brainpanhandler wrote:I don't see how Atzmon's words can be interpreted as anything other than anti-semitic. And witting or unwitting (no small question) he serves to conflate pro-palestinian with anti-semitic which serves the zionist cause and fuels further atrocities.
Atzmon's views might strike people here as outrageous, but they're hardly unique or original: many of his ideas are based on scholarly works by various Israeli researchers and thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Israel Shahak, for example, both of whom saw zionism as an attempt to recreate the closed Jewish communities of pre-Enlightenment Europe, and warned of the dangers zionist racism and supremacism combined with militarism.
The late Israel Shahak created huge shock-waves in the early 1980s, just by translating Hebrew texts that were intended only for an Israeli Jewish audience, into English. For the first time, non-Hebrew readers were exposed to a very different kind of Israeli and traditional Jewish thinking than had previously been available to them. He did this to expose and hopefully change the very dangerous direction in which Jewish zionist ideology was leading the Jews and indeed the world.
Unlike Atzmon, who is not a scholar, Israel Shahak was not so easy to simply dismiss with a simple label (not for lack of trying), since he used voluminous documentation from modern and historical sources to support his analysis.
From his wikipedia page:
According to Shahak Talmudic Judaism is a totalitarian religion where rabbinical law governs every aspect of Jewish behaviour.[22] Shahak's approach to the subject draws on both Karl Popper's concept of a closed society, his analysis of totalitarian thought-patterns in Plato's thought, and also on Moses Hadas's suggestion of a Platonic influence on rabbinical thought.[23] He asserts that what he views as Jewish chauvinism and religious fanaticism are grounded in this theological tradition. For Shahak, the religious roots of this 'Jewish ideology' had two important consequences:Attempts by Western analysts to explain contemporary Israeli politics in purely secular terms such as imperialism are fundamentally flawed.
More controversially, that 'Jewish chauvinism' can be a causal factor in antisemitism, and that both must be fought simultaneously.[citation needed]
Shahak also analyses the period from the beginning of the last millennium (CE) to the advent of the modern state when most Jews lived under rabbinical law in segregated communities. These communities, writes Shahak, were under the patronage of non-Jewish nobles who typically used them to enforce their authority on a non-Jewish peasant class. Rebellions by such peasants in which all feudal agents were attacked, Shahak argues, have wrongly been perceived as anti-Jewish persecutions. Consequently, he calls for significant parts of Jewish history to be re-evaluated from a universal perspective.[citation needed]
Shahak also claims that Zionism is an attempt to re-establish a closed Jewish community and that this has resulted in discrimination against non-Jews. He also argued that on several occasions Zionists held links with anti-Semites, as was the case of Herzl and Count von Plehve, the antisemitic minister of Tsar Nicholas II; Jabotinsky and the Ukrainian leader Petlyura, whose forces, Shahak says, massacred some 100,000 Jews in 1918-21; Ben-Gurion and the French extreme right, which included notorious antisemites, during the Algerian war; and others such as the Zionist rabbi Joachim Prinz, who welcomed Hitler’s rise to power, since they shared his belief in the primacy of ‘race’ and his hostility to the assimilation of Jews among ‘Aryans’. Shahak notes that Prinz, whose book Wir Juden (We Jews, 1934) celebrating Hitler's German Revolution and its defeat of liberalism, subsequently emigrated to the USA, where he rose to be vice-chairman of the World Jewish Congress and a leading light in the World Zionist Organization.'[24] He concludes by arguing the struggle against what he views as Jewish chauvinism and exclusivism, which must include a critique of classical Judaism, was of equal or greater importance as the struggle against antisemitism, and all other forms of racism.[citation needed]
In Foundations of a Political Messianic Trend in Israel, the late Uriel Tal, professor of modern Jewish history at Tel Aviv University, explained the messianic ideology embraced by the dominant rabbis and leaders of the religious settler movement, its roots in Jewish religious thought, its stand on human rights of non-Jews, the sanctity of war, and its views concerning genocide:
The third position concerning the question of the non-Jew's human rights is based upon the positive commandment from the Torah of the eradication of any trace of Amalek, i.e., actual genocide. This solution was suggested by Rabbi Israel Hess in his article, "The Commandment of Genocide in the Torah" (Bat Kol, the student journal of Bar Ilan University, Feb. 26, 1980), and apart from several colleagues such as Uriel Simon and other members of Oz ve-Shalom (the dovish religious group), we do not know of any dissenting reaction on behalf of the rabbinical teachers of this trend.
