Gilad Atzmon's Blog, page 75
October 16, 2013
Abunimah, Rosenberg, Anti-semitism and Dishonesty
By Gilad Atzmon
In the last few days blogger M. Jay Rosenberg came to the conclusion that Electronic Ali Abunimah is an anti-semite. Rosenberg's accusation is clearly unsubstantiated. Ali Abunimah is not an anti-semite. Dishonest? More likely.
Rosenberg writes, “let me explain why I consider Ali Abunimah to be anti-semitic…Ali Abunimah refers to Israelis as Zionists,.. but then he makes clear, over and over again, that Zionists are all bad people. Just go to his twitter feed and read the labels he uses for Zionists..’
Rosenberg is obviously uninformed. More and more commentators and scholars accept that Israelis are not Zionists, they are actually the product of the Zionist project. Most Israelis do not even understand what Zionism stands for. Zionism is the promise to bring about a Jewish national home. Once the Jewish State was founded (1948) Zionism finished its role as far as Israeli Jews are concerned. Thus, Zionism is now largely a Jewish Diaspora discourse. Accordingly, the debate between Zionists and the so-called ‘anti-’ has little relevance to Israeli politics or practice. In short, Rosenberg is wrong, yet why Abunimah misleads his readers, referring to Israelis as Zionists, remains unclear.
Abunimah may not be the most sophisticated theoretical commentator around, but he certainly monitors Israeli society and understands its politics.
Abunimah refers to ‘Israelis’ as ‘Zionists’ only because his operation is sustained financially and politically by Jewish ‘anti-Zionists’ and the Jewish Left. Abunimah refers to Israelis as ‘Zionists’ only because he knows that telling the truth, uttering the ‘J’ word, may cost him dearly.
October 14, 2013
Former Israeli Navy chief detained at Heathrow
Ynet just reported that commander of Israeli Navy during Operation Cast Lead and raid on Gaza-bound Marmara ship held for questioning upon arrival in UK
Maj.-Gen. (res.) Eli Marom, who served as the commander of the Israeli Navy during Operation Cast Lead and during the raid on the Gaza-bound Mavi Marmara vessel, was held for questioning at around noon Monday at London's Heathrow Airport upon his arrival in Britain.
Israel war criminal beware!!!
October 13, 2013
The Milibands, The BBC And The Proletariat
By Gilad Atzmon
Last week, The Daily Mail’s expose of Ralph Militant’s political views provoked strong reactions from the Miliband family, the Labour Party, The Guardian and the BBC.
The Mail article included a few quotes by Ralph Miliband, showing Miliband to be a radical cosmopolitan Marxist. So what else is new? Throughout his entire adult life Ralph had indeed been a radical cosmopolitan devoted to ‘progressive’ international working class politics and naturally opposed to any nationalism and local patriotism. However The Daily Mail was soon to learn, at its cost, that elaborating on the non-patriotic nature intrinsic to cosmopolitanism is practically forbidden in 2013 ‘free’ Britain.
The Mail revealed that in 1940, when Ralph was 17-year-old he wrote in his diary: “The Englishman is a rabid nationalist. They are perhaps the most nationalist people in the world…you sometimes want them almost to lose (the war) to show them how things are. They have the greatest contempt for the Continent…To lose their empire would be the worst possible humiliation.” Well, I’d guess that many 17 year old Marxists at that time could have expressed such views. But Miliband remained a devoted Marxist into adulthood and indeed for his whole life and maintained this cosmopolitan ideology into old age right up to his death. This may be unusual but it is not a crime.
My One and Only Love — Book Review
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http://www.boldfacenews.com/one-love-book-review/
Of Showbiz Kings and Kosher Pigs with Wings
My One and Only Love is a wild romp through the vast expanse of Gilad Atzmon’s imagination that leaves you breathless with laughter.
If you read Atzmon’s Guide to the Perplexed you are familiar with his satire power, if you read The Wandering Who? you know his philosophy, humanism and unflinching quest for truth and beauty, wherever it leads.
This book reveals other facets of Atzmon’s talent. One is his humor, of Rabelaisian robustness, life-afirming even in sarcastic wit, often reminiscent of Bukowsky. Nothing human is alien to him nor taboo and barred from examination: beauty, ugliness, sexuality, greed, pretense, opportunism, nationalistic cant, hypocrisy and, of course, as expected from the pioneer of the Jewish identity syndrome studies, Jewish supremacism.
