Being Ahead of Time

FEBRUARY 17, 2020 BY GILAD ATZMON

By Gilad Atzmon

https://www.unz.com/

In my recent book, Being in Time, I analyse Jewish controlled opposition. I argue that some self-identified Jews end up being on both polar extremes of every debate that is even mildly relevant to Jewish existence: Those who have recently been disturbed about the Jews who are at the centre of the impeachment trial have also found that Jews hold key positions on Trump’s defense team. Those who accuse Jews of pushing immigration and multiculturalism can’t deny that Trump’s senior policy advisor on immigration is Stephen Miller and that breitbart.com was “conceived in Jerusalem.” The Palestinians’ solidarity movement is dominated by a few well organized Jewish solidarity groups that do little but divert the discourse from the Palestinian right of return and exhaust the movement in their relentless witch-hunting of truth speakers and seekers.

In Being in Time, I point out that as soon as an issue or event is identified as a potential Jewish problem, a Jewish satellite dissent emerges to ‘calm things down.’ As soon as Corbyn became the modern Amalek (‘existential threat’), Jews for Jeremywas formed to dismantle the idea that Jews hate Corbyn collectively. Those who view Capitalism as a Jewish construct are similarly reminded that Marx was also a Jew. In Being in Time I argue that none of this is necessarily conspiratorial. It is only natural for Jews to denounce the crimes that are committed on ‘their behalf’ by a state that defines itself as ‘The Jewish State.’ The same applies to Jews who are genuinely tormented by the vast over representation of Jews in some problematic spheres. Yet, the outcome of all this is potentially volatile: every crucial debate regarding the West and its future; Globalism, Neocons wars, capitalism, immigration, multiculturalism, Israel and so on, is too frequently reduced into an internal Jewish exchange.

It was therefore just a matter of time before some Jews would admit that the involvement of a few prominent Jewish celebrities in some spectacular sex crimes is becoming rather embarrassing and even dangerous for the Jews.

It seems as if Jonah Goldberg has launched the ‘Jews against pedophilia’ campaign. Today, The Jewish World Review published an article titled “French pedo flap a cautionary tale for OUR cultural aristocrats.” In the commentary, Goldberg digs into the activities of Jewish radical ideology, along with those of the notorious paedophile, Gabriel Matzneff.

Goldberg was triggered by a New York Times article that examined the rise and fall of the paedophilia devotee. Matzneff is 83, an old man now, but he has been the darling of the French literary world and media for decades: his work was supported by leading newspapers and literary publications. “He’d appear on highbrow TV shows,” Goldberg writes, where he’d “regale interviewers and audiences with the sublime pleasures of having sex with children in France and on sex tours of southeast Asia.”

In his book “Under 16 Years Old,” Matzneff wrote, “To sleep with a child, it’s a holy experience, a baptismal event, a sacred adventure.”

But the contrast Goldberg draws between Jeffrey Epstein and Matzneff is surprisingly clumsy: “The well-connected billionaire spent vast sums to keep his sexual abuses at least somewhat secret. Matzneff not only confessed to his crimes, his confessions were celebrated as literary contributions.” I feel the need to remind Goldberg that nicknaming one’s plane the “Lolita Express” is hardly an attempt to hide one’s sexual morbidity and crimes. If anything Matzneff is like Epstein in that both celebrated a peculiar sense of impunity. Needless to mention, no Jewish outlet denounced either of them or their not very secretive activities before they were caught and charged.

Jewish Radicals and the role of the Orgasm

Next comes the ‘rationalisation.’ “Matzneff was a Child of 68,” Goldberg writes, “a product of the left-wing ‘May 68’ movement that shook France in the 1960s. These radicals subscribed to the idea that anything smacking of traditionalism or bourgeois morality was backward. Conventional sexual morality was part of the same rotten edifice as imperialism and racism.”

Goldberg doesn’t approve of the ‘Jewish radicals and their ideology. He reminds us that “a few years ago, Daniel Cohn-Bendit (a.k.a. Dany le Rouge), the famous former radical and leader of the European Green movement, got in hot water for his earlier writings and statements about “erotic” encounters with 5-year-olds. He (Cohn-Bendit ) dodged major consequences by disavowing his own words, saying they were merely intended to provoke.”

Goldberg is a well-known and successful writer, he could have published his criticism of Matzneff and Jewish radicals in numerous national American news outlets but, presumably he made the decision to use a Jewish outlet. Whether intentionally or not, Goldberg provides an insight into Jewish survival strategy in general and Jewish controlled opposition in particular. Criticizing radical philosophy and the advocacy of pedophilia on ideological grounds by Jews in a Jewish media outlet conveys the image that Jews can deal with their problems. The goyim should let it go or, even better, move on.

But Goldberg’s account is either mistaken or misleading. The sex revolution that branched into advocating paedophilia wasn’t invented in 1968. Its radical Jewish roots take us back to the 1920-30s and, in particular, to the early work of Wilhelm Reich.

The Following is an excerpt from Being in Time in which I delve into Wilhelm Reich and his ‘genital utopia.’

In his 1933 work, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Jewish Marxist and Freudian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich attempted to explain the striking victory of ‘reactionary’ Fascism over ‘progressive’ Communism. Reich was desperate to rescue the relevance of revolutionary Marxism. In order to do so he formed a new ‘post Marxist’ theoretical outlook to explain why the Germans of his time favoured ‘authoritarianism’ over a ‘preferable’ communist revolution.

According to Reich, the attraction of reactionary and conservative politics and the inclination towards fascism is driven by a long history of rigid, authoritarian patriarchy which affects the family, parenting, primal education and eventually, society as a whole.
Of course, the remarkable popularity of fascism in Europe could have provided the scientifically-orientated Reich with a clear refutation of Marxist working class politics, theories and predictions. After all, dialectical Marxism had failed as a social theory as well as a methodical prophecy. But for some reason, he, like many other Jewish intellectuals of his time, decided to stick with Marx. Hoping to rescue what was left of dialectical materialism, and insisting that true communist political revolution would prevail once sexual repression was overthrown, Reich synthesized Marx and Freud into a ‘Sex Revolution.’

Wilhelm Reich posited that sexual liberation on a mass scale would save Marxist dogmatism and working people as well. In chapter five of The Mass Psychology of Fascism, he declared war on the patriarchal and conservative family which he saw as being at the core of mass conservatism: “From the standpoint of social development,” Reich wrote, “the family cannot be considered the basis of the authoritarian state, only as one of the most important institutions which support it.” The traditional family is a “central reactionary germ cell, the most important place of reproduction of the reactionary and conservative individual. Being itself caused by the authoritarian system, the family becomes the most important institution for its conservation.”

In the eyes of the neo-Marxist affection, both romanticism and traditional family values were obstacles to socialist reform and Reich’s vehicle towards the new world order was … orgasm! In his 1927 study, The Function of the Orgasm, he came to the conclusion that: “there is only one thing wrong with neurotic patients: the lack of full and repeated sexual satisfaction.” In the hands of Reich, the Marx-Freud hybrid was leading to what some critical cynics dubbed “genital utopia.”

Reich believed that for women within the patriarchal society, sex was within the realm of duty and/or restricted to procreation. “The maintenance of the authoritarian family institution requires more than economic dependence of wife and children on husband and father. This dependence can be tolerated only under the condition that the consciousness of being a sexual being is extinguished as far as possible in women and children. The woman is not supposed to be a sexual being, only the producer of children.”(The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich pg 56 37. Ibid pg 56)

Within the traditional society, the woman was robbed of any libidinal consciousness: “This idealization of motherhood is essentially a means of keeping women from developing a sexual consciousness and from breaking through the barriers of sexual repression, of keeping alive their sexual anxieties and guilt feelings. The very existence of woman as a sexual being would threaten authoritarian ideology; her recognition and social affirmation would mean its collapse.” Women were mere baby factories, who had only an instrumental role because: “Imperialistic wars require that there be no rebellion in the women against the function that is imposed on them, that of being nothing but child-bearing machines.” This description of the woman and the family fits the traditional Jewish orthodox family rather better than, say, the German, French, Italian or Spanish family cell.

But Wilhelm Reich wasn’t only a dialectic social revolutionary, he was also a pragmatist. He invented the Orgone Energy Accumulator, a wooden box about the size of a telephone booth, lined with metal and insulated with steel wool. The Orgone itself was a vague concept: an esoteric energy, a universal life force that was massless yet omnipresent and promised to charge up the body with the life force that circulated in the atmosphere and which he christened “orgone energy.” His Orgone box promised to improve “orgastic potency” and, by extension, physical and mental health . Thus, the newly liberated Western subject was invited to experience the true meaning of Marx and Freud through sweating towards full emancipation by means of accumulating ‘Orgone energy’ in this wooden box.

Those who watched Woody Allen’s comedy film Sleeper (1973) probably remember the Orgasmatron – the orgasm inducing machine. In Allen’s satirical take on Reich’s Orgone box, it is actually the authoritarian regime that encourages its citizens to emancipate themselves by means of their genitalia. In Allen’s prophetic movie, the orgasm, like consumerism is a reward from the oppressive regime that diverts the masses’ attention from their existential misery.