Their silence is particularly significant in this instance, as we are dealing with a community for whom, because of its political structure, its leadership is not just the guide but also the one who grants absolution, because according to their outlook, the function of the Chief Rabbinate and heads of the yeshivot is to react to reality and to demonstrate to man the error of his ways (the rabbis in the yeshivot are thus called mashgichim—"supervisors"). Rabbi Hess proclaims that "the day will come when we will all be called to fulfill the commandment of this religiously commanded war, of annihilating Amalek"—the commandment of genocide. The manner of carrying this out is described in I Samuel 15:3: "Go now, attack Amalek, and deal with him and all that he has under the ban. Do not spare him but kill man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and ass."
This duty of carrying out the annihilation of Amalek is based, according to Rabbi Hess, on two arguments: the one concerning racial purity, and the other concerning war. The racial justification is as follows: according to Genesis 36:12, Amalek is the son of Timna, who was Eliphaz's concubine. Yet according to I Chronicles 1:36, the same Timna was the daughter of Eliphaz and thus Amalek's sister. Rabbi Hess thus concludes that Eliphaz cohabited with his wife (who herself was somebody else's wife), begat his daughter Timna by her, took his daughter as a concubine, cohabited with her, and thus Amalek was born. Thus, the rabbi tells us, it is impure blood which flows in Amalek's veins and in the veins of Amalek's descendants for all time. And as for the second argument—Amalek is the enemy who fought against Israel in a particulary cruel manner, Hess says, personifying boundless evil, because when the Children of Israel were walking along their way, exhausted, Amalek attacked and killed them, man, woman and child. According to this conception, in the opposition between Israel and Amalek there appears the opposition betwen light and darkness, between purity and contamination, between the people of God and the forces of evil, and this opposition continues to exist with respect to the descendants of Amalek for all time. And who are his descendants for all time? These are the Arab nations.
A lot of what people, especially in North America, think they know about Israel is just wrong. Not just about today's reality, but also about its establishment and early history. The Israeli historian Ilan Pappe demolished a lot of the myths that passed for "historical facts" with his seminal book, "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine." Not surprisingly he was forced out of his job as senior lecturer at the University of Haifa and, like Gilad Atzmon, has moved to the UK, where he teaches at the University of Exeter.
Another book that completely contradicts the official version of Israel's history is Israel's Sacred Terrorism, by Livia Rokach, which is based on the translation of the personal diaries of Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett. As Noam Chomsky wrote in the book's Foreword:
Moshe Sharett's diary, to which Livia Rokach's monograph is devoted, is undoubtedly a major documentary source. It remains outside of "official history"--that version of history that reaches more than a tiny audience of people unsatisfied by conventional doctrine. It is only reasonable to predict that this will remain true in the United States as long as the "special relationship" persists. If, on the other hand, Israel had been, say, an ally of the Soviet Union, then Sharett's revelations would quickly become common knowledge, just as no one would speak of the Egyptian attack on Israel in 1956.
It's a fascinating study, from the point of view of an insider, of how, among other things, the zionists led by Ben Gurion calculatingly used terrorism to repeatedly provoke the Arabs into trying to defend themselves, which Israel would then use as a pretext to invade, while persuading their own citizens that they were the victims of aggression. The diaries were translated from the original Hebrew by Livia Rokach, a former Israeli Interior Minister.
To sum up, since so much of what people think they know and understand about zionism and Israel is false, or heavily filtered, then it shouldn't surprise anybody that when someone like Gilad Atzmon comes along, trying to communicate his intimate knowledge of the environment in which he grew up, as well as what he's learned from serious works on a subject so obscured by propaganda, that he would be attacked for it.
brainpanhandler wrote:]Alice has done her best to refute this view, but in my opinion has lost this argument.
If so, that's my failure. If you're satisfied that you know enough about the subject to make an informed decision, ok. All I ask is for people like me to decide for themselves whether we agree or disagree, and not to have someone else's judgement imposed on us.
compared2what? wrote:Just to be crystal clear:
As far as I can see, the allegation by Tony Ryals that Gilad Atzmon is related to Menachem Atzmon hasn't been confirmed by anyone. Or denied by anyone. It appears to be pure speculation. In fact.
I'm glad you noted that. It would have been better just to have deleted the previous post, because: a) it's just a rant; and b) if you were going to post it, you should have posted the whole embarrassing thing. It doesn't discredit Gilad Atzmon in any way. All it goes to show is that activists frequently burn out, turn against their friends, and act strange, like Norman Finkelstein recently did. Mary Rizzo used to be cool -- years ago I used to read her web-site daily. But now she's on a crusade to "liberate" Syria and to defend the Saudi-Qatar-US-Israel-supported Syrian National Council against its critics.
