Anti-Imperialism & Anti-Humanist Rhetoric of Gilad Atzmon

[compared2what?]

You know what we need?

An Un-Occupy Israel Movement.

I mean, speaking only for myself, if I had the chance to expatriate myself from the United States as part of an organized political protest movement, I'd be on it like a bum on a baloney sandwich. And I'm sure that there are a modest but sizable number of people who'd do the same. But the thing is: At most, that would really just be an act of self-expression here. And no more. Because such a movement wouldn't even be capable of having much of a symbolic impact here, just as a function of the size of the country.

But in Israel, which is tiny and very much defined by elective residence, you might be able to get somewhere with that approach. Because if I'd been born there and hadn't left already, I'd sure as hell want to leave and make it count as much as I could by doing so now. And I'm sure that there are a lot of people who'd feel that way if the idea had ever occurred to them. It's just highly unlikely to have ever occurred to them. Abandoning Israel, even as a concept, was totally taboo until very recently. But enough of the bloom is off that rose now. So now is the time.

Just thinking aloud.

As a practical matter, provocative though the idea is, the voluntary expatriation of the more liberal elements within the society would only leave a larger proportion of reactionary types to run the show on the way down. Further, it might also cause a backlash Aliyah uptick among conservatives in the diaspora who are [for the moment] content to fund major Jewish organizations and the Israel Lobby.

That would virtually ensure a terrible ending to this saga [not that I have a better idea, and not that I don't agree with you in principle].

I guess I was thinking less about something the real objective of which would be to empty Israel of decent people and more about something the real accomplishment of which would be for Israeli activists to re-introduce the concept of ending the occupation in Israel in a way that associated it with OWS -- ie, that underlined that it was a movement for justice by the people of the world and against the power elites who fuck with them all.

Because it kind of insulates against the primary divide-and-conquer tactic that's been fucking shit up so very successfully thus far.

It's not the whole answer, and never could be. But one thing never is. It takes a lot of work to agitate, educate, and organize, and you have to have people doing all three along many, many avenues in order to build a consensus movement.

Anti-nuclear activism is another such avenue with some potential, for example. That would have many of the same advantages, as a matter of fact.

[Iamwhomiam]

Just lost this post, so I'll do my best to reconstruct it.

There was no cruelty intended, C2w?, just being succinct.

I do hope eyeno knows that I love him, because I do. After posting my reply to him it did occur to me, because of our earlier differences of opinion in another thread about global warming, that some might take my remark as me telling him to 'get lost,' but that was not my intent, nor would I ever be so rude to our gracious host.

Eyeno, as you know and Joe has pointed out, we all must make difficult choices in life.

Joe Hillshoist wrote:

Yeah but if you back out then well you know ... the terrorists have won.

They (whoever "they" are) want you to think they are more powerful than they are. And even if they are that powerful - fuck 'em. Whats the worse they can do? Cut your fingers off with bolt cutters and spray acid in the wounds? BFD.

If you limit your own freedom you are doing the job of a police state for them. I know that isn't exactly a comfort but it is after all, just a ride. So don't be afraid.

Ever.

Joe later added:

"You have to do whats good for you." "Ultimately you have to make your own decision." "So don't be afraid."

Joe's advice, eyeno, in my opinion is profoundly of more value than that I offered. Especially the last quote above.

Although I've friends deeply involved in Palestinian Solidarity, some being the founders of Project Salam and know some of the family members of victims of preemptive prosecutions, it is one issue that I have avoided getting too involved in. When I was asked a few years ago to join in a meeting with the FBI at their local office, I replied by asking if they had completely lost their mind and reminded them that my file was already sufficiently thick. No! Not me, uh uh.

So, this thread is one I would normally have avoided, but for some reason, perhaps only to help clear-up my confusion about Anti-Z Zs and Atzman, I jumped in.

Having learned more from C2w?'s and Alice's intercourse, I'm still a bit confused, though. Certainly about the character of Atzman. At first I imagined him to be a rabble-rouser, which he under all presented circumstances of course is, but what motivates him to choose such vile and emotionally charged language is simply beyond my understanding.

So what's his purpose for doing so? Is he an agent of the Mo? Perhaps. But Alice's last few comments swayed me a bit to see him more as she does. She does know the man, after all. But many spouses never have a clue their mate is an agent. Perhaps she's right.

C2w?'s argument is extremely persuasive and the last by AD, the US Palestinian Community Network statement, is too.

I'll follow along...

[compared2what?]

Just lost this post, so I'll do my best to reconstruct it.

There was no cruelty intended, C2w?, just being succinct.

OMG. Please believe me when I say:

I know!

As I said, I didn't understand what called for that response, but assumed that -- due to your sensitivity and good will -- whatever it was, it wasn't (or soon wouldn't be) a problem. And I really meant that. Basically, I had no idea what -- if anything -- was going on. And I wasn't sure what eyeno was saying or why. But it seemed possible that he was feeling low and lonely. So I thought it couldn't hurt to remark the truth of your loving nature, no matter what. Because no matter what, it would still be true, as well as comforting.

That's all.

[compared2what?]

BTW, in case it's not clear, I have enormous respect and admiration for Alice, and look up to her, personally, politically, and in every other way. Under all circumstances.

Just thought I'd mention it. Because, while I try not to yell at other people instead of talking to them, I don't always observe that the boundary line distinguishing one from the other is where it is. "Yelling at" is how I talk to myself. So it just sounds routine to me. And that does kind of skew the data on which I'm basing my best guesses regarding such things.

For which I apologize, if apologies are due.

Alice rules, afaic.

[Iamwhomiam]

Just affirming, C2w? Love you too!

(I am so glad you're not my mother... I wouldn't have had a chance telling the stories I did!)

It's always difficult not to 'lose it' and begin 'yelling' whenever you've just about exhausted all the avenues of tact available to you when another either misses or cannot grasp your point. I'm sure everyone understands your great respect for Alice and I believe hers for you. (hope I'm not projecting inaccurately, Alice)

If you haven't, you may want to take a gander at the UNAC conference line-up and workshops. It'll be an interesting weekend.

[compared2what?]

Hmmm...

http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2012/03/pale ... savow.html

WEDNESDAY, 14 MARCH 2012

Palestinian writers, activists disavow racism, anti-Semitism of Gilad Atzmon

Okay. Now I really curse and condemn Atzmon.

Palestinians should not have to fucking acknowledge the Holocaust in order to prove that they don't deny it. Because:

There being absolutely no reason for it to be any active concern or business of theirs, they're absolutely and totally entitled to treat it like the non-issue that it is, from their perspective and for their purposes.

Or anyway, they were, until just now. I mean, even the most fanatical neo-con sob sister on earth has never argued that people who express no opinion regarding the Holocaust should be forced to declare their belief in its historical validity. FFS.

So the issue would simply never have arisen if Gilad Atzmon hadn't been going around making Palestinian solidarity as synonymous with Holocaust revisionism as he possibly could.

Ugh. Honestly. Fuck him.

[AlicetheKurious]

Alice --

You have a blind spot. That's not what Atzmon does. And it's not what the Jewish Palestinian solidarity activists he's describing do.
The reason that they appeal for support by arguing that Palestinian solidarity is anti-anti-semitic is that they're countering the argument that only anti-semites criticize Israel, which is the trump card of the opposition and -- as decades and decades of experience have shown -- virtually unbeatable as long as the terms of the argument make playing it possible.

That's just realpolitik. I mean, come on. Do you want to fight? Or do you want to win?

Who, other than zionists, argues that only anti-semites criticize Israel? These are people who justify unbelievable atrocities with two big lies: that they are persecuted victims, and that they are morally superior to those whom they target. They cling to these lies for the simple reason that the truth leaves them no moral justification at all. So the 'anti-semitism' accusation is the only, pseudo-moral, weapon they have. It's a counterfeit trump card. They'll never, ever give it up, and whoever is suckered into accepting it as genuine and trying to reassure them, will only find that they keep shifting the goal-posts. That's why it's really "unbeatable".

No. If you really want to "win", you have to stop playing by zionist rules, in which everybody else is always wrong and they are always right, in which they are the center of the universe and you, and everybody else who is not them, are the Other. In which they are the final arbiters of what is true and what is just, and what is acceptable.

If you have right on your side, then act like it.

(Also: WHAT immeasurable damage? Examples?)

The Palestine solidarity movement has lost so much, by allowing itself to be misled and muzzled by those who, through either cowardice or malice, consistently steered it away from any effective action. Just to name one example, for decades, they made any talk of the Israeli lobby taboo, as though it made any sense at all to limit one's focus on what Israel does, but to ignore the international network of support that makes it possible.