The ‘authoritarian’ Germans, both fascist and communist, quickly expelled Reich from their ranks. By 1934, even Freud didn’t want anything to do with Reich. The progressive Americans however, tolerated his ideas, at least for a while. Reich was eventually arrested and died in an American prison leaving behind some radical minds, still convinced that the Orgone box was acting as a greenhouse for cosmic, libidinal energy. Within the free-ranging pornographic realm in which we live, the universe has become an extended Orgone container: pornography is free to all; genital sex is deemed almost Victorian; heterosexuality, at a certain stage, was on the verge of becoming a marginal adventure. And yet authoritarianism hasn’t disappeared. Quite the opposite; to borrow Marx’s metaphor – it is sex and pornography rather than religion that have become the opium of the masses. And yet, this ‘progressive’ universe in which we live didn’t defeat the inclination towards violence. We are killing millions by proxy in the name of moral interventionism and Coca Cola.

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Code-Panic: A Controlled Opposition Spectacle

JANUARY 12, 2020BY GILAD ATZMON

by Gilad Atzmon

Ariel Gold is the national co-director of CODEPINK, an American female  “grassroots peace and social justice movement” that claims to  work “to end U.S.-funded wars and occupations.” Ariel claims to support the Palestinians and oppose Israel. She has published  articles in Jewish progressive outlets such as the Forward, Tikkun Magazine and Mondoweiss.

On January 3rd, just a few hours after the world became aware of the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani by an American drone attack,  Ariel, the so called ‘Jewish dissenter’ rushed to post the following tweet:

“Loving reminder to folks rightfully horrified the US attack on Iran: please don’t frame this as being as being done to please Israel. This is Donald Trump and his band of US war hawks, period. To suggest Jews are pulling the strings is nothing short of antisemitism.”

Ariel Gold אריאל NO WAR WITH IRAN @ArielElyseGold

Loving reminder to folks rightfully horrified the US attack on Iran: please don’t frame this as being as being done to please Israel. This is Donald Trump and his band of US warhawks, period. To suggest Jews are pulling the strings is nothing short of antisemitism.3031:37 PM – Jan 3, 2020Twitter Ads info and privacy385 people are talking about this

The Jewish progressive activist basically insisted that any such criticism of  Israel was ‘antisemitism.’ She was also naive to prematurely vindicate the Jewish State of involvement in the unlawful assassination: a crime that may lead to unpredictable and lethal consequences in the near future.

Today’s news reports that Israel was deeply involved in the targeted assassination of the Iranian general. The Times of Israel ‘s headline this morning reads:

“Israeli intel helped US carry out strike that killed Iran’s Soleimani.” The article states that “Information provided by Jewish state confirmed that Quds Force leader was at Baghdad airport before missile strike, NBC News reports.”

Amongst my sins is the argument I have made for almost two decades: for the solidarity and peace movements to be genuine, functional and effective they must be emancipated from the grip of the so called Jewish progressives. As things stand at the moment,  solidarity with the oppressed is restricted by the sensitivities of the oppressor. 

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Transcending ‘Chosenness’: Journey of an ‘ex-Jew’

September 11, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

GA: TRT published yesterday this extensive interview. Those who struggle with my ideas or fail to understand where I come from, may want to read this article. It clarifies where I stand on most relevant issues.

An interview By Nafees Mahmud

How a former Israeli citizen Gilad Atzmon left Israel and how becoming a musician helped him understand Palestinian suffering.

 

LONDON — If you are despised by both conservative Zionists and liberal anti-Zionists, it can only mean one thing: you are Gilad Atzmon.

Born in Israel in 1963 into a Zionist household, he saw his birthplace as the Jewish promised land and says he was expected to serve and cement the Israeli ideology of Jewish supremacy.

However, at age 17, he was mesmerised by the sounds of African American jazz musician Charlie Parker. As a passionate Israeli, this challenged what he’d believed up until that point: only Jews produce greatness.

Serving as a paramedic and musician in the Israeli military during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, he witnessed the immense suffering of Arabs.

At this point, he says, he began to view life “from an ethical, rather than a Zionist point of view.”

Years later he moved to Britain to study philosophy and launched his career as a jazz musician. Today, he attempts to enlighten and unite people through his art.

Yet his work as a writer examining Jewish identity has seen him described as a peddler of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. He argues that this is an attempt to censor honest analysis of, and reflection upon, Jewishness’ immense impact on mass culture, politics and global economics through the likes of The Frankfurt School and Milton Friedman.

As Israel increasingly meets international criticism and boycott, Atzmon believes his former homeland can only be seriously challenged for its injustices, if it is understood in the wider context of Jewish identity politics – a context he is trying to remove himself from. TRT World spoke to him to find out why.

 

TRT WORLD: As a musician, how do you feel about Lana Del Ray and many others cancelling their performances at the Meteor Festival in Israel following pleas from the BDS campaign?

Gilad Atzmon: It’s a beautiful thing.

I don’t support BDS mounting pressure on artists, but I think it is well appreciated when artists refuse to perform in states where there are so many crimes against humanity. I myself decided to boycott Israel a long time before the BDS movement was born. Since 1996, I haven’t visited my home country.

There have been major stories in the news this year regarding Israel. One of the most significant was the Jewish nation-state bill. What do you make of that?

GA: It confirms what we’ve known for more than a while: Israel is the Jewish state and everything that is happening in Israel should be understood within the context of its Jewishness. It confirms what I’ve been saying for many years. We must dig into the notions of Jews, Jewishness and Judaism to understand the difference between these three and the relationship between them.

Break that down for us.

GA: I make a clear differentiation between Jews, the people, which I regard as an innocent category; Jewishness, the ideology; and Judaism, the religion.

I argue that both Jews and Judaism are innocent categories. The fact you are born a Jew doesn’t make you a war criminal or a supremacist. Also, Judaism is a relatively innocent notion. We know the only genuine Jewish collective who really operate actively for Palestine are Torah Jews, Orthodox Jews.

When it comes to Jewishness, this is complicated.  I had a debate about this with a supremacist Jew yesterday and his argument was there is no such thing as Jewishness – it changes along the years. I couldn’t agree more, elasticity is inherent to Jewishness.  One thing that remains constant is the exceptionalism. Jewishness is different explorations of the notion of “chosenness.

” Some Jews feel they are chosen because they are elected by God, some Jews feel they are chosen because they are Bolsheviks, and a week later they can feel chosen because they are supporting a free market – like Milton Friedman. They can feel chosen because they are religious, and they can feel chosen because they are secular. It is this exceptionalism that is the core of “chosenness,” that is racially driven, that I believe is the common ground for all Jewish cultures.

This is why I have never in my life referred to Jews biologically, nor as a race, nor ethnicity. But I believe supremacy is something that is essential to Jewishness. This is why instead of talking about “Jews” I talk about the people who identify “politically” as Jews.

Gilad Atzmon (Tali Atzmon/)

You’ve made a 180 degree turn from what Israel represents, but tell us about your childhood during which you say you were heavily influenced by your Zionist grandfather.

GA: I don’t think you can talk in my case about 180, 45 or even 360 degree turns. I see my role as a philosopher, and as a philosopher, my job is to refine questions rather than subscribe to or recycle slogans. I’m working now on Zionism, and I find – this is interesting – you’ll be the first one I explore this idea with. I grew up in a society that saw itself as a revolutionary society. I was subject to an ultranationalist upbringing driven by complete contempt towards the diaspora Jew, something I didn’t understand because I was growing up in Israel and I didn’t know any diaspora Jews. But the diaspora Jews were seen by us as a bunch of capitalists, unsocial abusers of the universe, and we were born to become ordinary people – workers. My father was a hard-working man, my mother was a hard-working woman and I was raised to be a hard-working Israeli.

Unlike the diaspora Jews who went like lambs to the slaughter in Auschwitz, we were raised to fight and, accordingly, I was happy and looking forward to dying in a war. This was my upbringing. Let me tell you: when the war came, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to die for Israel. I started to understand that something wasn’t right.

Now, I never understood what the problem was with the diaspora Jews. All I knew was that when you immigrate to Israel, we called it aliyah. Aliyah means ascending. If you leave Israel and become a diaspora Jew, it is called yerida – descending. So here, you already see within Zionism an internal concept of “chosenness;” so the Israelis are the “uber-chosen.”  What I do understand, nowadays, looking at the shift that happened in Israel after 1967, Israel gradually stopped seeing itself as the Israeli state and more and more as the Jewish state. The dichotomy between “us” the special emancipated Israelites and the diaspora Jews started to disappear.

As we became a Jewish state, we started to adopt more and more Jewish symptoms. We became victims, we started to cry about the Holocaust. When I was young, we looked at the Holocaust with contempt. We looked at the Jews who went like lambs to the slaughter with contempt. If you don’t believe me, read Tom Sergev: The Seventh Million. It’s about the million who survived the Holocaust, how badly they were treated in Israel. There are films about it. My parents tell me, and you can hear it from a lot of people, that they were not allowed to play with or bring home young survivors of the Holocaust. They were looked upon by the Israelis at the time as sub-humans. There is a film about it: Aviya’s Summer.

