The UK’s pro-Israel lobby in context.

[American Dream]

http://geniza.wordpress.com/2007/12/29/ ... m-part-vi/

Atzmon’s anti-Semitism, Part VI

Imagine someone wrote a paragraph like this:

“I don’t want to talk about blacks today. Instead, I am going to talk about a purely hypothetical, abstract, imaginary group I’ll call the B-people. The B-people are lazy and shiftless but they all have natural rhythm. The B-people eat lots of watermelon and have squads of nasty little illegitimate babies and rob liquor shops to pay for their drug habits . . . ”

And so on. And imagine that the writer then went on to list a long series of the classic signifiers of the negatively stereotyped black.

Then let’s suppose the writer claimed, “I couldn’t possibly be a racist! This is not by any means a racist post. I specifically say that I am not talking about blacks. I am dealing with abstractions, I am simply engaging in pure ideology. Anyone who accuses me of racism must have an ulterior motive — in fact, they must be racist themselves.”

Would anyone buy that excuse?

And the answer is apparently yes, as long as the target is not blacks but Jews.

Gilad Atzmon on the “J-people.”

Here is Atzmon on the “J-people” doing all those traditional “J-people” things — running the government, owning the media, in charge of the October Revolution:

“For them, it is all about winning, they are set to win, unconditional success is brewed into their spirit both culturally and religiously. But they can never win, by the time they win they get lost. They stop being victims. Occasionally it looks as if they are almost there, you can see them running the show, running American political life, running American show business, running the ‘new middle East’, running the Communist revolution but then, as it appears, something always goes wrong. Suddenly, completely out of the blue, everyone around is standing up against the plot. As it seems, they always win the battles but somehow manage to lose the war, very much like contemporary America. Is it a coincidence? I don’t think so.”

But this transparent rhetorical gimmick allows Atzmon to pour his anti-Semitic heart out in other, creepier, ways as well.

To Atzmon, the “J-people” can’t be loved:

“But then, let me tell you, there is only one thing they can’t cope with, one thing that drives them mad. Something that never settles peacefully in their well protected binary world. It is called love. If you love them you kill them.”

To Atzmon, the “J-people” are “fueled by negation.”

To Atzmon, the “J-people” are driven by a need to be hated, critically wounded psychologically, and lack the power of empathy:

“Don’t you ever forget, they are doing all those horrible things not because they are that horrifying, they just feel an urgent need to remind you that you really hate them. When you meet them in person you learn that they are not that vicious, they are just slightly immature beings due to the fact that they are not very competent in social life, they are born chosen. They live in a segregated mental ghetto. They never learned how to handle human company, they know very little about empathy.”

Atzmon is not — as he likes to claim — working in the realm of “pure ideology,” but in pure racist garbage. Because he dresses that garbage up in pseudo-scholastic terminology, however, there are those (including, unfortunately, at Indymedia UK) who are prepared to give him a free pass

[solace]

"Canada is the first country to condemn the remarks of Richard Falk,"

Too bad the increasingly antisemitic UK didn't as well. Uk? That's where you live innit?

http://www.adl.org/press-center/press-r ... itism.html

[bluenoseclaret]

Arch-Zionist gets top BBC strategy job ......By Nureddin Sabir

The incoming director-general of the BBC, Tony Hall, has put a notorious Zionist apologist, James Purnell, in charge of strategy at the corporation.

Mr Hall is due to take up his job as BBC boss on 2 April. He replaces George Entwistle, who resigned last November following the controversy over a report broadcast on BBC television’s “Newsnight” programme which falsely implicated Tory financier Lord McAlpine in the North Wales child abuse scandal.

James Purnell, currently a senior producer at programme makers Rare Day and adviser to business consultants BCG, served as secretary of state for culture in Gordon Brown’s Labour government.

In his new post at the BBC, he will be in charge of the corporation’s policy, strategy, digital services, public affairs, communications, marketing and audience research – in other words, pretty much everything that matters in the BBC.

That is why anyone who cares about fair and objective reporting of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict should be gravely concerned, for Mr Purnell has a rock-solid record as a stooge of Israel.

Israel lobby background

From 2002 to 2004 James Purnell served as chairman of Labour Friends of Israel – heading a Zionist lobby group, it would seem, is a prerequisite for high office in Britain.

In December 2002 he paid a week-long visit to Israel, courtesy of Labour Friends of Israel. Upon his return to Britain he embarked upon an Israeli propaganda campaign aimed at persuading the British public that black is white and white is black – i.e. that the Palestinian victims of the Israeli occupation are in fact the aggressors and that the Israeli occupiers, colonizers and oppressors of the Palestinians are, perversely, the innocent victims of the Palestinians.

Here is an example, published in the Guardian newspaper, in which he describes the apartheid wall almost as an angelic act of peace and benevolence:

From Britain, the wall looks like a land grab by the Israeli right – but from inside Israel (from the green line), it looks like a doveish move, which recognizes the legitimacy of two states, and seeks a less bloody way of controlling terrorism.