Chomsky and many others like him always tried to limit the scope of narrative to the Palestinians and the Israelis 'over there', when, as any good solidarity activist knows, the more immediate the issue feels to diverse people's own lives, the more effective and powerful the solidarity movement can be. As a result, the Israel lobby in the US, for example, was spared public scrutiny and accountability as it steadily grew more powerful and arrogant, until it made the American people accountable to it, rather than the other way around.

As Jeffrey Blankfort observed:

Although I had previously criticized Chomsky for downplaying the influence of the pro-Israel lobby on Washington’s Middle East policies,[4] I had hesitated to write a critique of his overall approach for the reasons noted. Nevertheless, I was convinced that while, ironically, having provided perhaps the most extensive documentation of Israeli crimes, he had, at the same time immobilized, if not sabotaged, the development of any serious effort to halt those crimes and to build an effective movement in behalf of the Palestinian cause.

An exaggeration? Hardly. A number of statements made by Chomsky have demonstrated his determination to keep Israel and Israelis from being punished or inconvenienced for the very monumental transgressions of decent human behavior that he himself has passionately documented over the years. ...

Quite naturally, the discussion turned to apartheid and whether Chomsky considered the term applied to Palestinians under Israeli rule. He responded:

I don’t use it myself, to tell you the truth. Just like I don't [often] use the term "empire," because these are just inflammatory terms... I think it's sufficient to just describe the situation, without comparing it to other situations.

Anyone familiar with Chomsky’s work will recognize that he is no stranger to inflammatory terms and that comparing one historical situation with another has long been part of his modus operandi. His response in this instance was troubling. Many Israeli academics and journalists, such as Ilan Pappe, Tanya Reinhart and Amira Hass, have described the situation of the Palestinians as one of apartheid. Bishop Tutu has done the same and last year Ha’aretz reported that South African law professor John Dugard, the special rapporteur for the United Nations on the situation of human rights in Occupied Palestine and a former member of his country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, had written in a report to the UN General Assembly that there is "an apartheid regime" in the territories "worse than the one that existed in South Africa."[6]

Chomsky explained his disagreement:

Apartheid was one particular system and a particularly ugly situation... It's just to wave a red flag, when it's perfectly well to simply describe the situation...

His reluctance to label Israel’s control of the Palestinians as "apartheid" out of concern that it be seen as a "red flag," like describing it as "inflammatory," was a red flag itself and raised questions that should have been asked by the interviewer, such as who would be inflamed by the reference to ‘apartheid’ as a "red flag" in Israel’s case and what objections would Chomsky have to that?

A more disturbing exchange occurred later in the interview when Chomsky was asked if sanctions should be applied against Israel as they were against South Africa. He responded:

In fact, I've been strongly against it in the case of Israel. For a number of reasons. For one thing, even in the case of South Africa, I think sanctions are a very questionable tactic. In the case of South Africa, I think they were [ultimately] legitimate because it was clear that the large majority of the population of South Africa was in favor of it.

Sanctions hurt the population. You don't impose them unless the population is asking for them. That's the moral issue. So, the first point in the case of Israel is that: Is the population asking for it? Well, obviously not.

Obviously not. But is it acceptable to make such a decision on the basis of what the majority of Israelis want? Israel, after all, is not a dictatorship in which the people are held in check by fear and, therefore, cannot be held responsible for their government’s actions. Israel has a largely unregulated, lively press and a "people’s army" in which all Israeli Jews, other than the ultra-orthodox, are expected to serve and that is viewed by the Israeli public with almost religious reverence. Over the years, in their own democratic fashion, the overwhelming majority of Israelis have consistently supported and participated in actions of their government against the Palestinians and Lebanese that are not only racist, but in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

So, according to that great champion of the Palestinians, sanctions should only be applied to Israel if the majority of Israelis ask for them; as for the Palestinians, uh, they don't count. And using the term "apartheid" to Israeli apartheid is just "inflammatory", even though the crime of apartheid was recognized in 2002 by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Since South African apartheid had ended decades before, clearly the ICC disagreed with Chomsky about the inapplicability of the term to any other system based on racist oppression.

And Chomsky is far from unique; the Palestine solidarity movement is riddled with similar self-appointed leaders who, when push comes to shove, always act to to muzzle and subvert the movement so that it becomes as ineffective as possible.

After the 2009 Israeli assault on Gaza I organized a concert for ‘Medical Aid for Palestinians’ featuring iconic violinist Nigel Kennedy. Campaigners launched an onslaught from all sides - the right, the left, the Zionists and the anti-Zionists - individually and collectively, lobbied the owner of the venue, the director of MAP and myself, demanding that we cancel the event. Some even accused us of mobilizing art to fund rocket attacks on Jews. I was shocked, upset and embarrassed that I had inadvertently dragged my friend, who owns the club, into such a shameful debacle.

That's the best you can do? Some unnamed "anti-zionist zionists" object to Gilad Atzmon -- which, as we know, they do because he's a liability to the cause -- and that proves that the only thing they care about is Jews?

You're missing the point. "The cause" that they claim to be representing is solidarity with the Palestinians, who had just undergone 33 days of bombardment with phosphorous and DIME weapons and missiles, which left more than a thousand dead and thousands wounded, under a vicious siege. They desperately needed medical help. Medical Aid for Palestinians is one of the few international organizations capable of getting that help to them. Those f*cking, sick bastards, while declaring themselves to be the true, morally superior, genuine Palestine solidarity activists, did everything possible to have the fund-raiser for Medical Aid for Palestinians cancelled, thus consigning real Palestinian men, women and children to die when they could have been saved.

In other words, since you seem to have some trouble getting it, these self-appointed moral arbiters decided it was ok for innocent Palestinians to die in agony, deprived of medical aid, rather than "offend" the Jews. If anything, by their disgustingly callous and selfish, yet hypocritically self-pitying and self-righteous actions, they proved Atzmon's point. (And by the way, those who follow such things do know who they are: Tony Greenstein, Mark Elf, David Aaronovitch, to name a few of those among the "anti-zionist zionists" whose pathological obsession with Atzmon has made them the object of ridicule and disgust among British Palestinian solidarity groups.) Incidentally, their so-called "solidarity work" consists of writing, mostly in their blogs, and attacking Gilad Atzmon; Atzmon, on the other hand, is well-known for organizing highly successful fund-raising events for Palestinian charities, and for introducing Western audiences to the beauty and depth of Palestinian indigenous culture.

In either event, have you ever noticed that the only thing that's actually causing all this strife and divisiveness is that Gilad Atzmon insists on continuing to spout inflammatory and objectionable nonsense that serves no constructive purpose? At all?

And the only reason that I'm not saying that its destructive and/or counter-productive effects are obvious is that the most lethal one actually isn't. (To -- shudder -- quote Robert McNamara on war, it's essential to know your enemy. Atzmon -- as I and others have said repeatedly -- is representing Israelis and Jews in terms that he must know are false in order (among other things) to prevent that.)

You may think they're false, but he certainly does not, because they emerged out of his own experience, and his own personal insights. If you disagree with something he says, or you want to correct a factual or a logical error, then that's one thing. But what these people are doing is trying to shut him up by threatening and intimidating anybody who wishes to hear him and make up their own minds. They want to forcibly impose their own narrative and their own cognitive filters on others. That's fascist. The means are the message: fascists are as fascists do.

I'm no fan of Chomsky's, never have been. But the last time I looked, I thought he was advocating for a one-state solution.

Well, look again: he's not.

If your main objective is to make the world-at-large and the Israeli people recognize the injustice of their occupation of Israel -- a country largely occupied by Holocaust survivors, WWII refugees and their descendants, the foundation of which was and is solely justified in the eyes of the world by their status as such -- no matter what else you do, do not continually remind them of the Holocaust by constantly recurring to it in any terms.

Personally, my main objective has little to do with the Israelis; their only significance to me is that they are the cause of their victims' agony. The racist oppressors can cry themselves a self-pitying river to their hearts' content, but it doesn't absolve them from responsibility for the horrors they deliberately, and sadistically keep inflicting on others, day after day.

Because that's just going to make them feel like they have to fight for their survival and/or serve to legitimize whatever fights they engage in generally in the eyes of the world.

Obviously.

Hello? That is what they're doing: when they're burning children alive with phosphorous weapons, when they are flooding Palestinian villages with their sewage, when they're bulldozing people's houses and starving people, and shooting little children in the head and siccing attack dogs on elderly people, they legitimize this by claiming to be fighting for their survival and calling everybody else nazis, including their victims. For God's sake, every crime they've ever committed, over seven bloody decades of ethnic cleansing, they've legitimized by claiming to be the real victims. And there's no end in sight, no ceiling. On the contrary, the more they get away with, the crazier they get. Nobody will ever convince them nicely to stop, and to accept that the Palestinians are human beings with rights, just like them.