What I understood recently is that I was initially very enthusiastic about this Israeli revolution. I agreed with it.

I just wanted to be an ordinary human being. But as Israel was transforming into a Jewish state, I had to leave the country.

What were you taught at school about the creation of Israel?

GA: We were misled. We were told the Palestinians left willingly. I didn’t hear the word nakba until the late nineties. However, when I was in Lebanon in 1982, I started to see all the refugee camps. I started to dig into it and I realised the scale of the ethnic cleansing.

Can you share some of the things you saw?

GA: I don’t like to talk about it. But when I saw the Israeli army in Lebanon, I understood that we were not as righteous as we claim to be and this was the beginning of my transition in the early 1980s. My journey really started there.

What was the tipping point that made you leave?

GA: Very simple – the Oslo Agreement of 1993. Until that point, there was a common belief that we, the Israelis, wanted peace. When I look at the peace deal that was imposed on the Palestinians, I realised by then the Palestinians were the ones expelled from the country that I believed to be mine. I understood then that we don’t mean peace, that what Israel means by peace is security for the Jews.

This is why I am not hopeful. You will not hear me talking about resolution. Israel will be defeated into a solution by the facts on the ground.

How did music change you? It’s part of your journey away from Israel, isn’t it?

GA: It was the first time I understood that I can join a discourse that is universal – aiming at beauty – rather than being a part of an ultranationalist tribal ethos. If jazz was the music of the oppressed, I gladly joined the oppressed and learned their language and I made it into quite a successful career.

How does being a jazz musician aid your philosophical work?

GA: In my thirties, I tried to integrate Arabic music into my jazz. By then I could pretty much play any kind of music, but I realised how difficult it is for me to play Arabic music which is surprising because I grew up with Umm Kulthum, the Egyptian singer, all around me.

I found it really difficult. But then I realised that in Arab music it’s all about the primacy of the ear, as opposed to Western musical education where they put you in front of notes and you have to learn to translate the primacy of the eye. The West is obsessed with the primacy of the eye but humanity is all about the primacy of the ear.  Primacy of the ear is where ethics starts. We have to listen to each other. I made a huge effort to listen to the Palestinians and understand their plight. If you were a Jewish journalist you would say: “What about listening to the Jews?” I say listening to the Jews is not necessary because you get it all over – from the media to the Holocaust museums. But Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Libya is the holocaust that is most relevant for us now.

Tell us about some of the thinkers, philosophers and activists who have influenced you?

GA: I am disgusted by most forms of activism and I think activists have very little to contribute to our understanding. This is why they achieve nothing.  They are part of the controlled opposition. I ended up learning German philosophy. I started with Immanuel Kant and what I took from him is the ability to refine questions. Then Hegel, Nietzsche and most important, Heidegger who is the ultimate master in refining questions, and this is what I do. By refining questions, I can see the answers are flexible. They are changing as the questions are shifting.

Heidegger was about “being,” right?

GA: Obviously, but being is the goal. How do you reach the understanding of “being,” if ever? Through questioning. What is “being?” What is that thing that is unique, most fundamental to us human beings? What he called dasein. This “Being,” with a capital B, that we can never touch.

So, what were you told “Being” was when you were growing up in Israel?

GA: I guess that being an Israeli meant, at the early stage of my upbringing, being forceful, being determined, fighting for what you believe in and the willingness to sacrifice for that goal. Believe it or not, in that sense, I am 100 percent Israeli and I had to leave Israel because Israel was not Israel anymore. It stopped being Israeli. It became Jewish, and Jewishness is celebrating victimhood which is something that I would never do. I prefer to die than be a victim.

How do you describe yourself now?

GA: I aim at a universal understanding of humanism. To be a universal humanist is a challenge for everyone, it’s a task rather than a state of being. It is being inspired by the ability to see yourself as an ordinary creature. To remove yourself from any sense of privilege.

Universal humanism is not the human rights declaration, not a set of commandments. It’s an organic thing that is changing all the time and is finding itself to be more and more inclusive, and this is why you can only aspire to become one and work on it twenty-four seven rather than declare yourself to be one.

Is universal humanism not part of the cultural Marxist doctrine, which you find impedes human flourishing?

GA: On paper, yes. But in reality, definitely not. The new left, cultural Marxists – the Frankfurt School – are all people in the open who define who is in and who is out.  They invented no platforming. How can people who adhere to no platforming be universalists?

Aren’t you still seeing the world from a Jewish perspective despite trying to move beyond this?

GA: I hope not, you know. Some people would argue they see some Jewish traits in my thinking, and I accept that. The one thing that I would admit to you is that the one thing I learnt from Otto Weininger – he’s one of the people who inspired me – is that in art, self-realisation is the realisation of the world. So while a scientist looks at the world and tells us something about the world, artists close their eyes and write a poem, and through this poem we understand the world, or through a symphony – and this is the most important thing. So when I look at myself, I occasionally deconstruct the Jew that is left in me. It’s not a privilege, it’s an instrument towards developing a better understanding and a better world.

This interview has been edited for clarity

Jeremy Corbyn, Jewish Assimilation and the Lobby

August 21, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

By Gilad Atzmon

Although the following quotation is from an old text that refers to an earlier era and different geo-political conditions, it provides an impeccable analysis of the current Zionist campaign against Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party and the false alarm of antisemitsm.

“The ghettoized Ashkenazim (both in their Communist and their Zionist organizations) were inspired to obstruct emancipation by every possible device (including assassination in the last resort) while the story of their persecution was hammered, as an intimidatory warning, into the consciousness of the Western Jews and, as a rightful claim for succour, into that of the Christian West.

The Gentile politicians of the West presented these fictions to their peoples as truth, for they had found that powerful Jews, in all countries, were able to assist parties favoured by them with money, press support and votes; the return they required was support for the cause of the “persecuted” Jews in Russia and for the ‘return’ to Palestine. In effect this meant that politicians who sought these favours had to subordinate national interest to two causes ultimately destructive of all nation-states: the revolution (communism) and the ambition to acquire territory for the dominant race (Zionism).”* Douglas Reed 1955.

According to Douglas Reed the threat of antisemitism is designed primarily as a means to prevent Jewish assimilation. In The Wandering Who? I show that the fear of assimilation is not exclusive to Zionism, the Jewish political left and Jewish anti Zionism serve the same objective. By giving a place in the Jewish world to ethically inclined Jews they prevent such Jews from integrating with humanity as equals. The mechanism is straight forward: ‘You do not have to become a Goy in order to oppose Israeli criminality, you can just join JVP and oppose Israel ‘as a Jew.’ Similarly, you don’t have to oppose Corbyn’s detractors as an ordinary Labour member, you are better off celebrating your Jewish privilege and support Corbyn as a member of Jews for Jeremy or Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL).

Exclusively Jewish ‘dissenting’ bodies serve another crucial purpose: they operate to exclude gentiles from sensitive Jew-related discourse. Palestine solidarity has been dominated by Jewish ‘anti’ Zionist political bodies for more than a decade. These bodies have never been interested in solving the Palestinian plight; they have never echoed the Palestinian core demand for the right of return. Instead they have called for the ‘end of the occupation (practically legitimizing the Jewish State within pre 67 lines),’ the ‘Two States Solution,’ and BDS measures against Israel. Instead of fighting for the Palestinians’ right to return to their land, they have produced a noisy exchange between Zionists and the so-called ‘anti’s’ over Jews’ right to BDS. Thanks to the Jewish solidarity groups the discourse of the oppressed has been shaped by the sensitivities of the oppressor.

The same dynamic has been affecting Corbyn’s support campaign. Britain’s NO 1 anti racist doesn’t need a ‘kosher certificate’; from a supportive Jewish lobby. He doesn’t need the ‘as a Jew, I believe in Jeremy’ declarations. The same dynamic that obliterated the Palestinian Solidarity movement has so far had a disastrous effect on Corbyn’s supporters. They foolishly positioned  the ‘good Jews’ at the forefront of their campaign and let the campaign for the leader of the largest British national party be reduced to an internal Jewish spat in a greater Judeo-centric battle against assimilation.

Reed continues, “The Gentile politicians of the West presented these fictions (of Jewish persecution)  to their peoples as truth.” This is an unfortunately apt description of Home Secretary Sajid Javid’s call for Corbyn’s resignation over the ‘antisemitism’ crisis. Our PM, Therea May, also accused Jeremy Corbyn of allowing anti-Semitism to ‘run rife’ in Labour.  But why do they openly act this way? Do they really believe that antisemitism is ‘rife’ in the UK?