Mr Purnell is also on record describing critics of Israel as closet anti-Semites. In a letter published in Prospect magazine in December 2004, he said:

… As the (non-Jewish) chairman of Labour Friends of Israel for the last two years, I have been shocked by the occasional demonization of Israel that I’ve encountered. Israel’s government makes mistakes. So do the leaders of the Palestinians. But some people are trying to turn Israel into a global villain, the new pariah regime to take the place of apartheid-era South Africa.

I find it hard to reconcile that image to the reality on the ground – Israel is a democracy, suffering terrorist attacks, surrounded by countries that don’t recognize its existence, the victim of well-funded terrorist organizations that preach anti-Semitic hate. The Palestinians deserve a viable state, and are suffering real poverty and hardship. There is suffering on both sides-neither can solve this problem without the other.

So when some people talk as if Israel is entirely to blame, I ask why. The only answer I can find is that there is something deep in our cultural memory that makes us disposed to blame Jews. That tendency was put in its box by the holocaust. But today it re-emerges-occasionally, but persistently. I would call it passive, or unexamined, anti-Semitism.

Readers will find Mr Purnell’s equating of Palestinian and Israeli suffering bizarre and offensive, to put it politely. As Stuart Littlewood points out:

For the benefit of those who prattle about terror killings, here is the score. In the 12 years since the first Intifada (September 2000) up to the end of September 2012 Israel killed 6,550 Palestinians in their homeland. Of these, 1,335 were children. Over the same period Palestinians killed 590 Israelis in their homeland, including 85 children. This is a kill-ratio of 11 to 1. When it comes to children the Israelis are even more proficient, achieving a kill-ratio of nearly 16 to 1.

These figures, which come from the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, don’t even take account of the slaughter perpetrated by Israel during its terror attacks on Gaza in November 2012.

Continuing BBC bias

The BBC’s history of bias towards Israel is well documented, and the reasons for this bias have long been the subject of serious academic studies, the best known of which is Greg Philo’s and Mike Berry’s More Bad News from Israel. In fact, an independent report commissioned by the BBC’s own governing body concluded in 2006 that BBC coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “does not consistently constitute a full and fair account of the conflict but rather, in important respects, presents an incomplete and in that sense misleading picture”.

The appointment of arch-Zionist James Purnell to the BBC’s top policy and strategy job will make sure that it stays that way.

http://www.redressonline.com/2013/02/ar ... ategy-job/

[American Dream]

http://geniza.wordpress.com/2007/12/24/ ... -part-iii/

Atzmon’s anti-Semitism, Part III


Why did the Nazis hate the Jews — was it because of the Nazis, or because of the Jews?

According to Gilad Atzmon’s essay, and again in the interview in which he defends the essay, it’s the latter.

“Seemingly, it is the personification of WW2 and the Holocaust that blinded the Israelis and their supporters from internalising the real meaning of the conditions and the events that led towards their destruction in the first place. Would the Zionists understand the real meaning of their Holocaust, the contemporary Israelite may be able to prevent the destruction that may be awaiting them in the future.”

Original source.

Atzmon is building an analogy here, clearly equating what’s happening now with the Jews to what happened with the Jews before the Holocaust. In particuar, Atzmon suggests that Jews are risking bringing some future form of Holocaust upon themselves by acting like Jews did before WWII — by making themselves “unpopular” the way the Jews of Europe made themselves “unpopular.”

It is this charge — in Atzmonean “history,” it’s the Jews who made the Nazis hate them — which caused such an explosive wave of opposition to Atzmon’s essay. And deservedly so; it’s simply a morally appalling thing to say. Tony Greenstein attacks Atzmon’s stance directly, as I’ve quoted here:

“The article justifies the holocaust by suggesting that it was the victims of the Nazis who brought the catastrophe on themselves because of their unpopularity".

To be clear: by “justifies the Holocaust,” Greenstein doesn’t mean that he believes Atzmon thinks the Holocaust was a good and justifiable thing, but rather that Atzmon believes that the Nazis were, to some degree, justified in hating the Jews, that the Jews were the source of their own “unpopularity.” Atzmon, perhaps characteristically, has chosen a far different interpretation, interpreting Greenstein as claiming “Atzmon thinks the Holocaust was justified.” Anyone who has ever watched a politican dissemble has seen this technique, parrying an opposition attack by recasting it into something ridiculous and then defending one’s self from the parody while ignoring the original charge.

As I’ll detail in another post, Greenstein’s statement is not a misinterpretation of what Atzmon means; in the interview he gave to Indymedia, Atzmon returns again to this point in more than enough detail and clarity to prove that Greenstein’s interpretation is actually what Atzmon says: that the Holocaust happened not to Jews but because of Jews.

Atzmon shifts blame away from Nazis and onto Jews. Like the “Khazaria” fairy tale but much more appalling, Atzmon’s blame-shifting is another example of how right wing, anti-Semitic thought gets sugared over with leftist vocabulary for leftist consumption. And the essay’s continuing presence on Indymedia UK is another example of how Indymedia UK is allowing itself, out of fear of “Zionist censorship,” to become a conduit for anti-Semitism despite the many, loud protests by those who have taken the time to scrape the sugar coating away and show what lies beneath.