It didn't work with the Nazis, it didn't work with the slave-owners, it didn't work with the American segregationists, and it didn't work with the white South Africans. In fact, as far as I know, it's never worked anywhere. Why do you think it will work with the zionists? That's crazy-talk, no less crazy than theirs. No, history teaches us that it can only be done by force.

I truly hate violence itself, but more importantly, I believe that using violence carries a terrible price to the perpetrator. Except in certain very specific conditions, any victory obtained by violent means is a Pyrrhic one. So, if we really are interested in creating solidarity with the Palestinian people, instead of wasting time and energy that the Palestinians can ill-afford in a futile effort to placate Israelis, I propose that we focus only on standing up for their victims. That means putting them, not their oppressors, first: trying to view the world, and their tormentors, through their eyes for once. Listening to them, and getting others to listen to them. Refusing to legitimize in any way, or excuse, the crimes committed against them, or to participate in them, even passively. It means not closing our eyes to the infrastructure that exists to support their oppressors and give them immunity, or shrouds their actions behind a sympathetic veil.

It also means uncovering ourselves, and liberating ourselves, as well: from our own hypocrisy and double standards, our unspoken racist assumptions, our own inner zionist. And it means consciously making choices that manifest in the real world the values we claim to believe in.

This, in a nutshell, is what Gilad Atzmon has done.

I mean, even the most fanatical neo-con sob sister on earth has never argued that people who express no opinion regarding the Holocaust should be forced to declare their belief in its historical validity. FFS.

So the issue would simply never have arisen if Gilad Atzmon hadn't been going around making Palestinian solidarity as synonymous with Holocaust revisionism as he possibly could.

Why are you blaming him, and not the ones who have devoted more massive resources than Gilad Atzmon will ever have, over more years than Gilad Atzmon has ever lived, to try to make Palestinian solidarity synonymous with 'anti-semitism' and even nazism? And who will continue to do so, long after Gilad Atzmon is dead and buried, or has been silenced forever, until they are exposed and stopped?

Ugh. Honestly. Fuck him.

No. Fuck them.

P.S. I love you too, I really do.

[compared2what?]

Incidentally, I've been meaning to mention that there's no more lovely example of Atzmon's (ostensibly) guileless yet unfailingly consistent use of words and phrases associated with extreme anti-Judaic/anti-semitic sentiment than The Wandering Who?, the title he gave to his book.

It's a play on the phrase/archetype/character of the Wandering Jew. As Wiki notes:

The Wandering Jew is a figure from medieval Christian folklore whose legend began to spread in Europe in the 13th century. The original legend concerns a Jew who taunted Jesus on the way to the Crucifixion and was then cursed to walk the earth until the Second Coming. The exact nature of the wanderer's indiscretion varies in different versions of the tale, as do aspects of his character; sometimes he is said to be a shoemaker or other tradesman, while sometimes he is the doorman at Pontius Pilate's estate.

So. The figure of the Wandering Jew (sometimes known as "the Eternal Jew") has always been a part of Christian anti-Judaica. But he hasn't always been depicted as evil, or unsympathetic. (As I'm sure Atzmon would hasten to point out, were he here.) So if he hadn't been picked up as a subject of caricature by (of course) the 19th-century antisemites from whose work (of course) the Nazis took so many liberal helpings, he wouldn't necessarily evoke any anti-semitic associations today.

So. Coming from a writer who wasn't catering to the Neo-Nazi fan base among whom his earlier work had found its natural following, that reference might be just fine. Coming from Atzmon, on the other hand, it suggests something more like this...



...well-known image from the 1937/38 Degenerate Art exhibition in Berlin.

Or -- more probably, imo -- something like this.

^^It's a video clip, but I can't embed it. You guys should watch it, though. It talks about the international Jewish financiers who start world wars and everything, just like we do!
_______________

Anyway. That film's definitely what Atzmon's title will suggest to a significant subset of Atzmon's readers. As he surely knows. And yet, at the same time, it's very unlikely to offend any wandering Jews who may happen to catch a glimpse of it in book display while passing through Barnes and Noble or wherever. Due to the more innocent usages of the phrase. I mean.

[compared2what?]

Alice --

You have a blind spot. That's not what Atzmon does. And it's not what the Jewish Palestinian solidarity activists he's describing do.
The reason that they appeal for support by arguing that Palestinian solidarity is anti-anti-semitic is that they're countering the argument that only anti-semites criticize Israel, which is the trump card of the opposition and -- as decades and decades of experience have shown -- virtually unbeatable as long as the terms of the argument make playing it possible.

That's just realpolitik. I mean, come on. Do you want to fight? Or do you want to win?

Who, other than zionists, argues that only anti-semites criticize Israel?

The point is that they make that argument -- to which they have no right -- quite, quite successfully, due to the ease with which they can point to real and sometimes really threatening anti-semitic words and deeds.

What part of that is not getting through to you?

I mean, I know it's somehow considered a denial of other genocides to mention it by some here, but there was a Holocaust. It was traumatic. People whose lives and families were touched by it do respond strongly to it. A lot of those people moved to Israel, where some of them (no doubt) went on to commit war crimes (and assorted other crimes against humanity) against the Palestinians.

That is the terrain.

What advantage do you gain by....

Look. Try thinking about it like this:

The anti-semitic literature of the early 20th-century had a very direct influence on both Hitler and Goebbels, and thus on the policy and propaganda of the Third Reich. And where did that lead?



So. Exactly where do you think that using more or less the same rhetoric while in pursuit of more or less the same aim might lead today? Have their been any changes since the 1930s that favor a significantly different outcome?

Because as far as I can tell, if there were a real fight, all the powers that intervened then would still intervene now. They'd still view anyone who used Nazi terminology in relation to any Jews (including Israeli Jews) in the course of that fight as a Nazi and an anti-semitic war criminal. And it would still be very much in their interests to carve up the spoils of war in ways that rewarded themselves, not the native inhabitants of the land, if they won.

So if you're planning on attaining a victory through armed violence that will presumably achieve critical mass after having been preached to popularity on the wings of terms such as those Gilad Atzmon uses, how exactly do you propose to overcome those obstacles?

These are people who justify unbelievable atrocities with two big lies: that they are persecuted victims, and that they are morally superior to those whom they target.

That's not unique to them. Those were the same two basis components of our casus belli in both Afghanistan and Iraq. For example.

But it's enraging anyway. Obviously.

They cling to these lies for the simple reason that the truth leaves them no moral justification at all.

Also, they work. (The lies.)

So the 'anti-semitism' accusation is the only, pseudo-moral, weapon they have. It's a counterfeit trump card. They'll never, ever give it up, and whoever is suckered into accepting it as genuine and trying to reassure them, will only find that they keep shifting the goal-posts. That's why it's really "unbeatable".

Alice, believe it or not, I GET THAT.

So WHY KEEP DEALING THEM CARDS THAT AREN'T COUNTERFEIT?

That's what Atzmon does. It's all he does. For example:

Faulting Jews for not thinking about what they did to cause their European neighbors to resent them in the 1920s-40s is anti-semitic.

So. A person might easily choose to describe it that way simply for the pleasure of making a true and justified observation, if that were his or her cup of tea. Or (just as easily) he/she might seize upon it as just the kind of thing it would be useful to wave around while pointing at him/herself when others tried to draw attention to the Palestinian genocide.

^^That's officially my last attempt to make some version of that point. BTW.

No. If you really want to "win", you have to stop playing by zionist rules, in which everybody else is always wrong and they are always right, in which they are the center of the universe and you, and everybody else who is not them, are the Other. In which they are the final arbiters of what is true and what is just, and what is acceptable.

If you have right on your side, then act like it.

Totally. But if you have Holocaust-denial enthusiasts on your side, it would (in fact) just be an act. Not a very convincing one, either, to most people. Including some of your most natural allies.

And that has nothing whatsoever to do with zionist rules. Holocaust denial actually is not right, but rather wrong.

DISCLAIMER: I don't think that's a moral issue or that it should be a legal issue, ever. Personally. But it is, nevertheless, factually wrong and (therefore) pointlessly offensive, for political purposes.

(Also: WHAT immeasurable damage? Examples?)