Back in 1955, decades before AIPAC was formed and the Conservative Friends of Israel was exposed as Israel’s long arm, Reed provided a possible explanation of current British political maneuvering.  They do it because they “found that powerful Jews, in all countries, were able to assist parties favoured by them with money, press support and votes.” Reed argues that Western politicians who accept the lobby’s favours scarify their national interests. This observation from 1955 explains why Britain and the USA have been fighting Zio-con wars and the prospect of world peace is progressively fading away.

When Douglas Reed died in 1976 his entire prolific career as a journalist and a commentator was dismissed. The Times‘ obituary condemned him as a ‘virulent anti-Semite.’  During my intellectual career I have learned that too often it is the so called ‘bigots,’ ‘anti-Semites’ and ‘racists’ who understand the world and its meaning better and ahead of anyone else. I guess that the take home message is: when they attempt to burn a book, make sure that this text is at the top of the pile next to your bed. If they attempt to silence a voice, attend to this voice before you do anything else. Because Jewish power is the power to obliterate the discussion on Jewish power.

* The Controversy of Zion – Douglas Reed pg. 177 to upload pdf of Reed’s book click here

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Zuckerberg On Denial and Being Wrong

July 20, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

By Gilad Atzmon

In an interview with technology website Recode, Mark Facebook  Zuckerberg stated that posts from Holocaust deniers should be allowed on Facebook.

In response to a question on Facebook’s policy on fake news, Mr. Zuckerberg offered, without prompting, the example of posts by Holocaust deniers.

“I’m Jewish and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened,” he told reporter Kara Swisher. “I find it deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong.”

He added, “everyone gets things wrong and if we were taking down people’s accounts when they got a few things wrong, then that would be a hard world for giving people a voice and saying that you care about that.”

Despite the fact that FB has earned itself a reputation as a tyrannical Zionist force and an enemy of elementary freedoms, Zuckerberg expressed a clear position consistent with whatever is left of the true American spirit and the 1st Amendment.

The Jewish press is totally upset by Zuckerberg’s policy.  Israeli commentators denounced his remarks.  Here in Britain, the editor of the so called ‘anti-fascist’ magazine Searchlight, Gerry Gable, told the BBC that  “Because of his financial powers, he [Zuckerberg] just does a bit of tinkering without understanding how this material could inspire crazy people to firebomb synagogues, mosques or churches.” I can’t see how comments about the past incite violence against “synagogues, mosques or churches.” But of course, “crazy people” can firebomb anything at anytime, regardless of Zuckerberg’s recent intervention. I’d advise the Gable that the perception of Facebook as a tyrannical Zionist power that silences differing viewpoints may be far more dangerous for Jews and others.

I probably should have finished today’s article here. But I just can’t stop myself from taking this discussion at least one step further.

Here is a point to ponder: with Zuckerberg presenting a reasonable and tolerant attitude to historical debate, WWII, history revisionism and the Holocaust can easily be reduced to an internal Jewish debate. This is the point I make in my recent book, ‘Being in Time.’ I contend that when Jews accept that something about their culture, ideology or politics is perceived as a ‘Jewish problem,’ some Jews are quick to form a satellite opposition.

When it became clear that the criminality of the State that defines itself as the ‘Jewish State’ had become a Jewish problem, Jews for Palestine was created. The Palestine solidarity movement was rapidly reduced to an internal debate among Jews. Here in Britain, some Jews grasped that the Jewish campaign against Jeremy Corbyn is very dangerous for the Jews.  Jews for Corbyn was formed. At the moment, the future of the Labour party has become an internal Jewish debate between the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement and the so called ‘anti’ Jewish Voice for Labour. Neocon wars are now an internal Jewish debate between Sam Harris and Noam Chomsky. In his brave essay, ‘On The Jewish Question,’ Karl Marx comes to the conclusion that Capitalism is a ‘Jewish symptom’. Not surprisingly, many of his followers were of Jewish origin and the battle of capitalism (for and against) became an internal Jewish discourse. It is possible that Zuckerberg, who is not stupid, can sense the growing resentment to FB’s Zio-centrism and he is clever enough to present a new more liberal principled view. He even kindly allows the rest of us to be wrong.

In ‘Being in Time’ I note that the emergence of a Jewish satellite opposition is not necessarily a conspiratorial maneuver. It is only natural for Jews to oppose the crimes committed in their name by the Jewish State. It is equally natural for Jews to oppose Zio-con global wars. It is also reasonable for Zuckerberg to try to amend the negative impression his company bought itself in recent years and to decide to promote basic freedom of speech. The outcome, however, could be problematic. The entire debate on elementary rights and freedoms can easily become an internal Jewish discourse.

To understand ID politics read

Being in Time – A Post Political Manifesto, 

Amazon.co.uk , Amazon.com and  here (gilad.co.uk).

On Jewish controlled opposition:

No Fly Zone over Israel

February 13, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

Syria possesses the ability to impose a no fly zone over northern Israel.

Interview with Gilad Atzmon on recent news by Alimuddin Usmani

http://lapravda.ch/

Alimuddin Usmani: On the 10th of February, Syrian anti-aircraft units managed to use an old Soviet anti-aircraft missile built in the sixties to shoot down an Israeli F-16.

 What is the significance of this military incident?

Gilad Atzmon:  I do not know much about the type of anti air missiles the Syrians used.  It seems that the Israelis were also perplexed by Syrian anti air capacity. But what we do know is that the Israeli F-16 wasn’t in Syria’s air space. It was well within Israel, in fact not too far from Haifa’s sky. This means that Syria possesses the ability to impose a no fly zone over northern Israel. This is undoubtedly  a positive development. It may even restrain Israeli aggression.

AA: According to Israeli minister Bennett, “Israel must act systematically against the Iranian octopus“.

GA: The reference to Iran as an octopus is new to me. I have seen the octopus imagery used to portray the idea of Jews having  domineering powers.  The image I am referring to is one of octopuses  decorated with a Star of David and holding the planet in their hands.  I do wonder what led Minister Bennett to use such a metaphor. Is it the fear of being encircled and eventually squashed by mighty Iran or maybe Bennett was simply projecting, attributing his own characteristics to the Iranians. This question can remain open. I can say with certainty that since Bennett is a religious Jew, he won’t eat calamari any time soon and he probably doesn’t even know what he misses.

What is fascinating  about the incident is that for years we have seen Israeli politicians vow to attack Iran. We have seen Jewish leaders worldwide push for military actions and sanctions against Iran. The facts are undeniable: Israel feels surrounded and Bennett seems to admit it by employing the octopus metaphor.

AA: Recently a French-Syrian woman was forced to quit a song show due to some comments she made a while ago on Twitter criticizing the French government’s stance on terrorist attacks.

 What is you take on the above?

GA: This farce highlights the duplicity at the core of so-called multi culturalism and ‘diversity.’ We love and care for the ‘other’ but only so as long as the other conceals his or her otherness. We love Muslims as long as they pretend to be Jews. I see this form of  progressive  ‘diversity’ as an anti humanist oppressive force.

AA: Ahed Tamimi, a young Palestinian activist was arrested on the 19th of December for slapping an Israeli soldier who was standing outside her home. She is still in prison, awaiting a trial. What is your opinion about this girl?

GA: I am afraid that my linguistic abilities fall short in describing my admiration for this Palestinian teenager. I am not impressed by the Palestinian solidarity movement. And now many see the solidarity movement as a controlled opposition apparatus, largely dominated by Jewish organisations and outlets  (JVP, IJAN, Mondoweiss etc.). This has led to a discourse of the oppressed  shaped by the sensitivities of the oppressors. Instead of talking about the Right of Return we have been subject to a barrage of notions, ideas, tactics and political tools that are set to limit the resistance and in practice, facilitate recognition of the Jewish State and its right to exist (to read more  http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/2015/5/16/the-jewish-solidarity-spin).

Ahed Tamimi represents uncompromising resistance. She wants her land to be free, and I don’t doubt  that her wishes will come through

AA: Tell us something about your next gigs.

GA: I am on my way to Barcelona. I am writing to you while seated in a plane. Tonight I will be talking about my new book Being in Time. I will probably be asked about Catalan independence in light of my  post political theory although I have nothing to say about it. I do not really understand the Catalan situation nor do I know how or where to locate it within my criticism of the current global dystopia, I hope that by the end of the night I will have learned  more about Catalonia. A lot of my ideas were born out of intense exchanges with the many people I have encountered while being on the road. It is the differences that  spark thinking and originality, concepts that are seriously lacking in the monolithic tyranny of correctness that is imposed on us.

The Banality of Good pt. 6: Jewish Power and Identity Politics

February 03, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

By now, we are all Palestinians. Like the Palestinians we aren’t really allowed to dig into the true meaning of our oppression. Our opposition is shaped by the sensitivities of our oppressors.

 

By Clara S and Gilad Atzmon

Jewish Power and Identity Politics

Clara:   You show how Jewish institutions influence US policies, that it all happens in the open and that the Zionist lobbyists boast about their power. So, are Jews, in fact, controlling the world, just as the Nazis claimed they were?