[bluenoseclaret]

AD...do everyone a favour and fuck off.

Atzmon’s anti-Semitism, Part III...what has that to do with the BBC.

Kro

[American Dream]

Atzmon’s anti-Semitism, Part III...what has that to do with the BBC.

Weren't you the one who posted Gilad Atzmon?

And you are totally ok with the racism in his work?

[bluenoseclaret]

AD...Are you happy with your chosen racism.?

Read about yourself.....Controlled Opposition

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/12/ ... pposition/

"The Progressive Racists"....doing more harm than good.

Too scared to read the article.!

[American Dream]

AD...Are you happy with your chosen racism.?

Talk about changing the subject!

This means nothing.

What are you so afraid of?


On Edit: Are you taking lessons from slimmouse on how to retroactively edit your posts after your inconsistencies are exposed?

What are you so afraid of?

[Searcher08]

Can I suggest re-focusing on the OP?

Going down the road of debating Atzmon on RI has been done before and at great cost to the community.
He is an extremely contentious thinker and subject personally, many of his opponents are also extremely contentious, the manner of debate becomes an issue in itself and personalised and toxic. I don't think any of the people on either side of Atzmon are in any way convinced by what the others are saying. On an established progressive board like Mondoweiss, threads about his writings were debated intelligently and endlessly.

[American Dream]

Why not talk about how racism and bigotry are conflated with "anti-Zionism"?- that seems extremely relevant to bluenoseclaret's slippery and reactionary position here...

[Wombaticus Rex]

AD...Are you happy with your chosen racism.?

Read about yourself.....Controlled Opposition

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/12/ ... pposition/

"The Progressive Racists"....doing more harm than good.

Too scared to read the article.!

You know, even by the feral standards we live with here, you're getting really snotty and venomous lately. Take a week off, find some better targets for your anger.

[seemslikeadream]

Can I suggest re-focusing on the OP?

Going down the road of debating Atzmon on RI has been done before and at great cost to the community.
He is an extremely contentious thinker and subject personally, many of his opponents are also extremely contentious, the manner of debate becomes an issue in itself and personalised and toxic. I don't think any of the people on either side of Atzmon are in any way convinced by what the others are saying. On an established progressive board like Mondoweiss, threads about his writings were debated intelligently and endlessly.

that would be nice since AD inserted DI (extreme off topic) name in this thread it has become toxic ...of course that is what he intended to do...and I am taking responsibility for my part in that

[Searcher08]

Why not talk about how racism and bigotry are conflated with "anti-Zionism"?- that seems extremely relevant to bluenoseclaret's slippery and reactionary position here...

Well, obviously that is up to you, but the point is a bit moot since
a) he isnt around and
b) my attempts to get things back to the original post failed and
c) You are now doing CopyPasta from geniza

I want to focus then on for myself the item of value from this thread (as well as bph's interesting post about law) which was our exchange about Handlandians and TruthLandians and which actually, I am still reflecting with how to best continue; the last post to me you posted was in NVC - and which I have been struggling to formulate a reply to - your NVC Giraffe language was most appreciated and was spot-on. I felt understood and heard. Yay!-
However I have been struggling to formulate a reply to the second part. I am not sure if you are familiar with University of Chicago Prof Gene Gendlin and Focusing? -


if you are... when I try to reply to you, I go into an experience of 'felt-sense' ie prior to emotion or descriptive language.

In NVC terms, I am finding it really hard to communicate in 'Giraffe language' and really want to.

[coffin_dodger]

I'm interested in this subject - particularly the conditioning of thought regarding questioning the official, set-in-stone narrative - because that's what I like to do, question everything. This is one of the very last taboos about which discussion (or discourse) is still firmly blocked by the vitriolic anger of the system meme, enforced by society members themselves, even if/when they have no skin in the game. I find this disturbing. And intriguing.

Thou shalt not discuss that which we deem inappropriate. We are right, you are heretic to suggest otherwise. It is case-closed and no further investigation shall be warranted. If you persist, we shall brand you 'anti-x' and lay the deaths of millions at your door as though you had pulled the levers yourself. We shall paint you as condoning mass extermination. You will be cast as a psychopath with intent.

Indeed, this is powerful mojo.

And quite fascinating to watch.

[slimmouse]

I'm interested in this subject - particularly the conditioning of thought regarding questioning the official, set-in-stone narrative - because that's what I like to do, question everything. This is one of the very last taboos about which discussion (or discourse) is still firmly blocked by the vitriolic anger of the system meme, enforced by society members themselves, even if/when they have no skin in the game. I find this disturbing. And intriguing.

Thou shalt not discuss that which we deem inappropriate. We are right, you are heretic to suggest otherwise. It is case-closed and no further investigation shall be warranted. If you persist, we shall brand you 'anti-x' and lay the deaths of millions at your door as though you had pulled the levers yourself. We shall paint you as condoning mass extermination. You will be cast as a psychopath with intent.

Indeed, this is powerful mojo.

And quite fascinating to watch.

I see it more as crappy advertisments, interrupting interesting discourse.