The Palestine solidarity movement has lost so much, by allowing itself to be misled and muzzled by those who, through either cowardice or malice, consistently steered it away from any effective action. Just to name one example, for decades, they made any talk of the Israeli lobby taboo, as though it made any sense at all to limit one's focus on what Israel does, but to ignore the international network of support that makes it possible.

Chomsky and many others like him always tried to limit the scope of narrative to the Palestinians and the Israelis 'over there', when, as any good solidarity activist knows, the more immediate the issue feels to diverse people's own lives, the more effective and powerful the solidarity movement can be. As a result, the Israel lobby in the US, for example, was spared public scrutiny and accountability as it steadily grew more powerful and arrogant, until it made the American people accountable to it, rather than the other way around.

As Jeffrey Blankfort observed:

Although I had previously criticized Chomsky for downplaying the influence of the pro-Israel lobby on Washington’s Middle East policies,[4] I had hesitated to write a critique of his overall approach for the reasons noted. Nevertheless, I was convinced that while, ironically, having provided perhaps the most extensive documentation of Israeli crimes, he had, at the same time immobilized, if not sabotaged, the development of any serious effort to halt those crimes and to build an effective movement in behalf of the Palestinian cause.

An exaggeration? Hardly. A number of statements made by Chomsky have demonstrated his determination to keep Israel and Israelis from being punished or inconvenienced for the very monumental transgressions of decent human behavior that he himself has passionately documented over the years. ...

Quite naturally, the discussion turned to apartheid and whether Chomsky considered the term applied to Palestinians under Israeli rule. He responded:

I don’t use it myself, to tell you the truth. Just like I don't [often] use the term "empire," because these are just inflammatory terms... I think it's sufficient to just describe the situation, without comparing it to other situations.

Anyone familiar with Chomsky’s work will recognize that he is no stranger to inflammatory terms and that comparing one historical situation with another has long been part of his modus operandi. His response in this instance was troubling. Many Israeli academics and journalists, such as Ilan Pappe, Tanya Reinhart and Amira Hass, have described the situation of the Palestinians as one of apartheid. Bishop Tutu has done the same and last year Ha’aretz reported that South African law professor John Dugard, the special rapporteur for the United Nations on the situation of human rights in Occupied Palestine and a former member of his country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, had written in a report to the UN General Assembly that there is "an apartheid regime" in the territories "worse than the one that existed in South Africa."[6]

Chomsky explained his disagreement:

Apartheid was one particular system and a particularly ugly situation... It's just to wave a red flag, when it's perfectly well to simply describe the situation...

His reluctance to label Israel’s control of the Palestinians as "apartheid" out of concern that it be seen as a "red flag," like describing it as "inflammatory," was a red flag itself and raised questions that should have been asked by the interviewer, such as who would be inflamed by the reference to ‘apartheid’ as a "red flag" in Israel’s case and what objections would Chomsky have to that?

A more disturbing exchange occurred later in the interview when Chomsky was asked if sanctions should be applied against Israel as they were against South Africa. He responded:

In fact, I've been strongly against it in the case of Israel. For a number of reasons. For one thing, even in the case of South Africa, I think sanctions are a very questionable tactic. In the case of South Africa, I think they were [ultimately] legitimate because it was clear that the large majority of the population of South Africa was in favor of it.

Sanctions hurt the population. You don't impose them unless the population is asking for them. That's the moral issue. So, the first point in the case of Israel is that: Is the population asking for it? Well, obviously not.

Obviously not. But is it acceptable to make such a decision on the basis of what the majority of Israelis want? Israel, after all, is not a dictatorship in which the people are held in check by fear and, therefore, cannot be held responsible for their government’s actions. Israel has a largely unregulated, lively press and a "people’s army" in which all Israeli Jews, other than the ultra-orthodox, are expected to serve and that is viewed by the Israeli public with almost religious reverence. Over the years, in their own democratic fashion, the overwhelming majority of Israelis have consistently supported and participated in actions of their government against the Palestinians and Lebanese that are not only racist, but in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

So, according to that great champion of the Palestinians, sanctions should only be applied to Israel if the majority of Israelis ask for them; as for the Palestinians, uh, they don't count. And using the term "apartheid" to Israeli apartheid is just "inflammatory", even though the crime of apartheid was recognized in 2002 by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Since South African apartheid had ended decades before, clearly the ICC disagreed with Chomsky about the inapplicability of the term to any other system based on racist oppression.

And Chomsky is far from unique; the Palestine solidarity movement is riddled with similar self-appointed leaders who, when push comes to shove, always act to to muzzle and subvert the movement so that it becomes as ineffective as possible.

Ah! I see. Well, except wrt that being his aim -- if that's what you're saying -- I agree with you about all the important stuff.

After the 2009 Israeli assault on Gaza I organized a concert for ‘Medical Aid for Palestinians’ featuring iconic violinist Nigel Kennedy. Campaigners launched an onslaught from all sides - the right, the left, the Zionists and the anti-Zionists - individually and collectively, lobbied the owner of the venue, the director of MAP and myself, demanding that we cancel the event. Some even accused us of mobilizing art to fund rocket attacks on Jews. I was shocked, upset and embarrassed that I had inadvertently dragged my friend, who owns the club, into such a shameful debacle.

That's the best you can do? Some unnamed "anti-zionist zionists" object to Gilad Atzmon -- which, as we know, they do because he's a liability to the cause -- and that proves that the only thing they care about is Jews?

You're missing the point. "The cause" that they claim to be representing is solidarity with the Palestinians, who had just undergone 33 days of bombardment with phosphorous and DIME weapons and missiles, which left more than a thousand dead and thousands wounded, under a vicious siege. They desperately needed medical help. Medical Aid for Palestinians is one of the few international organizations capable of getting that help to them. Those f*cking, sick bastards, while declaring themselves to be the true, morally superior, genuine Palestine solidarity activists, did everything possible to have the fund-raiser for Medical Aid for Palestinians cancelled, thus consigning real Palestinian men, women and children to die when they could have been saved.

In other words, since you seem to have some trouble getting it, these self-appointed moral arbiters decided it was ok for innocent Palestinians to die in agony, deprived of medical aid, rather than "offend" the Jews. If anything, by their disgustingly callous and selfish, yet hypocritically self-pitying and self-righteous actions, they proved Atzmon's point. (And by the way, those who follow such things do know who they are: Tony Greenstein, Mark Elf, David Aaronovitch, to name a few of those among the "anti-zionist zionists" whose pathological obsession with Atzmon has made them the object of ridicule and disgust among British Palestinian solidarity groups.) Incidentally, their so-called "solidarity work" consists of writing, mostly in their blogs, and attacking Gilad Atzmon; Atzmon, on the other hand, is well-known for organizing highly successful fund-raising events for Palestinian charities, and for introducing Western audiences to the beauty and depth of Palestinian indigenous culture.

Well. If he gives $$$, at least he compensates for the damage he's doing somewhat. So good for him.

In either event, have you ever noticed that the only thing that's actually causing all this strife and divisiveness is that Gilad Atzmon insists on continuing to spout inflammatory and objectionable nonsense that serves no constructive purpose? At all?

And the only reason that I'm not saying that its destructive and/or counter-productive effects are obvious is that the most lethal one actually isn't. (To -- shudder -- quote Robert McNamara on war, it's essential to know your enemy. Atzmon -- as I and others have said repeatedly -- is representing Israelis and Jews in terms that he must know are false in order (among other things) to prevent that.)

You may think they're false, but he certainly does not, because they emerged out of his own experience, and his own personal insights.

Dude. I'm telling you. He knows they're false. They're almost hilariously false sometimes. Actually. If he were even an eensy little bit less careful about that, he'd have exposed the con a long time ago.

If you disagree with something he says, or you want to correct a factual or a logical error, then that's one thing. But what these people are doing is trying to shut him up by threatening and intimidating anybody who wishes to hear him and make up their own minds. They want to forcibly impose their own narrative and their own cognitive filters on others. That's fascist. The means are the message: fascists are as fascists do.

Maybe. But he does act like Mossad. He brings very little to the table. And you can't be too careful.

I'm no fan of Chomsky's, never have been. But the last time I looked, I thought he was advocating for a one-state solution.

Well, look again: he's not.

I regret the error.

If your main objective is to make the world-at-large and the Israeli people recognize the injustice of their occupation of Israel -- a country largely occupied by Holocaust survivors, WWII refugees and their descendants, the foundation of which was and is solely justified in the eyes of the world by their status as such -- no matter what else you do, do not continually remind them of the Holocaust by constantly recurring to it in any terms.

Personally, my main objective has little to do with the Israelis; their only significance to me is that they are the cause of their victims' agony. The racist oppressors can cry themselves a self-pitying river to their hearts' content, but it doesn't absolve them from responsibility for the horrors they deliberately, and sadistically keep inflicting on others, day after day.