Gilad: This is another multi layered question for which we must first clarify the terminology. Do the ‘Jews’ (the people) control the world? Absolutely not. But a few segments within the Jewish elite are certainly dominant and vastly over-represented within media, finance, culture, academia, politics, political lobbying, Hollywood and so on.  I elaborate on this volatile topic in my new book ‘Being in Time – A Post Political Manifesto’. The book was partially inspired by ‘The Jewish Century’, the monumental text by Yuri Slezkine that attempted to explain what it was within the Jews that made the 20th into their century: What is it about Jews and their culture that made them dominant in the West?  In Being in Time I offer a few of my original ideas. I also attempt to examine some other theories that have been largely rejected, but that I find  helpful.

My study suggests that the Jewish elite is extremely sophisticated as well as gifted.

Clara:   If they are so gifted, why do you see ‘their dominance in western culture’ as a problem? Can’t we all profit from their extraordinary talents?

Gilad:  To start with, we did and we do. That which we criticize is also that which makes our life special.  The obsession with the global free market which we hate is entangled with the imaginary sense of freedom we purport to celebrate.  The widespread  consumerism we hate is part of the illusion that we can posses whatever we want.

But this is a  problem as well.  The world we live in is not a nice place. It is  dystopic and we the people are becoming more nostalgic by the minute. At an earlier  point we saw ourselves as free subjects. Now not much is left of that decaying freedom.  We are reduced to consumers. The politicians who should  represent our needs and desires mostly just facilitate consumption by means of credit. Manufacturing has died on us and the prospect of a better future is remote. I addressed these troublesome issues in ‘Being in Time’. I believe that the identitarian revolution, or rather, the New Left ideology has a lot to do with the above. The Western subject has been indoctrinated to think and speak ‘as a’: as a gay, as a woman, as a black, etc. We learn to identify with our biology (gender, skin colour, sexual orientation, etc.)  We learn to see ourselves as an aggregation of biologically oriented tribes. Our people are a construct of multiple Israelite tribes, but the Israelites are better than anyone else at being Israelites, they have been doing it for 3000 years.

Clara: So identity politics are a Jewish construct?

Gilad: Exactly. And here is the most problematic twist. In ‘Being in Time’ I argue that the New Left has fallen into the Nazi trap. Dividing humanity by biology (race, skin colour, gender etc.) requires that we define ourselves and others in biological terms.  Instead of uniting under a dynamic universal ethos we are subject to new categories that make human universal harmony impossible.

We live in a totally fragmented society. Instead of fighting together for our common and universal needs, we are divided into identitarian groups and fight each other.

 Clara:   Biology? Doing what the Nazis did and even defining a ‘race’ when there is none? I see your point: a nice twist indeed.

Although defining oneself in terms of identity seems to be natural: we (nearly) all have experiences of loss and discrimination because of our ‘biological’ identity: as a woman, as a member of an ethnic minority, as somebody with a handicap, because of our sexual orientation, and on.

 Gilad: True. It is natural for people to identify with their biology.

This is why half of the Americans voted for Hillary Clinton. This is why ID politics is the only so called Left ideology that has gained in popularity. It also explains some of what what attracted the masses to Nazism.  And then, it also explains the logos at the core of Jewish tribalism.

 Clara: Gilad, I have a lot of sympathy for anti-discrimination and emancipatory movements. Without them I still would not have the right to vote and my independent career would not have been possible. The homosexual couple in my neighbourhood would have had to pose as cousins and a lot of barrier-free railway stations would be non-existent. And I, personally, love the mix of different ethnic cultures we experience in Germany, in spite of the problems that come with it.

For me as a teacher it has always been important to make sure I support those students who were not born with a silver spoon in their mouths. The motto of our school is ‘Diversity is our strength’ and I stand by that.

 When I first encountered criticism of identity politics I didn’t take it seriously because I found the criticism regressive: it came from the kind of people who want to send women back to, as the German saying goes, Kinder, Kueche, Kirche (kids, kitchen and church), forbid abortion, kick out foreigners and view homosexuality as something sick. Though there were increasingly aspects to the ‘multi-culti’ and open-border ideas that made me wonder. I must admit that it was not until the last American presidential race that I realized that within the Democratic Party, identitarian politics had replaced policies that were, in my opinion, ‘genuine Left’ such as improving people’s social and economic situation and anti-imperialism. And I realized that the same had happened to the left in Germany.

 So has the Left been captured by identitarians?

 Gilad: Yep, I fully understand. Like many others, I used to agree with Left ideology  but as I grew older I found the Left to be increasingly  delusional, dogmatic and frequently  duplicitous. I couldn’t detect any suggestion of dialectical thinking. Even the aspiration towards equality had somehow evaporated. In ‘The Wandering Who’ I shifted. Instead of asking what the ‘J-word’ represents, I asked what do people mean when they identify themselves as Jews? In ‘Being in Time’ I employed an identical strategy. I asked what is it that people who identify as Leftists adhere to?

The answer was pretty troubling. The New Left shares little or nothing  with old Left values. The New Left is tribal, biologically oriented, and it is authoritarian and often proto fascist. The Left was not simply captured by the identitarians, it was hijacked. The New Left is occupied territory and this is another reason why we are all Palestinians.

This is why I argue that by now the Left / Right dichotomy is meaningless and on the verge of futile. Welcome to the post-political condition.

Clara: We are all Palestinians?

Gilad: I believe that it was me who coined the popular adage, ‘by now, we are all Palestinians.’ The meaning of this saying is devastating.

Like the Palestinians we aren’t really allowed to dig into the true meaning of our oppression.  The boundaries of pro Palestinian discourse are shaped by Jewish sensitivities. Tragically, this is an adequate description of our Western dissent.  Our opposition is shaped by the sensitivities of our oppressors.

Clara:   So could we say that emancipation has been replaced by victimization? Are identity politics a  powerful movement of people who see the world through the restricted perspective of victims of racist, sexist or some other prejudice or discrimination?  Is its philosophy that ‘The world would be a better place, if everybody saw it the way I do’; ‘If xy changed his attitude, I could fulfill my  potential, I cannot do that because xy doesn’t let me do it’? Then it is always somebody else who is made responsible. No wonder that white males, who until now were symbols of oppression, also want to be recognized as victims. The steps from this thinking to hate and destructive violent behaviour are not that big:

“We shall have our manhood. We shall have it or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it.” That is how Eldrige Cleaver  described the needs of blacks.  The way the MeToomovement brings down male ‘perpetrators’ also seems to be more driven by spite and the wish to humiliate than by the wish to bring wrong-doing to light and peace to women who have been scarred. True ‘souls on ice’!

And because we have to be ‘politically correct’ we are not allowed to criticize  victims so as not to hurt their feelings. But this doesn’t heal the harm. You go on feeding this particular ‘child,’  it will never be satisfied and will grow into a big fat monster crying ‘feed me!’ till the end of time.

But how does Jewish victimization and their huge success in the 20th century connect?

Gilad  It is amazing for me to read your comment  because I examined  ID politics and victimhood using a similar approach in ‘Being in Time’.  On the one hand we are all broken into biologically oriented tribes. We are defined by our skin, gender, mother’s gene, sexual orientation, yet it is only the biologically identified Jews who have a state, hundreds of atomic bombs, squadrons of F-35s and the question is why? Let me shock you. Because Jewish identity involves self- hatred. Early Zionism was the promise to change the Jews, to relieve them of their victimhood. To make them people like all other people. When identitarians learn how to hate themselves, they may start to move forward, they may even find their path back to the universal.

Clara:   Do you mean that self-hatred was the key to Zionism and if Jewishness hadn’t hijacked Zionism, the Jews could have found the path to the universal?
Gilad: Exactly, Zionism was driven by hard core self-loathing. A core principle of  Early Zionists was ‘negation of the Galut (Diaspora)’. This form of self-hatred  fuelled the fantasy of a new Jewish beginning. Zionism was a form of Jewish empowerment, that tried to replace victimhood.

Clara:   ‘… but I laugh, and eat well, and grow strong …’

Gilad: Yes. Instead of blaming the Goyim for anti-Semitic crimes, early Zionists looked into Jewish history and culture and tried to identify what is it in Jewish culture and politics that brings about anti-Semitism. This may explain why Jewish identitarianism has achieved far more than other  identitarian groups. Early Zionism, as far as I am concerned, was an astonishing transition in Jewish history.  Yet, the fact that it failed is even more significant. It might mean that there is no collective remedy to the Jewish question. If Jews want to rescue themselves, they must break out alone into the night, in the dark, with the hope that they may meet the universal at daybreak.  

If they want to burn it, you want to read it …

Being in Time – A Post Political Manifesto, 

Amazon.co.uk  ,  Amazon.com  and   here  (gilad.co.uk). 

For previous segments:

Part 1: http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/2018/1/23/the-banality-of-good-part-1

Part 2: http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/2018/1/25/the-banality-of-good-pt-2-blaming-the-victim

Part 3: http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/2018/1/28/the-banality-of-good-pt3-revising-history

Part 4: http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/2018/1/30/the-banality-of-good-pt-4-anti-semitism-racism-and-cultural-identity

Part 5: http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/2018/1/31/the-banality-of-good-pt-5-pre-tsd-zionism-and-empire

The Banality of Good pt. 2: Blaming the Victim?