Another is his memorable delineation of characters, not two-dimensional cardboard effigies but live incarnations of Israeli typology, each with his or her individual voice and diction.
There is Avrum, the showbiz entrepreneur, resourceful “fixer” always looking for a “combina” to make some “lokshen,” while patriotically helping “Long Arm,” the feared Israeli intelligence service, to abduct a Nazi war criminal from South America by hiding him in a “Gulliver violin case.”
October 12, 2013
Yossi Gurvitz: On Jewish 'Ethics' (must watch)
Israeli writer Yossi Gurvitz on genocide, child abuse, the Goy hatred, the Torah, the Talmud and Israel..
Jews Are Not a Race But Jewish Identity is Racist
By Gilad Atzmon
We were informed this week that the four major female founders of the Ashkenazis show roots in Europe 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. So do most of the minor founders, the study found. Only 8% of the mitochondrial DNA shows signs of being from the Near East.
Gil Atzmon, of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, who led the research, argued that there had been some evidence of mass conversions, especially of women, to Judaism throughout the Mediterranean in the past. That resulted in about 6 million citizens, or a tenth of the Roman population, who were Jewish.
The practical meaning of this information is simple and far from being new. Ashkenazi Jews are not Semitic and have no roots in Palestine. Needless to say that neither Alan Dershowitz nor Max Blumenthal or myself look particularly oriental. So if Jews are neither a race nor Semitic what is it that bonds them together? The answer is an extreme form of tribal ethnocentrism AKA racism. In short, Jews are not a race but Jewish secular culture is racist to the bone.
Hannah Arendt and Jewish Intolerance
A film review by Gilad Atzmon
In 1961, German-Jewish philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt travelled to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker. Margarethe von Trotta’s new docudrama 'Hannah Arendt' tells the story of her journey and the controversy following her report.
What Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) saw in Eichmann was not stupidity, but actually a thoughtlessness – a complete incapacity for independent critical thought. Arendt understood that it was within this thoughtlessness that the evil becomes banal as opposed to being a sinister premeditated crime. The ‘banality of evil’, as such, is the structure that allows the ethical to fade away and blind compliance to take over. To a certain extent, the banality of evil is that crude obedience that actually removes responsibility from the perpetrator and turns genocide into a mechanical operation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTQNWgZVctM
The Jewish community was outraged by Arendt’s reading of both the Holocaust and the Eichmann trial, and objected to the portrayal of Eichmann as an obedient officer within a state bureaucratic apparatus. They protested against the instrumental notion of the ‘Banality of Evil.’ They wanted revenge and wanted to see Eichmann as the arch exemplary case of a ‘hatemonger antisemite’. But Arendt suggested he wasn’t that at all. According to Arendt, Eichmann's appearance in Jerusalem proved that he was just a minor cog in a big machine.
October 11, 2013
October 2, 2013
NYC is my Mecca
By Gilad Atzmon
As an Israeli boy of a patriotic background, I was destined to become a military man. But then, at seventeen, as I was getting myself ready for my IDF compulsory service, the unexpected happened. On a late night jazz radio programme, I heard Charlie Park first time.
I was knocked down. The music was more organic, poetic, sentimental and wilder than anything I had ever heard before. Parker’s music was intense but it was as well romantic and even melancholic at times.
It was then and there that I realised, my upbringing, Zion, and the IDF notwithstanding, that NYC was my Mecca and Jazz was my Jihad – a spiritual struggle aiming at beauty.
As I grew older, I realised that America was far from being perfect, and it wasn’t necessarily as brilliant as the music of Bird, Ellington or Coltrane’s. Nevertheless it was clear to me that there was something in America and NYC that brought about jazz, that unique combustible mixture of imaginary freedom confronted with harsh oppressive capitalism, urban complexity, all sparked by a lot of talent.
Yesterday I was listening to the legendary Jimmy Cobb playing at Fat Cat. Jimmy is not young, he played with Miles Davis and John Coltrane back in the 1950’s. But his spirit is still very young. And he was surrounded by young musicians who keep jazz alive against all odds.
[image error]This weekend I will record in Manhattan with Ben Meigners on upright bass, and Jason Brown on the drums. I am very excited about it. I rarely record in America, but when I do, it is a special event in my career. The recording sessions are open to the public but the number of seats is obviously limited. This would be the first ever recording of this trio. But you could also be a part of it! To book a place: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/455960