My remarks were premised on the assumption that since it's not easy to beat a nuclear power in war, you have to get them to concede whatever it is you're after by some combination of other means.

And I still fail to see what concessions you gain by recurring to the Holocaust. It doesn't stop them from committing atrocities themselves. It gives them moral cover for their commission. And it's possible that it actually prompts their commission. Because it's not just self-pity, you know. There's fear and anger, too.

What am I saying? It's not at all self-pity, as far as I've ever observed. It's either anger or depression. Or both.

Because that's just going to make them feel like they have to fight for their survival and/or serve to legitimize whatever fights they engage in generally in the eyes of the world.

Obviously.

Hello? That is what they're doing: when they're burning children alive with phosphorous weapons, when they are flooding Palestinian villages with their sewage, when they're bulldozing people's houses and starving people, and shooting little children in the head and siccing attack dogs on elderly people, they legitimize this by claiming to be fighting for their survival and calling everybody else nazis, including their victims. For God's sake, every crime they've ever committed, over seven bloody decades of ethnic cleansing, they've legitimized by claiming to be the real victims.

That's my point.

And there's no end in sight, no ceiling. On the contrary, the more they get away with, the crazier they get. Nobody will ever convince them nicely to stop, and to accept that the Palestinians are human beings with rights, just like them.

It didn't work with the Nazis, it didn't work with the slave-owners, it didn't work with the American segregationists, and it didn't work with the white South Africans. In fact, as far as I know, it's never worked anywhere. Why do you think it will work with the zionists? That's crazy-talk, no less crazy than theirs. No, history teaches us that it can only be done by force.

I truly hate violence itself, but more importantly, I believe that using violence carries a terrible price to the perpetrator. Except in certain very specific conditions, any victory obtained by violent means is a Pyrrhic one. So, if we really are interested in creating solidarity with the Palestinian people, instead of wasting time and energy that the Palestinians can ill-afford in a futile effort to placate Israelis, I propose that we focus only on standing up for their victims. That means putting them, not their oppressors, first: trying to view the world, and their tormentors, through their eyes for once. Listening to them, and getting others to listen to them. Refusing to legitimize in any way, or excuse, the crimes committed against them, or to participate in them, even passively. It means not closing our eyes to the infrastructure that exists to support their oppressors and give them immunity, or shrouds their actions behind a sympathetic veil.

They're mostly not criminals, Alice.

It also means uncovering ourselves, and liberating ourselves, as well: from our own hypocrisy and double standards, our unspoken racist assumptions, our own inner zionist. And it means consciously making choices that manifest in the real world the values we claim to believe in.

This, in a nutshell, is what Gilad Atzmon has done.

No. It's not. He's a liar.

I mean, even the most fanatical neo-con sob sister on earth has never argued that people who express no opinion regarding the Holocaust should be forced to declare their belief in its historical validity. FFS.

So the issue would simply never have arisen if Gilad Atzmon hadn't been going around making Palestinian solidarity as synonymous with Holocaust revisionism as he possibly could.

Why are you blaming him, and not the ones who have devoted more massive resources than Gilad Atzmon will ever have, over more years than Gilad Atzmon has ever lived, to try to make Palestinian solidarity synonymous with 'anti-semitism' and even nazism? And who will continue to do so, long after Gilad Atzmon is dead and buried, or has been silenced forever, until they are exposed and stopped?

Ugh. Honestly. Fuck him.

No. Fuck them.

Them too. It's really one and the same thing, though. If you ask me.

P.S. I love you too, I really do.

But do you respect me? That's what I want to know.

[AlicetheKurious]

The point is that they make that argument -- to which they have no right -- quite, quite successfully, due to the ease with which they can point to real and sometimes really threatening anti-semitic words and deeds.

What part of that is not getting through to you?

I mean, I know it's somehow considered a denial of other genocides to mention it by some here, but there was a Holocaust. It was traumatic. People whose lives and families were touched by it do respond strongly to it. A lot of those people moved to Israel, where some of them (no doubt) went on to commit war crimes (and assorted other crimes against humanity) against the Palestinians.

Here's the part that's not getting to me:

1) They're making it "quite, quite successfully" not because it's valid, but because they have the power to impose it, and to punish and silence those who aren't "convinced". That's some neat trick: posing as the victim of persecution, while at the same time arrogantly committing massacres and other war crimes, imposing your self-serving narrative by force, shutting up anyone who doesn't agree with you, and bullying people and entire nations around with impunity.

2) Furthermore, the supporters of a state founded on racist principles, that practices apartheid, whose leaders publicly warn about a "demographic threat" in referring to the survivors of its ethnic cleansing, where a key cabinet minister proposes drowning people to get rid of them, who advocate racist expulsion, strip people of their citizenship and residency permits on solely racist grounds, who deliberately starve a million and a half trapped civilians, whose military officers casually claim that "there are no civilians" when they indiscriminately bombard population centers, HAVE NO RIGHT to identify themselves as victims of Nazism. Being a victim is not something you inherit through bloodlines. It is not a racial/ethnic/religious identity. If anything, although they claim to identify with the victims, their actions prove otherwise. So they can't have it both ways: they can't terrorize and kill and rob the targets of their racist dehumanization and then claim that nobody has the right to judge them. Well, they can and they do, but the sane and appropriate response is not to humor them in their cynical "victimization" pose, but to tell them to go fuck themselves.

3) And another thing that's not getting to me: even if we accept "trauma" as a mitigating factor for those who commit atrocities against other people, why is this only applicable to Jews? The Germans suffered a lot of trauma during WWI and the subsequent Versailles Treaty. Hundreds of thousands of Germans starved or died from preventable disease during the war due to the naval blockade against Germany, and Germany lost 1.7 million men. And that was before the Treaty of Versailles imposed punitive measures that led to even more starvation and suffering. Does that give any German killer the right to claim victimhood or is he fully accountable for his actions? What about the Armenians? What about the indigenous peoples of North America? What about African-Americans? What about (hi, slad!) the Irish? What about the Vietnamese? What about the Palestinians? Are they also allowed to milk their "trauma" to justify killing and robbing others with impunity?

The anti-semitic literature of the early 20th-century had a very direct influence on both Hitler and Goebbels, and thus on the policy and propaganda of the Third Reich. And where did that lead?



So. Exactly where do you think that using more or less the same rhetoric while in pursuit of more or less the same aim might lead today? Have their been any changes since the 1930s that favor a significantly different outcome?

That you can even ask that question amazes me. Furthermore, it's not "the same aim"; on the contrary: Atzmon's aim is to de-legitimize racist oppression by exposing its ideological basis, based on his own experience.

You insist on identifying today's Israelis and zionists with the victims of the Nazis, when the evidence clearly indicates that it is they who have internalized the values, propaganda and cruelty of the Nazis against their own 'untermenschen' in their violent quest for 'lebensraum' for their racist state. Just as it is perfectly legitimate, even a moral imperative, to dissect and critically examine the thinking that rationalized and justified the institutionalized racism of the Nazi state, so is it a moral imperative to dissect and criticize the thinking that rationalizes and justifies, even sanctifies, the institutional racism of the zionist state. Atzmon is hardly the first person of conscience to do this; much of his own insights are an echo of Jewish and Israeli humanitarian scholars like Israel Shahak, a survivor of the Nazi genocide who, like Atzmon, was alarmed by the parallels between the nazi and zionist world-view, and traced these to pathological elements within Jewish ideology that were given a receptive environment to flourish in the zionist state.

In the book Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Shahak and co-author Norton Mezvinsky lament the dramatic growth in recent years of Jewish fundamentalism which has manifested itself in opposition to the peace process and played a role in the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the murder of 29 Muslims at prayer by the American-born fundamentalist, Baruch Goldstein.

They cite, for example, Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, who wrote a chapter of a book in praise of Goldstein and what he did. An immigrant to Israel from the U.S., Ginsburgh speaks freely of Jews’ genetic-based spiritual superiority over non-Jews; “If you saw two people drowning, a Jew and a non-Jew, the Torah says you save the Jewish life first….Something is special about Jewish DNA….If a Jew needs a liver, can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah probably would permit that. Jewish life has an infinite value.”