January 26, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

Blaming the Victim? 

By Clara S. and Gilad Atzmon

To read part 1 http://www.gilad.co.uk/

German: https://opablog.net

Clara:   You know, when I saw the pictures of the kids killed in Gaza while playing on the beach in 2014, I was shocked again. But I was told to accept that these people had brought their fate upon themselves using their kids as human shields. Hadn’t I heard that before? Didn’t the Nazis say the Jews deserved to die because they had brought so much evil upon the world?

And you have just told me, that the Holocaust survivors were treated kind of the same by their fellow-citizens.

So here’s my next question: When I read your book I couldn’t help to think,
“Does Gilad really want to say that the Jews were responsible themselves for what had happened to them”? 

In chapter 21 you write: “65 years after the liberation of Ausschwitz we should be able to ask – why? Why were the Jews hated? Why did European people stand up against their neighbours”? (The Wandering Who?)

Isn’t that just like telling a victim of rape that she should have dressed more properly or stayed at home altogether? That is outrageous!

Gilad: ‘Don’t blame the victim’ is a popular, however problematic, proclamation. It begs for attention. We must ask some crucial questions who and what is a victim? What forms victimhood? What are the circumstances in which a crime is taking place? As you may imagine, I actually gave a lot of thought to these questions.  The ethical judgment here is far from being a universal algorithm. On the contrary, it is the particularity of the judgment that aspires at a universal maxim instead.

Let’s for instance examine the case of young woman X who was raped in the park in the middle of the night. She was subject to sexual assault something she didn’t consent to. The case of a rape is established. X was a victim. However, we also learn that X made a conscious decision to cross the park half naked, in the middle of the night, knowing that this given park is known for its bad reputation as far as sex predatory activity is concerned. Will you agree that while X is a victim of a rape, she, to a certain extent, brought it on herself?  She took an unreasonable risk.  And what would you say about X if you learned that she has been raped in the same spot on a regular basis five times a week for the last two decades? X is still a victim, those who rape her are still criminals, yet would you be interested to examine X’s mental making?

The case of Jews, Jewry and Jewish history is actually different altogether.  To start with, we are dealing with an ethnic group (as opposed to an individual).  Furthermore, I myself do not deal with people; Moshe, Yossef or Yaakov. I deal instead with ideology, culture and politics. The answer to the questions ‘Why were the Jews hated? Or why did European people stand up against their neighbours?’ led me to a study of the culture, the ideology and the politics that form Jewish identity. I ask ‘what is it in Jewish culture, ID politics and ideology that evokes animosity in so many different places and different times in history’?
I do believe, and this is fundamental to my work, that Jews like all other people are born innocent. I argue that some elements in Jewish culture, such as tribal chosenness, have made things complicated for many Jews all along Jewish history.

Clara:    Wait a moment: of course this victim isn’t acting very sensibly. But still, I hold to it that I want to live in surroundings where my safety is secured and I do not have to expect that kind of “activity”, no matter how eccentric I may be …

Gilad: This is somehow more fundamental than just being eccentric.

I believe that since Jewish history is a chain of disasters, we must understand once and for all ‘what is it in Jewish culture, politics and ideology that puts Jews, the people, at risk’. By the way, I didn’t invent this question. It is this question exactly that initiated the Zionist movement. It was thinkers like Bernard Lazare who elaborated on the Jewish question in an attempt to grasp, once and for all ‘why the Jews?’ The difference between early Zionists (Herzl, Lazare, Borochov, Nordau etc.)  and myself is that early Zionists believed that Jews could be morphed collectively into something else.  I am not sure that this is the case. I am not convinced that there is a collective solution to the Jewish question. I believe that some break out as individuals. I hope that I, myself, have managed.

Clara:   It’s also what communists tend to believe in, that they can forge a new and better kind of human being. I used to think that way, too. Today I have some doubts about how realistic that idea is.
But back to the question of ‘blaming the victim’ once more:It is a well-established fact that victims of abuse tend to seek the reason for what has happened to them in themselves. The guilt they feel is a way of finding a meaning in the egregious things they had to suffer, of trying to control the uncontrollable. Aren’t you doing exactly the same?

Gilad:   I certainly do.  I believe that considering Jewish history being a chain of disasters, Jews must examine themselves by means of self reflection instead of accusing the Goyim. As you know, I am a follower of the Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger who revealed to us that in art self realization is realization of the world. The more I look into myself, the better I understand the world around me.

Clara:    Well, I’m not sure. Many victims blame themselves for things they are 100% not guilty of. That is not a healthy way to cope with traumatic experiences.

 Gilad:   Who decides? How do we figure out the exact percentage of our accountability? Should we care about such percentage? I actually believe that understanding reality in categorical terms is way more helpful. Examining, for instance, the case of X may reveal that being a rape victim satisfies X’s needs. I guess that you can extend this analogy as you wish.

Clara:    If it were that way, we would indeed have to think about X’s frame of mind. But for us who do not draw satisfaction from being a victim it maybe all comes down to the question of responsibility. To take responsibility for the things I can change and to accept that there are a lot of things I cannot. It’s hard enough for an individual to find out which is which. Can a group go through such a process? Having started and lost two world wars the Germans as a collective have been blamed and blaming themselves for all the bad things which happened to them as a result. Now some people have started questioning whether the shock and awe tactics of bombing Dresden and other cities really was necessary to win the war (not to forget the atomic bombs which destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki). My mother, for example, lost everything she had during the bombing of Leipzig, luckily no one in the family was killed. But this is seen by others as an attempt of justifying the atrocities committed by my people.

However, if an individual like yourself claims to take responsibility for a whole group, the other members might not be amused. No wonder that some of your fellow Jews call you a well-poisoner.

Gilad:   I do not think that those people are my ‘fellow Jews’ for I haven’t been a Jew for many years and they aren’t exactly my fellows.  Rather than blaming Jews I ask Jews to look into their culture, ideology and politics and ask themselves why? Why pogroms, the Holocaust, anti-Semitism?  Zionism promised to transform the Jews, to make them loved, it failed miserably, why? If Jews are struggling to come with an answer, as I mention before, early Zionism is a good start. I, once again recommend the work of Lazare, Borochov, Ehad Ha’am and even Herzl. Responsibility, if you wish, starts with self reflection.

Clara:   So how would you describe yourself if not as a Jew?

Gilad: To start with I avoid any form of political identification … I am a jazz artist, I am a writer, I am British, I am an ex Jew and ex Israeli, I follow the message of Christ but do not follow any organized religion.

If they want to burn it, you want to read it …

Being in Time – A Post Political Manifesto, 

Amazon.co.uk  ,  Amazon.com  and   here  (gilad.co.uk). 

Daily Sabah: Exclusive interview with Gilad Atzmon

Comment:

Brother Gilad said: To survive is to win.

I say: To Win is to Survive and to Survive is to Resist. To Win Palestinians should realize that Palestine is a Part of Greater Syria “Bilad Asham”. They should bury Afratat’s slogan about “Palestinian Independent  Decision”. Thanks to Syria and allies for keeping the Palestinian Cause alive. Thanks to Daesh for breaking Sykes-Picot borders. Thanks to stupid TRUMP for uniting real Arabs and Real Muslims and Real Humans.

UP

—

January 22, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

I left Israel because I didn’t want to live on someone else’s land.

https://www.dailysabah.com/

Gilad Atzmon In an interview with Daily Sabah’s editor Burak Altun digging into  the current crisis in the Middle East

Burak Altun: Mr Atzmon, you are one of the most gifted jazz musicians around. In addition, you  are actively engaged in peace in the Middle East and criticize the state of Israel  within that context. I can see two separate identities here – you are a musician and a political activist. At the social and political level, you complain about identity politics in the West. What is it all about?

Gilad Atzmon: To start with, you are very kind in your description of me, but let me correct you. I am not a political activist, I have never been involved in politics and I prefer to stay away from the so called activist community. The reason is simple. Activists always know the answers. I am a philosopher. My task is refining the questions. I can easily live in peace with more than one answer and even with competing and contradicting  answers.

However, let me address your question regarding identity politics. In the world in which I grew up the role of the political and especially Left politics was to point at that which unites us. Our left icons insisted that it didn’t matter whether one is a Muslim, Black, Jew or Woman, we were all united against the mammonites, those capitalist plunderers in the City. But this has  changed. At a certain stage the Left decided to embrace new tactics. We were taught how to speak ‘as a’: as a woman, as a Jew, as a Black, as a gay and so on. Instead of being united we were set up to fight each other. In this New Left/progressive universe, we the people are divided by our biology yet the global market is united in its war against us the people, against humanity and humanism.

How do you explain the allegations of anti-Semitism, which are repeatedly directed against you? You yourself differentiate between Judaism (the religion) and Jewish politics.  According to the logic of those who accuse you, critics of “Islamism” must be Islamophobes.

