Atzmon Slams “Jewish Tribal Activists”
Counterpunch, a journal of the far right, has published the latest screed by the racist crank, Gilad Atzmon.
The subject of Atzmon’s long and rambling article is – you guessed it – the dangerous nature of “jewishness”, and in particular:
3rd category socialists, on the other hand, are there to stop proud self-hating Jews from blowing the whistle. The Jewish Socialists are there to prevent you from reading the words you are engaged with right now.
In other words, Michael Rosen.
Those of you who have read the works of “Israel Shamir” and Paul Eisen, or who occasionally browse Stormfront will be familiar with Atzmon’s argument.
1. Jewish socialists, argues Atzmon, are engaged in “tribal activity which aims at halting assimilation and enforcing monolithic collective thought”.
2. Michael Rosen occasionally tells folksy stories about his boyhood, and so is part of the same “Hebraic” network as Ariel Sharon: both are driven, personally and politically, by “the tribal parental condition of the Jewish home”.
3. Zionism includes “every form of Jewish political tribalism”.
4. Atzmon therefore advocates a flight from Jewishness, Judaism and any other form of Judaic tribalism. It means, leaving chosenness behind. This is probably the only form of real Jewish resistance to Zionism.”
4. “Jewishness” – as distinct from jews – must be fought as a matter of urgency:
To be a Zionist is to prevent assimilation, to be a Zionist is to engage in some form of Jewish political tribalism. Zionism indeed colonizes Palestine but its branches are far-reaching. Zionism is not a local movement supported by some enthusiastic lobbies around the world. Zionism is a global network. It is a clannish political apparatus that systematically endangers our planet for the sake of a miniature ethnic group. This very group is not the Jews per se, it is actually the Jewish political tribe. Zionism is there to shape and re-shape the notion of the Ghetto, to form and re-form the dialectic of chosenness, to balance the emerging tension between insularity and openness and yet to include most of the Jews. Zionism is a global network with no head, it is a spirit and spirit cannot be defeated. Yet, spirit can be revealed and spiritual supremacy must be exposed.
This is the message that the Socialist Workers’ Party is propagating at the moment. It is also pretty much where its front organisation, RESPECT, stands.
PS. Harry’s Place also gets a mention. Which is nice.
Comments
| 22 January 2007, 9:53 am |
Yes but it’s not just Atzmon who gets quoted by Stormfront is it?
http://www.stormfront.org/solargeneral/library/www.fpp.co.uk/StMartinsPress/Hitchens0696.html
A quick check will demonstrate that Hitchens seems to be quoted quite regularly in the Nazi journal.
| 22 January 2007, 10:00 am |
Ideally, let’s not “out” people who choose to use pseudonyms.
| 22 January 2007, 10:00 am |
Counterpunch is clearly a Zionist front aimed at literally delegitimising Palestinian national aspirations and the global antiwar movement. Actually.
| 22 January 2007, 10:36 am |
Ideally, let’s not “out” people who choose to use pseudonyms.
David, he mentioned himself who he was in a recent thread, did he not?
| 22 January 2007, 10:37 am |
Gilad has an extreme aversion to identity affirmation politicking- he’s an advocate for total universalism. If so how come he doesn’t have a problem with an Islamic State or Islamic fundamentalism? It essentially holds the same problems of chosenness thinking working outside universalism, but it promises in my opinion a far more violent response against the other.
| 22 January 2007, 10:41 am |
Because he is a racist crank, surely?
Morgoth – sorry, I missed that. If he has referred to himself by non-pseudonym then it is a different matter.
| 22 January 2007, 10:46 am |
Morgoth – sorry, I missed that. If he has referred to himself by non-pseudonym then it is a different matter.
I only made the linkage because I recalled a specific linkage between the nom-de-guerre and the real name being made here. If I was mistaken, then fair enough.
| 22 January 2007, 11:18 am |
No, you’re right, apparently. If he said who he was, that’s fine, but otherwise it isn’t.
| 22 January 2007, 11:19 am |
Funny story about Atzmon.
JAZZ, RACISM AND RESISTANCE
A night of live music and spoken word with
GILAD ATZMON
GEORGE GALLOWAY Respect MP
MARTIN SMITH
(author of John Coltrane-jazz, racism and resistance)
Monday 27 November, 7pm
Galloway, being tipped off that Atzmon is a raving anti semite, pulled out at the last minute.
According to Atzmon
Gilad: we spoke to GG on the night. He was stuck in the Parliament voting on Iraq
Poor Gilad.
There was no vote on Iraq.
| 22 January 2007, 11:31 am |
“Because he is a racist crank, surely?”
Absolutely.
Such a position could be held if it was consistently applied to all identities and particularism in favour of absolute universalism.The fact that he doesn’t mind an Islamic state in Palestine exposes his obsessive prejudice.The argument is legitimate if applied to all nation states and including Islamic States all groupings based on ethnic origins or faith.If Jews shouldn’t group together neither should Poles, or Indians.The Islamic ideology of spreading an Islamic State far and wide faithful to Allah always in relation to the infidels, epitomises the dangers of exclusively driven ideologies that define themselves against other humans by what they are not.
| 22 January 2007, 11:32 am |
“Gilad has an extreme aversion to identity affirmation politicking- he’s an advocate for total universalism. If so how come he doesn’t have a problem with an Islamic State or Islamic fundamentalism?”
If he did object to an Islamic State and Islamic fundamentalism, would you accept his anti-Zionist position?
| 22 January 2007, 11:35 am |
No, you’re right, apparently. If he said who he was, that’s fine, but otherwise it isn’t.