Shahak and Mezvinsky point out that, “Changing the words ‘Jewish’ to ‘German’ or ‘Aryan’ and ‘non-Jewish’ to ‘Jewish’ turns the Ginsburgh position into the doctrine that made Auschwitz possible in the past. To a considerable extent the German Nazi success depended upon that ideology and upon its implication of being widely known early. Disregarding even on a limited scale the potential effects of messianic…and other ideologies could prove to be calamitous….The similarities between the Jewish political messianic trend and German Nazism are glaring. The Gentiles are for the messianists what the Jews were for the Nazis. The hatred of Western culture with its rational and democratic elements is common to both movements…. The ideology…is both eschatological and messianic….It assumes the imminent coming of the Messiah and asserts that the Jews, aided by God, will thereafter triumph over the non-Jews and rule them forever.”

It troubled Israel Shahak that the lesson many Jews learned from the Nazi period was to embrace ethno-centric nationalism—just what had created such tragedy in Europe—and to reject the older prophetic Jewish tradition of universalism. He was particularly dismayed with the organized Jewish community in the U.S. and other Western countries, which promoted ideas of religious freedom and ethnic diversity in their own countries, but embraced Israel’s rejection of these same values. Link

In his 1994 book Jewish History, Jewish Religion: the Weight of Three Thousand Years, Prof. Shahak wrote:

The influence on "Jewish ideology" on many Jews will be stronger the more it is hidden from public discussion. Such discussion will, it is hoped, lead people take the same attitude towards Jewish chauvinism and the contempt displayed by so many Jews towards non-Jews (which will be documented below) as that commonly taken towards antisemitism and all other forms of xenophobia, chauvinism and racism. It is justly assumed that only the full exposition, not only of antisemitism, but also of its historical roots, can be the basis of struggle against it. Likewise I am assuming that only the full exposition of Jewish chauvinism and religious fanaticism can be the basis of struggle against those phenomena. This is especially true today when, contrary to the situation prevailing fifty or sixty years ago, the political influence of Jewish chauvinism and religious fanaticism is much greater than that of antisemitism. But there is also another important consideration. I strongly believe that antisemitism and Jewish chauvinism can only be fought simultaneously.

Because as far as I can tell, if there were a real fight, all the powers that intervened then would still intervene now. They'd still view anyone who used Nazi terminology in relation to any Jews (including Israeli Jews) in the course of that fight as a Nazi and an anti-semitic war criminal. And it would still be very much in their interests to carve up the spoils of war in ways that rewarded themselves, not the native inhabitants of the land, if they won.

So if you're planning on attaining a victory through armed violence that will presumably achieve critical mass after having been preached to popularity on the wings of terms such as those Gilad Atzmon uses, how exactly do you propose to overcome those obstacles?

I guess you didn't read what I wrote. As Israel's own strategists know very well, simply eliminating zionist immunity for crimes against humanity will lead to the dissolution of the zionist state. There's no need for armed struggle, and as I wrote before, any victory will be too costly, in too many ways, for both sides. Instead, I want people to be aware of just what they are supporting (wittingly or not), in what ways they support it, and to obey the dictates of their conscience and stop. This is the basis for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

No. If you really want to "win", you have to stop playing by zionist rules, in which everybody else is always wrong and they are always right, in which they are the center of the universe and you, and everybody else who is not them, are the Other. In which they are the final arbiters of what is true and what is just, and what is acceptable.

If you have right on your side, then act like it.

Totally. But if you have Holocaust-denial enthusiasts on your side, it would (in fact) just be an act. Not a very convincing one, either, to most people. Including some of your most natural allies.

And that has nothing whatsoever to do with zionist rules. Holocaust denial actually is not right, but rather wrong.

DISCLAIMER: I don't think that's a moral issue or that it should be a legal issue, ever. Personally. But it is, nevertheless, factually wrong and (therefore) pointlessly offensive, for political purposes.

It depends on how you define "wrong". For example, it may be wrong to deny the officially-sanctioned narrative about a historical event, but some would say it's a much greater wrong to deny people the right to question, to inform themselves, to examine and weigh the evidence, and come to their own conclusions about a historical event. One may vehemently disagree with someone's opinions, yet just as vehemently defend their right to have them. Because once anybody has the power to punish people for their thoughts and opinions, we've all stepped onto a very slippery slope.

In other words, since you seem to have some trouble getting it, these self-appointed moral arbiters decided it was ok for innocent Palestinians to die in agony, deprived of medical aid, rather than "offend" the Jews. If anything, by their disgustingly callous and selfish, yet hypocritically self-pitying and self-righteous actions, they proved Atzmon's point. (And by the way, those who follow such things do know who they are: Tony Greenstein, Mark Elf, David Aaronovitch, to name a few of those among the "anti-zionist zionists" whose pathological obsession with Atzmon has made them the object of ridicule and disgust among British Palestinian solidarity groups.) Incidentally, their so-called "solidarity work" consists of writing, mostly in their blogs, and attacking Gilad Atzmon; Atzmon, on the other hand, is well-known for organizing highly successful fund-raising events for Palestinian charities, and for introducing Western audiences to the beauty and depth of Palestinian indigenous culture.

Well. If he gives $$$, at least he compensates for the damage he's doing somewhat. So good for him.

Whatever "damage" he's supposedly doing, at least he didn't deliberately try to deprive desperate, wounded people from receiving medical aid, as these self-appointed moral guardians did.

Dude. I'm telling you. He knows they're false. They're almost hilariously false sometimes. Actually. If he were even an eensy little bit less careful about that, he'd have exposed the con a long time ago.

If they're false, especially if they're "hilariously false", then they should be easy to refute with facts and logic.

Maybe. But he does act like Mossad. He brings very little to the table. And you can't be too careful.

I think I know a little bit about how Mossad operates, and on this point we'll just have to (strongly) disagree, just like on your assertion that he is deliberately misrepresenting what "he knows".

My remarks were premised on the assumption that since it's not easy to beat a nuclear power in war, you have to get them to concede whatever it is you're after by some combination of other means.

Once you've resorted to war, you've already lost almost everything you hoped to "win". Furthermore, on a purely pragmatic level, it's stupid to attack your enemy where he is strongest and enjoys an overwhelming advantage. Israel's weakness is in its racist and oppressive ideology and practise, and its dependence on an external network of political, military and economic support. These should be the focus for any serious opponent of institutionalized racism. That Israel can ever be nicely persuaded to ever "concede" anything is a dangerous illusion, as its own history amply demonstrates.

They're mostly not criminals, Alice.

I know. But as Atzmon points out, Israel is a democracy for its Jewish citizens; they do bear responsibility for the leaders they choose to put in power, and for the atrocities that are committed in their name, with their support.

And, for that matter, neither were the segregationists in the American south; for that matter, neither were the Germans during WWII. And neither are the Palestinian people who are being treated worse than animals for the crime of not being Jewish in the Jewish state.

Ugh. Honestly. Fuck him.

No. Fuck them.

Them too. It's really one and the same thing, though. If you ask me.

No, because he rejects tribalism and its insistence on knee-jerk loyalty that defines "right" and "wrong" according to the dictates of the tribal authorities; he defends the right of each individual to think for themselves, and advocates equal human rights for everybody, regardless of religion, ethnicity, or any other consideration. He identifies with the true victims of racist persecution, not those who cynically use an ersatz victimhood to dehumanize others. So it's not the same thing at all.

But do you respect me? That's what I want to know.

At the risk of sounding as pedantic as I really am (you should have guessed that about me, by now): I don't consider it possible to love someone without respecting them. On the other hand, it's very possible to respect someone without loving them. As a rule, I tend to respect others to the exact same degree that they respect me.

[American Dream]

These sorts of concerns about Atzmon have been raised- sadly to some deaf ears- for many, many years now:

http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2008/01/gila ... enier.html

Tuesday, 29 January 2008
Gilad Atzmon – Now an Open Holocaust Denier
- Tony Greenstein


In the past week, reports have circulated that Sylvia Stolz, lawyer for Ernst Zundel, a neo-Nazi serving 5 years in a German prison for race hate crimes, had cited a newspaper report claiming that Gilad Atzmon had described the history of the 2nd World War and the Nazi Holocaust as ‘a complete forgery.’

This has been widely reported (15.1.08). , not least on fascist sites such as David Duke’s and the Zundelsite.

The Adelaide Institute, also a Holocaust Revisionist site, reported that in the trial of Dr Rigolf Hennig, whom Stolz was defending, the lawyer referred to the report thus:

‘A few days ago, on 27 November 2005, Gilad Atzmon introduced the most radical blow that has as yet been struck against the political indoctrination forced on us.

This is to be found in Exhibit No. 1….He describes the historiography of the Second World War and Holocaust, … as a complete falsification invented by Zionists and Americans. He shows that the real enemy was not Hitler but Stalin.’