The accusation of anti-Semitsm is obviously an empty one. It is designed to stifle criticism of Israel and Jewish power. In my entire life I have never criticized Jews or anyone else as a people, race, biology or ethnicity. I deal solely with ID politics, ideology and culture!   For me racism becomes a problem when blind hatred is performed, when you hate X for being X, when you hate Black people for being Black or when you hate White people for being White. I can’t think of anyone who hates Jews for being Jews. I would admit that more than a few may oppose Jews for what they interpret as Jewish politics, Jewish Lobbying, Jewish ideology and so on. This tendency deserves our attention. It clearly deserves Jewish attention but Jewish power is the power to suppress criticism of Jewish power.

Now, your point regarding Islamists and Islamophobia deserve attention. I don’t believe that there are such things as ‘Islamists’ or ‘Islamism.’ In Islam, like in Judaism, there is no distinction between the political and religio.  Islamism is a Zionist/Neocon invention. It was created in an attempt to draw an imaginary dichotomy between the religious reality and the political. It is basically a projection of the Jewish post-assimilation reality on the Muslim world. It was invented in order to provide a ‘rationale’ for America and Britain so they could flatten Arab cities on behalf of Zion.

You said once in an interview for Russia Today that your charm is your defense against the antisemitic allegations. Can you elaborate? Can a likeable person basically not be an anti-Semite? And do you sometimes wonder if your critics are secretly playing your music before they go to bed? 

My comment on George Galloway was obviously comical. It is pretty obvious that a person who plays music every night with many Jews and shares platforms with rabbis cannot be ‘anti-semitic.’ It is hardly a secret that many of my supporters are Jews and even Israelis.

I would have loved to think that my detractors can enjoy my music. But I do not have any reason to believe that they are aesthetically inclined.

You grew up in a Zionist family and witnessed the Lebanon War in 1982. Would you be so committed to peace in the Middle East today if you had not had that experience? How do you feel about it when you reflect on your past?

It is hard to say. I am not a political person. I am doing what I am doing because I am curious.

I left Israel because I didn’t want to live on someone else’s land. But when I witnessed the Jewish Diaspora Zionists’ hawkish attitude and even worse, the duplicity at the core of the Jewish anti-Zionist discourse, I realised how intense Jewish identity is. I started to dig into it. We are dealing with complex and fascinating people who are shaped by a very old tribal philosophy that morphs quickly. By the time you think that you understand Jewish ID politics, it only suggests that Jewish ID politics has already morphed into something else. 

My philosophy hero Otto Weininger taught me that in art, self exploration is exploration of the world. For me, self reflection is understanding the troubling affairs around us. I guess that this is why Jews are so troubled by self hatred. It is an attempt of unveiling the concealed, the deepest secrets Jews tend to hide from themselves.

I do not need to ask you how about your stand on the U.S. decision regarding Jerusalem – but it would be interesting to know if you see a long-term departure from the “Trump’s Middle East policy. At the moment, the outcry is particularly great – which is partly due to the relevance of  Jerusalem. However, there had been no constructive development in the Middle East under Obama’s leadership. How do you rate the role of the USA – and especially the Israel lobby? You once said that AIPAC offered you money to become a member. Was the amount not big enough? 

Trump doesn’t have a middle East policy. And this is not a bad thing. America is not a key player anymore and this is a very positive development. We should thank Trump and Kushner for it. But it is true that this deterioration didn’t start just a year ago. I believe Obama made a conscious decision to pull out from the region. 

There is no doubt that AIPAC has been dominating American Middle East policy for a long time and it is totally obvious that AIPAC was serving the interests of a foreign state rather than American national interests. Americans can only blame themselves for letting this happen.

Since I left Israel, I have never been approached by a single Israeli or a Zionist body who tried to buy my support or collaboration.  The Jewish institutions and people who attempted to bribe me a few times in the past were of the Jewish anti-Zionist persuasion. I was offered to be ‘looked after’ and protected as long as I accepted their duplicitous terminology or just dumped my own. They wanted me to limit the discussion to Zionism and to make sure I drift away from the study of Jewish ID politics. Several times I was asked to denounce and disavow several people. I always rejected any dialogue with these kinds of tribal agent. In some cases I exposed these attempts. 

How do you rate the recent move by the Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC) led by President Erdoğan against the Trump decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel? Will the UN resolution do something?

I’ll be honest with you. I do not think that anyone, including President Erdoğan, can liberate the Palestinians except the Palestinians themselves. How they do that is indeed a complicated question. I believe that Abbas is right. Time is their weapon. To survive is to win. The only people who can destroy the Jewish state are the Jews themselves. This is how they have always done it along their history.

In recent years, President Erdoğan has repeatedly, loudly complained of the Israeli government’s behavior towards the Palestinians and used harsh words such as “terrorist state” or “child murderer” regarding Israel. Many leaders of Arab states would never dare to do so that concretely. So Erdoğan’s popularity in Palestine seems very high. Do you believe that President Erdoğan can build a powerful counter-pole to Israel and the United States? It seems as if the EU member states have also moved a bit toward the Palestinians politically since the last Jerusalem crisis – even if they are looking for political pressure against Israel in vain.

President Erdoğan was indeed outspoken when it comes to Israel but I do understand how volatile the situation he is in. He has to deal with a very complex situation. Syria, the Kurds, Gülen, NATO, Russia and the USA. Unfortunately, Israel is a key player in all of that. We have seen the Turks swinging on issues to do with Israel. At the end of the day, Erdogan was elected to serve the Turkish people and this mission is probably difficult enough considering the complexity involved.

Do you still believe in the possibility of a two-state solution?

I’ve never believed in a two State Solution. And I am not so sure that the discussion about solutions is leading anywhere. It is designed to keep some activists busy so they have something to shout in their gatherings and pickets. 

What we really see is facts on the ground. Israel and Palestine are one state. One electrical grid, one international pre dial number (+972), one sewage system yet this state is oppressive, abusive and often genocidal towards the indigenous people of the land. Why? Because Israel defines itself as ‘the Jewish State.’ It is a state of the Jews rather than ‘a State of its citizens.’ For the situation to be resolved Israel must be ‘de-Jewishified’ (stripped of its Judeo-centric  exceptionalism and become  a state of its citizens, regardless of their ethnicity or religion). However, when this happens Israel will become Palestine from the river to the sea.

Thank you very much for the interview Mr Atzmon, and good luck with your music and your political commitment to peace in the Middle East.

All the best…

 

All you need to know about Israel, The Lobby, Yinon Plan & Trump (video)

January 06, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

https://youtu.be/Z9xJWBn1B9M

10 minutes interview on the most popular political show  on Turkish TV.

Turkish Tv, YAZ BOZ; ” Ergün DİLER – Bekir HAZAR”: 29 Dec 2017

Witch Hunters United – Gerry Downing Speaks with Gilad Atzmon

January 05, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

Gerry, you were accused of Anti-Semitism.  Along with thousands of other Labour Party members, you were labelled anti-Semitic and expelled from the party for expressing universalist ideas and opposing all forms of racism including Jewish racism.

Q: What is anti-Semitism?

GD: Anti-Semitism is the hatred of Jews as Jews. Full stop. Nothing else. It is not criticism of the state of Israel or Jewish institutions.

Q: Under this definition of anti-Semitism are you or your organization anti-Semitic?

GD: No. Not Gerry Downing or Ian Donovan nor any member or supporter of Socialist Fight, past or present, are in any way anti-Semitic. We are members of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and are well-known defenders of Palestinian rights and opponents of the state of Israel. There is not a single act or political stance alleged that is in any way racist or anti-Semitic except in the minds of those who want to appease the Labour Party bureaucracy of Ian McNichol. These same people also attempt to prove that they are not revolutionary socialists and agree with McNichol that Trotskyists should not be afforded any democratic rights in a throwback to the Great Purges in the USSR in the 1930s and 1940s.

Q:  You are part of a radical Left group called Socialist Fight. Can you brief us shortly about this group and its principles?

GD: It is best summed up in the first point of the Where We Stand document on our website:

“We stand with Karl Marx: ‘The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves. The struggle for the emancipation of the working class means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies but for equal rights and duties and the abolition of all class rule’ (The International Workingmen’s Association 1864, General Rules). The working class ‘cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other sphere of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society’ (Marx, A Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1843).”

Q: We met today because I learned from the British and Jewish press that Labour Against the Witch-hunt (LAW) a newly formed body, has decided to expel half of its members or more precisely, to kick out Socialist Fight from its ranks. Is that true?

GD:  The ostensibly broad campaign, LAW, was launched on 21 October 2017 after professor Moshé Machover was auto-excluded, and, as the Labour Party Marxists reported, he was only “one of a long line of socialists, Corbyn supporters and defenders of Palestinian rights expelled or suspended on bogus charges of anti-Semitism”. Socialist Fight participated in the formation of LAW, through Gerry Downing and Ian Donovan and contributed to the discussion and to collection, as Socialist Fight expected to participate in LAW’s work.

