitism has remained," he said. "We have made great strides in philosophy, in science, and we can even prevent disease. … The only disease that has not found its cure is anti-Semitism." Link

[I]f anti-Semitism is a variety of racism, it is a most peculiar variety, with many unique characteristics. In my view as a historian, it is so peculiar that it deserves to be placed in a quite different category. I would call it an intellectual disease, a disease of the mind, extremely infectious and massively destructive. It is a disease to which both human individuals and entire human societies are prone.

...anti-Semitism is very ancient, has never been associated with frontiers, and, although it has had its ups and downs, seems impervious to change.
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What strikes the historian surveying anti-Semitism worldwide over more than two millennia is its fundamental irrationality. It seems to make no sense, any more than malaria or meningitis makes sense. In the whole of history, it is hard to point to a single occasion when a wave of anti-Semitism was provoked by a real Jewish threat (as opposed to an imaginary one). In Japan, anti-Semitism was and remains common even though there has never been a Jewish community there of any size.
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Like many physical diseases, anti-Semitism is highly infectious, and can become endemic in certain localities and societies. Though a disease of the mind, it is by no means confined to weak, feeble, or commonplace intellects; as history sadly records, its carriers have included men and women of otherwise powerful and subtle thoughts. Like all mental diseases, it is damaging to reason, and sometimes fatal. Link

So, in this highly bizarre, yet remarkably prevalent explanation, anti-semitism is a universal, incurable, infectious disease that afflicts non-Jews everywhere. Because it is utterly irrational and therefore unpredictable, there is nothing that Jews can do to coexist safely with non-Jews, anywhere. This is the message of The Holocaust religion, and the exilic "Jewish identity" that predated it. As Atzmon says, "its preaching teaches us to see a threat in everything."

Atzmon adamantly rejects the idea that all conflicts between Jews and non-Jews can be attributed to anti-semitism, still less that non-Jews carry a brain disease that makes them hate Jews and attack them for no reason. This is bad enough, but then he does the unforgivable: he accuses the leaders of what he calls "organized Jewry", the rabbinical authorities in previous centuries and the zionist authorities more recently, of creating self-fulfilling prophecies, and then exploiting the resulting trauma to solidify their own power over their "flock".

The pattern of demagoguery and elite manipulation is very similar, whether we are talking about Nazi Germany post Versailles Treaty, America post 9/11, or zionists post Holocaust. What makes Israel unique is that without this pattern of constant trauma-induction, this belief that powerful forces are always mobilizing to 'exterminate' them, both among its own citizens and also among those in the so-called diaspora, it would cease to exist. In other words, Israel's very raison d'etre is based on its ability to perpetuate a pathological and highly damaging suspicion, fear and loathing of "Others" both in its own citizens and those in the "diaspora".

Since 9/11, a lot of the uglier developments we've been witnessing in America represent an acceleration of the 'Israelization' of the US, with its all-too familiar elements -- the pumping up of xenophobic and racist fear, the sense of being "hated" by the rest of the world, the promotion of religious fanaticism, the militarization of the police and even of society, the erection of "security" walls to keep the 'others' out, etc.

Once we learn to look at Jewishness as an exilic culture, as the embodiment of the ‘ultimate other’ we can then understand Jewishness as a collective continuum grounded on a fantasy of horror. Jewishness is the materialisation of politics of fear into a pragmatic agenda. This is what Holocaust religion is all about and it is indeed as old as the Jews. ...

Zionism was indeed a great promise, it was there to convert the Jews into Israelites. It was going to make the Jews into people like other peoples. Zionism was there to identify and fight the Galut (Diaspora), the exilic characteristic of the Jewish people and their culture. But Zionism was doomed to failure. The reason is obvious: within a culture that is metaphysically grounded upon exilic ideology the last thing you can expect is a successful homecoming. In order to live for its promise Zionism had to liberate itself of the Jewish exilic ideology, Zionism had to liberate itself of the Holocaust religion. But this is exactly what it fails to do. Being exilic to the bone, Zionism had to turn to antagonising the indigenous Palestinians in order to maintain its fetish of Jewish identity.Link

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.