I concur wholeheartedly.
| 22 January 2007, 11:58 am |
Thanks, Andrew, for your kind words. I’d be bothered at getting dollops of antisemitism thrown at me by someone I respected, but Atzmon? do I look bothered?
Meanwhile, over at peaceplaestneblogspot (or neonaziswelcometoposthereblogspot) Atzmon has a little surprise for his followers and his enemies.
I’ve always thought he was somewhat useful to zionists, giving them an excuse to shout “antisemite” at opponents of Zionism, but he’s just come out as one of them, himself.
In the middle of a diatribe aimed at Michael Rosen where he is rubbishing the Yiddish language (which was, after all, only the daily language of the majority of the Jewish people for hundreds of years, a language which Atzmon claims has no etymology (!) or grammar (!) and is vastly inferior to German – to which it is related).
I tell you he is a nar, a shlemiel, a shmendrick, a putz and a paskudniak, all rolled into one (check their etymology, Gilad)
Yiddish was, of course, the daily language of most of the 6 million Jews wiped out by nazism – maybe Atzmon regards Hitler as a great assimilator…no hang on, he doesn’t do the “Holocaust narrative”
Anyway, Zionists from the left to the right fought a bitter struggle against yiddish which they saw as the language of uneducated workers, the language of diaspora, of internationalism. Not the proud language of Jewish nationalism.
Well, my Zionist friends, sorry about this but you are welcome to him.
You think I’m lying? – this is what he says:
“Ashkenazi culture is not an inferior culture. It is NO culture. And indeed. Zionism exposes it. I suggest that you read Ber Borochov and other early Zionists. Their argument is valid. You are in fact the exact example of a non productive tribal Bourgeoisie they all refer to (yet you are slightly more productive than your tribal comrades) . Zionism was there to repair the damage. Zionism is wrong about many things but it is correct in its critic of Ashkenazi bourgeoisie culture.”
| 22 January 2007, 12:44 pm |
Ideally can we not keep asking David T if he’s Jewish? It forces him to censor even faster than usual.
| 22 January 2007, 12:51 pm |
Gilad Atzmon is merely guilty of misplaced anti-zionism. He forgot to say “zionist” instead of “jew”, a common mistake and one I never make, because I never make mistaks.
Anyway, who cares about anti-semitism? Only zionists.
You lot are ignirent.
| 22 January 2007, 1:12 pm |
I love Jews.
I hate Zionism.
| 22 January 2007, 1:19 pm |
I love them too. I serve their interests 24/7. Ah, but am I one? That’s for me to know and you to find out.
| 22 January 2007, 1:30 pm |
I love lamp.
I hate floor.
| 22 January 2007, 2:54 pm |
I’ll bet that even Respect/SWP zombies, like JohnG, are getting seriously cheesed off with Atzmon’s antics and if they ever drop him, he’ll probably write a similar nasty piece about them in Counterpunch
| 22 January 2007, 3:07 pm |
He’ll say that they are jews, or in the control of jews.
| 22 January 2007, 3:10 pm |
Today the discrediting of Gilad Atzmon, tomorrow the world!
| 22 January 2007, 3:22 pm |
Atzmon is an irrelevance – it’s the fact that the SWP and Counterpunch support him that makes it more interesting. They are also irrelevant but more fun to expose ofr their lunacy views.
| 22 January 2007, 3:48 pm |
No no, Mikey, that’s heresy.
Atzmon’s saxophone is the pillar on which the entire fragile structure of reactionary resistance to the benign global hegemony of the neocons rests. Kick the sax away and watch those fascists flee!
| 22 January 2007, 5:04 pm |
Counterpunch is far left, not far right. One of its main editors is Alexander Cockburn, a long-time left-wing journalist.
Admittedly, on some issues it’s getting harder to tell the difference.
| 23 January 2007, 3:58 pm |
“Counterpunch, a journal of the far right…”
“To be good you had to be on the left.” (Nick Cohen)
In what sense, except that they are foul and there is a reflexive habit of calling nasty things “right wing”, are the Counterpunch troops of the right? Smaller state advocates? Responsibility, not rights? Free trade?
Oliver Kamm has shown, in his posts about the Peace Pledge Union, how similar the Stoppers are now to the left-orientated apeasement of the ’30s (”Europe wouldn’t be so bad under Mr Hitler”).
Another lurch of honesty is needed: the far left is the far right. There’s almost no difference – just hatreds chosen along slightly different lines. Both are statist, collectivist, communalist. Both have longstanding histories of anti-semitism; both have long histories of collaboration with Islamofascists (going back to the early days of the Russian Revolution on the one hand, and reaching an apogee with the Mufti of Jerusalem and the nazis on the other).
The BNP’s use of Islam as a proxy for racism is convenient, not intrinsic. Equally, the SWP (and similar) attachments to gender and racial equality was also merely convenient, as is shown by the ease with which these have been shed.
Left and Right are of decreasing use in contemporary politics (except perhaps as in this case as a way to see provoke some of the usual suspects into amusing squeals). Pragmatic libertarians and social democrats are placed on opposing sides by this dichotomy, but in fact they have more in common with one another than either do with the fascistic ultras whose adamantine certainties – religious or political – threaten so much that was hard won and that remains fragile.
| 24 January 2007, 12:53 am |
If the Socialist Workers Party is “far right”, what does that make George W Bush and the neocons? Crypto-communists?
I see that David Rosenberg, of the Jewish Socialists’ Group and magazine, gets some vicious anti-semitic stick from Atzmon as well.
Anyone who insults in this way, my old comrade David, who is one of the kindest, most reasonable, humorous, and well-liked people you could ever meet, is beneath even contempt.