Atzmon’s supporters, especially Mary Rizzo insist that it is all a question of ‘rabid Zionists (who) have united with the so-called ‘Jewish anti-Zionists protagonists’. This time, they insist upon believing that I am a Holocaust Denier.’ Gilad Atzmon - “Public Lapidation” round one’ 18.1.08 . It is all a question of Atzmon’s critics ‘circulating the news from a site that specialises in what they call Holocaust Denial. It’s a site I don’t read, and won’t even link to..’ This is somewhat strange coming from Mary Rizzo as Atzmon and co. dispute whether there is even such a thing as holocaust denial.

At present it is not possible to determined the truth or falsity of the report, although it is unlikely that there is no smoke without fire, given that the statements attributed to Atzmon are so similar to much of his other writings. In a post to me by an Atzmon supporter, Kristoffer Larson cites a German report that

‘There was a ‘heated debate between the writer and the audience in the course of which several members of the audience left the hall under protest. Atzmon referred to the historiography about the World War II and about the Holocaust such as we know it as a complete forgery initiated by Americans and Zionists. According to him the true enemy was not Hitler but Stalin. According to Atzmon.’

Whether or not Atzmon is correctly quoted is immaterial. Even if he is given the benefit of a very considerable doubt, by his own words it is clear that he has now become a fully fledged holocaust denier.

I first became aware of Gilad Atzmon when he posted an article 'The Protocols of the Elders Of London' . This is posted on a site which lists Atzmon as one of its main contributors. Typical of the articles alongside it entitled ‘David Irving: Excerpt from a Radical’s Diary January 17, 2008’ or ‘Liberation of the Camps’ a full blooded holocaust denial article.

Atzmon’s article, a caricature of the infamous Czarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, dubbed myself and other members of Jews Against Zionism as ‘Elders’ and offered ‘a glimpse into the abusive, assertive and violent world of Zionist lobbying’. Why was it written?

In 2005 Jews Against Zionism activists had called for the ostracism of a small group on the fringes of the Palestine solidarity movement, Deir Yassin Remembered [DYR]. DYR had taken onto its Board of Advisors one Israel Shamir. In his Discussion of Anti-Semitism, he argued for an alliance between Palestine solidarity activists and the white supremacist right. ‘For as long as Richard Perle sits in the Pentagon, Elie Wiesel brandishes his Nobel Prize, … we need the voices of Duke, Sobran, Raimondo, Buchanan, Mahler, Griffin and of other anti-bourgeois nationalists.’

Shamir’s appointment prompted long standing Israeli Jewish activists – Lea Tsemel, Michael Warshawski and Jeff Halper - to resign from DYR. Tsemel and Warshawski wrote that ‘There is no room for a racist in an institution aimed to fight for the memory of the Deir Yassin victims of Ethnic cleansing and massacre.’ and likewise Jeff Halper stated that

‘To turn the Deir Yassin tragedy into a discussion of Jewish racial characteristics, to dirty it with racist discourse, to create a situation where the people who were the most committed to honoring its memory… raises serious, fundamental questions…. Has Deir Yassin been hijacked by a cult more intent on pursuing hate campaigns against the fictive “Jews”

Shamir even went so far as to accuse the fascist British National Party of not being anti-Semitic enough! ‘I do not feel at ease accusing you and your comrades of betraying the Britons and joining with the Jews, but if I’d keep mum, stones won’t.’

In 2001 an article, 'Serious Concerns About Israel Shamir' by Ali Abunimah & Hussein Ibish stated that ‘We do not have any need for some of what Israel Shamir is introducing into the discourse on behalf of Palestinian rights, which increasingly includes elements of traditional European anti-Semitic rhetoric.’

But in an e-mail of 12.6.05. Atzmon’s explained to me that ‘I regard Shamir as a unique and advanced thinker.’ Just how unique and advanced Shamir’s thinking is can be gleaned by his views on Auschwitz: ‘Another go of Zionist propaganda. The camp was an internment facility, attended by the Red Cross… This idea of “bombing Auschwitz” makes sense only if one accepts the vision of “industrial extermination factory”, and it was formed only well after the war.’

When I read Atzmon’s ‘Elder’s of London’ article I wrote to him questioning his support for DYR and Paul Eisen, its British Director, who had written two pamphlets – ‘Jewish Power’ and ‘Holocaust Wars’, a tribute to Zundel. To my query that ‘I understand that you have been distributing Paul Eisen’s most recent The Holocaust Wars which denies, in the course of defending Ernest Zundel, that there ever was a holocaust or extermination of European Jewry by the Nazis.’ Atzmon replied, on 6th June 2005 thus: ‘True I circulated Paul Eisen’s paper…. By the way, my take on the subject is slightly different than Paul’s one and yet, i found Paul very attentive to my criticism. Furthermore, Let me assure you that if I ever see a great text written by yourself I ll be the first to circulate it. This is my way, that is what i believe in.’

This ‘great text’ of Eisen is posted on the Zundel site . According to which:

‘Zundel does not deny that the National Socialist regime targeted Jews or that Jews suffered at their hands, but he does deny specific, albeit key aspects of the Holocaust narrative as we know it. …

o That there ever was an official plan on the part of Hitler or any other part of the Nazi regime systematically and physically to eliminate every Jew in Europe.

o That there ever existed homicidal gas-chambers.

o That the numbers of Jewish victims have been exaggerated.’

Eisen writes:

‘How do those Germans, now nearing the end of their lives, feel when told that what seemed so right then and perhaps even still seems so right, was in fact so wrong? … How might it feel to be forbidden, alone amongst the peoples of Europe, to recall your recent history with anything but shame?’

For Eisen, it is a terrible thing that the Holocaust cannot be recalled ‘with anything but shame’. And in a passage ‘The Hitler we loved and why’ we are told that ‘Ernst Zundel was once involved in the publication of a book called The Hitler We Loved and Why, but Ernst Zundel was not the only German who loved Hitler and is probably not the only German who still loves Hitler. Millions of Germans loved Hitler, who … still cherish his memory.’

There is no mention of the terror state that the Nazis created. The abolition of the unions, the incarceration and murder of trade unionists in Dachau, still less the extermination of millions of untermenschen. Eisen goes on to state that:

‘Nothing seems to fit about the gassing story. The numbers of victims crammed into the space, the design and construction of the gassing facilities, the lack of protection for the attendants, the implausibility surrounding the rate of cremation, the huge errors, omissions and disparities in eye-witness accounts — all these and more, when added to the near total absence of hard affirmative evidence, makes one wonder why anyone believed such a story in the first place. No-one has yet been able to explain how a gas chamber worked. No-one has been able to explain how pellets of Zyklon B were poured into holes that do not and never have existed. No-one has been able to explain how the Sonderkommando (special detachment) of Jewish prisoner/attendants was able to enter a gas chamber immediately, … In effect, no one has been able to take up the Faurisson challenge: “Show me or draw me a Nazi gas chamber!’

And if there is any doubt, then Eisen makes his views clear in a posting of 26th February 2007. ‘Regarding gas, again I am not sure but the evidence for the use of homicidal gas-chambers is not good at all. The evidence against it is much, much stronger.’

In an e-mail to me of 26.6.05. Eisen states that ‘There is a very strong possibility that the revisionists are substantially correct.’ On DYR’s own site, Eisen has written an article In Clear Sight of Yad Vashem (January 2006) wherein he states that ‘The Holocaust too has come under assault. Over the last fifty years, revisionist scholars have amassed a formidable body of substantial evidence, which runs in direct opposition to the traditional Holocaust narrative. “Where is the evidence,” they say, “for this alleged gargantuan mass-murder? Where are the documents? Where are the traces and remains? Where are the weapons of murder?”

Yet in an e-mail that Atzmon sent me on 23.6.05: he wrote:

‘how dare you classify innocent and honest people as H deniers. Can’t you see that this is a crime. Mr Eisen whom you despise his learning the H for 3 years, he is an expert. I myself working on WW2 for over ten years.’

And there is no doubting that Eisen has become an ‘expert’ holocaust denier. Atzmon continues:

‘I do not have any doubt that our notion of the H will change radically in the near future. Too many discrepancies. and as I said, the only active scholarship is in the hands of the revisionists. The funny bit is that only left Jews are defending the Zio-Anglo-American’s H narrative. Ask yourself why. I think that it is simple. You are not religious, you killed god….’

This was in reply to my comment that ‘at best. What they [DYR] are doing is playing into the Zionists’ hands.’ To which Atzmon replied: ‘Nonsense, you maintain the zio narrative while blaming us for playing to their hands?…. Paul’s H scholarship is not going to interfere with his DYR activity. Paul is a humanist, whether you like it or not, and so is everyone who is involved with DYR.’

And in his The Embarrassing Case of Tony Greenstein Atzmon expresses his anger that ‘my friend, activist Paul Eisen the most peaceful person I have ever come across’ has been called a racist.’

On June 17th 2005 Jews Against Zionism, together with many others, picketed a talk by Atzmon at the Socialist Workers’ Party bookshop Bookmarks. We protested that an organisation that calls itself socialist should sully itself by association with Atzmon. Atzmon himself had, at the SWP’s instigation put out a statement denying that he was a holocaust denier. It was clearly a damage limitation exercise but given that Atzmon had denied he was a holocaust denier we were prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Today it is clear that Atzmon has not changed. In recent months he has posted a number of articles and made a number of comments that make it clear that Atzmon is a fully-fledged holocaust denier. He may be confused but his deep anti-Semitism has led him along the path of holocaust denial.

A Jewish Conspiracy Theorist
Atzmon has always believed in Jewish conspiracies. On the leaflet which we gave out at the picket, we quoted his ‘On anti-Semitism’ as stating that:

“we must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously…. …. American Jewry makes any debate on whether the ‘Protocols of the elder of Zion’ are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews do try to control the world, by proxy… I would suggest that perhaps we should face it once and for all: the Jews were responsible for the killing of Jesus who, by the way, was himself a Palestinian Jew.”

Atzmon has subsequently changed ‘Jewish people’ to ‘Zionists’ and added (in fact Zionists) after ‘American Jews’ but the meaning remains the same.

Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that ‘They are based on a forgery, the Frankfurter Zeitung moans and screams once every week: the best proof that they are authentic.’ The only difference on this question between Atzmon and Hitler is that for Hitler the ‘fact’ that what the Protocols said was true meant they were authentic whereas for Atzmon it is irrelevant if they are a forgery, because clearly they are true! A distinction without a difference.

Atzmon is quoted in the Guardian (12.5.05) ‘I’m not going to say whether it is right or not to burn down a synagogue, I can see that it is a rational act’. Which is substantially the same as what he writes in his essay ‘‘on anti-Semitism’.

Instead of seeing the Israeli state as an outpost of US imperialism, he reverses the relationship. ‘it looks as if Zionist lobbies control American foreign politics. After so many years of independence, the United States of America is becoming a remote colony of an apparently far greater state, the Jewish state.’ The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion (Verse 2) But then ‘The J’s are the ultimate chameleons, they can be whatever they like as long as it serves as some expedient.’ J-Spot

In Dialectic of the Negation Atzmon demonstrates that an anti-Semite must also be a Zionist. ‘Early Zionists were critical enough to expose the non-ethical characteristics amongst their fellow brothers. Zionism was there to erect a new ethical Jew, a genuine moral being….’ And goes on to hold that the reason that the Palestine solidarity movement hasn’t succeeded is because of the number of Jews in it! ‘Though this may explain why Jews are so involved in Palestinian solidarity, it may additionally explain why the Palestinian solidarity movement has never made it into a global mass movement. Apparently, not many people around are that keen to join a liberal synagogue.’

But it is in his essay ‘From Esther to AIPAC’ that Atzmon reveals his true feelings:

‘The Scholars who are engaged in the study of the Holocaust religion … are engaged with a list of events that happened between 1933-1945. Most of the scholars are themselves orthodox observants. Though they may be critical of different aspects of the exploitation of the Holocaust, they all accept the validity of the Nazi Judeocide and its mainstream interpretations and implications. Most of the scholars, if not all of them, do not challenge the Zionist narrative, namely Nazi Judeocide, yet, more than a few are critical of the way Jewish and Zionist institutes employ the Holocaust…. no one goes as far as revisionism, not a single Holocaust religion scholar dares engage in a dialogue with the so-called ‘deniers’ to discuss their vision of the events or any other revisionist scholarship.’

Atzmon berates the fact that Lenni Brenner, Shraga Elam, Marc Ellis and Norman Finkelstein ‘dare’ not engage with Holocaust deniers. Atzmon has difficulty understanding that astronomers for example have long ceased arguing with the followers of Aristotle and Ptolemy about whether Sun is the centre of the solar system.


Continues at: http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2008/01/gila ... enier.html


.

[compared2what?]

You insist on identifying today's Israelis and zionists with the victims of the Nazis

No. I do not. But I do say that the widespread appeal of zionism and support for the foundation/continuance of the state of Israel were and are both largely -- almost exclusively -- a reaction to the victimization of Jews by the Nazis.

That doesn't mean I approve of or endorse it. It's just what happened.

Obviously, it's not a tenable argument for present-day Israelis to claim that the Palestinian genocide is justified by the Nazi Holocaust. In fact, it's ridiculous and offensive and patently absurd.

But you know what the only thing that might make it look less ridiculous and offensive and patently absurd is?

If you could somehow associate the Palestinian cause with that of the Nazis.

That's exactly what Atzmon does. That's obviously his intention, in fact. And whom does that help?

That's all I'm saying.

[compared2what?]

If they're false, especially if they're "hilariously false", then they should be easy to refute with facts and logic.

???

They are. Very easy. I've given some examples. And I can give many others. Do you want me to?

[compared2what?]

I mean, Alice, you do have right on your side. A sustained, organized movement could and should (and, imo, would) succeed if it worked systematically to attain its ends. The anti-apartheid movement is actually a pretty good model, although it's not a perfect parallel. Among other things, there were no AIPAC or ADL equivalents. For example. But neither AIPAC nor the ADL is unbeatable, if you factor an anticipation of their tactics -- which are predictable -- into your strategy.

But doing that doesn't actually require doing anything that wouldn't have to be done anyway. The Palestinian solidarity movement needs to gain international public support generally (and the support of the American public, in particular) in order to succeed.*** And I'm very sorry to say that it actually does only take one Holocaust denier to prevent that from happening under the presently existing conditions. That's not at all fair. But life's not fair.

You know, the anti-apartheid movement faced 100 percent, unambivalent opposition everywhere in the world when it first started, as well as for some time afterwards. And they totally turned that around within about 35 years. It can be done. But not if you make the right to do and say things that are extraneous to the cause and have negative strategic implications for it a pre-condition for participation.

That's all I'm saying.
_________________

*** Those aren't the only things needed, obviously. They weren't for the anti-apartheid movement, either. But they were and are needed.

[AlicetheKurious]

The Palestinian solidarity movement needs to gain international public support generally (and the support of the American public, in particular) in order to succeed.

A few years ago, I would have strongly agreed with that, but not any more. And in fact, it's sort of a myth that South Africa was liberated by "international support". The international support, especially from the West, only came after the ANC and the Communist Party had done a great job in mobilizing the South African blacks into a strong resistance movement -- political and armed. In a nutshell, the struggle against Apartheid only became an international effort once the West realized that the threat of a communist revolution in South Africa was a very real possibility. It seems the West decided to jettison Apartheid and keep South Africa capitalist, with all the injustice and inequality that entails, rather than let the revolution take its course.

I know it's a cynical view; that's the price of looking behind the curtain. But my point is, true liberation is not something that others can do for you, whether you're an individual or a nation. At best, you'll get something that may look like liberation, and will be called liberation, but really isn't. If you want the real thing, you have to do the heavy lifting yourself: that means getting rid of corruption within your ranks, winning the respect and trust of your people, recruiting, mobilizing and training your own cadres, setting your own goals and then seeking natural allies -- those whose goals, and whose resources and strengths are complementary to yours. I've come to the conclusion that whatever and whoever the enemy is, his greatest strength is rooted in our weakness and disunity.

That being said, I do support the BDS movement, and it's made impressive gains just in the few years since it was launched -- by Palestinian activists living under occupation, may I add. If and when the Palestinians and the Arabs in general do succeed in getting their act together, nobody on earth will be able to oppress them any more. But all the international support in the world won't liberate the Palestinians, any more than all the international opposition to the invasion of Iraq made any difference at all.

What international support can do is raise awareness and spark debate about the role of the Israel lobby in other countries, and its real impact on those countries and the people who live in them. If and when people in the US and Britain and elsewhere decide to liberate themselves, for their own reasons, then and only then, will they be valuable and effective allies for the Palestinians and all other oppressed peoples. Who knows? Maybe then even the Israelis will see the light, and decide that their true enemy is not "over there" but right among their own elites, posing as their saviours.

Anyway. All this is to say that real liberation begins with oneself, and only then can genuinely valuable alliances be made.

It's hard, and it takes time and sustained effort, but that effort is a valuable, even indispensable element of the growing process, building a basis for genuine achievements.