Soon after the launch, one Lee Rock began a vitriolic witch hunt against us on LAW’s Facebook page, claiming we were anti-Semitic and should be expelled from LAW. The three remaining LAW Steering Committee members, Tony Greenstein, Stan Keable and Jackie Walker (Peter Firmin had resigned), duly obliged by auto-excluding us without a hearing or right to appeal, the very practice the group had been set up to overturn in the Labour party. We were instructed not to attend the next LAW meeting as we were no longer members and we were blocked from the LAW Facebook page.

We did, however, turn up early for the meeting on 2nd December with 3 supporters and, as Tony Greenstein reported, the meeting was “effectively ambushed by a small Trotskyist grouping, Socialist Fight” i.e., our band of 5 managed to persuade the meeting, some 24 at its height, to refuse to accept the undemocratic, not to say autocratic, decisions of the triumvirate. We were accepted back in and reinstated to the Facebook page by Tony Greenstein.

Q: According to the Jewish press, LAW is led by Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein both of whom identify politically ‘as Jews.’ Both Greenstein and Walker were suspended from the Labour Party for being anti-Semitic. However, they believe that while the slur of anti-Semite is mostly delusional, on rare occasions they can decide it is real. Where do you think Greenstein/Walker set that kosher demarcation line?

GD: it is my belief that there are two key questions to understand in this. 1. the motivations of Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein, which are slightly different and 2. The motivation of Jack Conrad, the leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain/Weekly Worker which has influence in the Labour Party Marxists, led by Stan Keable, another member of the LAW Steering Committee.

On the first point the key is found in the statement Tony Greenstein issued on March 22, 2016 made after he got a letter from the Labour Party informing him he had been suspended. He wrote the following:

“I can only assume, in the current climate of media engineered hysteria over ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party and amongst Corbyn supporters, that it is related to this.  I can think of no other reason. If this is the case what is involved is a witch hunt of anti-Zionists using the cover of anti-Semitism since even the Zionist Board of Deputies of British Jews (BOD) and other Zionists have acknowledged my role in combatting Gilad Atzmon, a notorious anti-Semite who used to be associated with the Palestine solidarity movement.”

So, suspended from Labour for ‘anti-Semitism’ he (Greenstein) tried to ingratiate himself with the pro-Zionist witch hunters by pointing to his own role in witch hunting Gilad Atzmon. Today he is in a de-facto bloc with Zionist/Blairite witch hunters against Socialist Fight.

Jackie Walker is slightly different, she largely rejects the politics of identity and is more cosmopolitan than Greenstein. She also strongly champions black rights. She is repelled by the outright revolutionary politics of Socialist Fight as she revealed during the Labour Representation Committee AGM in 2012, when she verbally abused me for heckling a speaker who was defending the role of the ANC in the Marikana massacre after I had made a motion condemning them.

Jack Conrad suffered a major embarrassment at their annual Communist University when Socialist Fight exposed his narrative on the Russian Revolution, which he promotes in conjunction with the Swedish academic Lars T Lih. They put forward the revisionist theory that Lenin’s April Theses was of no particular significance, and that Kamenev, Zinoviev and Stalin were doing fine before Lenin returned in April and had only to make a slight adjustment, despite Lenin’s powerful condemnations of their capitulation to the provisional government. And then his accusation of treason against Kamenev and Zinoviev when they went public with the plans for the October insurrection, thereby putting all their lives in immediate danger.

Q:  In the recent LAW meeting Greenstein and Walker reportedly said that “making a connection between the number of Jewish billionaires in the US or who is Jewish amongst the richest sections of society and imperialist support for Israel is anti-Semitic.” I guess that Walker and Greenstein believe that Jewish politics and mammon are beyond criticism. Can you tell us which political school may adhere to such a peculiar approach? Is there any Left ideology or working-class politics that excludes criticism of Jewish mammon and influence?

GD: Of course, that ideology is Zionism. I can do no better than to quote Daniel Waterman, the famous author and anti-Zionist activist. His mother, Ruth Kupferschmidt, survived the Holocaust. He wrote on the LAW Facebook page in refutation of this cowardly capitulation:

The following statement (from Tony Greenstein) therefore makes for uncomfortable reading:

“‘Making a connection between the number of Jewish billionaires in the United States or who is Jewish amongst the richest sections of society and imperialist support for Israel is anti-Semitic.’

(To which Waterman replied:) NO NO NO! We all know that there are many Jewish millionaires and billionaires in the US. We also know that many of them are involved with determining policy with respect to Israel. We even know that many of them are outspoken supporters of Israel. Why on earth is it then taboo to speak about this openly?

Yes, mentioning the power of the Jewish lobby was and remains a tactic of antisemites. But that does not make the statement, or the reality, inherently anti-Semitic. The reason why ought to be clear to anyone with half a brain but let’s just spell it out: because not all Jews are billionaires and not all Jews are Zionists or supporters of Israel.

So, why has this issue become such a point in this group? First of all we can consider quite legitimate concerns about the possibility of any discussion of ‘Jewish billionaires supporting Israel’ being interpreted as anti-Semitic, but then that is also exactly why this group was created, to defend others who are legitimately criticising Israel ‘and making comparisons to Nazi Germany’ from being accused of antisemitism.”

Q: You and your political group were expelled by Greenstein/Walker in a non-democratic manner. You were pushed out despite the fact that the democratic vote of LAW members opposed your expulsion. What can we learn from this development about the authoritarian tendencies of Greenstein and Walker?  Do you believe that people of that type can present a better future for Britain’s working people?

GD: It really is shocking that the LAW Steering Committee are pursuing these utterly undemocratic and unprincipled manoeuvres against us. If we are all agreed that the way that John Lansman closed down the democratic structures of Momentum was utterly wrong and justly criticised him for that how can they do the same themselves? How can either John’s Lansman’s Momentum or the far smaller LAW group of Tony Greenstein fight to democratise the structures of the Labour Party when their own structures and practices are so undemocratic? And what kind of a new society of social and economic equality, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” can be forged with these methods? Do what I say, don’t do what I do, as Joe Stalin and Ian McNichol hypocritically might say.

Q: What is next? I understand that on Saturday Greenstein/Walker are planning another bogus meeting in an attempt to overrule their previous defeat. How can we help you? Can we attend the meeting? Where is it?  

GD: The Labour Against the Witch hunt meeting was due to be held at 12 noon on Saturday 6 January in the Calthorpe Arms, 252 Greys Inn Road, London, WC1X 8JR. Please get there by 11.30.

However, on the one hand, Tony Greenstein tells us the landlord of the Calthorpe Arms has rung him up cancelling the meeting: “There will therefore be no meeting on Saturday, the meeting is cancelled”. Stan Keable, the LAW Secretary on the other hand, tells us that a nearby alternative venue has been found and we can all come. Stan Keable: “We regret that Calthorpe Arms has cancelled our booking, but the meeting will go ahead in a nearby alternative venue. Please come to Calthorpe Arms, 252 Grays Inn Road, at 12 noon, and we will direct you to the nearby alternative venue.”

We will move a simple motion along these lines:

“We defend the right of Socialist Fight Comrades to attend and participate in the Labour Against the Witch hunt and reject the slurs of anti-Semitism directed against Socialist Fight and its two leading comrades, Gerry Downing and Ian Donovan.”

Hot Off The Press: British Anti Witch-Hunt Group expelled half its supporters

January 04, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

By Gilad Atzmon

When you think that British ‘Left’ has reached rock bottom you wake up to learn that this political comedy act has no limits.

We learned today that the ‘anti witch-hunt’ labour group LAW (Labour Against the Witch-hunt ) has expelled half of its members over ‘anti-Semitism.’

Times of Israel reports today that LAW has cut ties to Socialist Fight because of the views of its members. Socialist Fight is accused of being “supportive of controversial Israeli-born author Gilad Atzmon.”

Needless to mention that I am thrilled by all of that. I enjoy being supported by proper radical left groups; people who adhere to universal principles of equality and human brotherhood. Despite the fact that in my entire life, I have never been a member of any political body or party, I can clearly see that my writing is now making a change.

If you are wondering what it is that I am saying that pushes LAW leaders Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein, two self identified (political) Jews, over the edge, to the point that they themselves have decided to act, in the open, as witch hunters, I will provide a brief answer.

I argue that if Israel defines itself as a Jewish State we must ask who are the Jews, what is Jewishness and what is Judaism. We should then proceed and  examine Israeli politics and Jewish lobbying in the light of the above questions. I basically argue that Zionism is just one symptom of Jewish choseness. I actually identify the exact same exceptionalist tendencies in Jewish Left and in particular in Walker and Greenstein’s political act. To add to my sins, I am also responsible for the popular adage “by now, we are all Palestinians.” Like the Palestinians we are not allowed to articulate the true nature of our oppression.

No one could articulate this observation better than Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein. In the minutes of the LAW meeting, Walker and Greenstein apparently said “Making a connection between the number of Jewish billionaires in the US or who is Jewish amongst the richest sections of society and imperialist support for Israel is anti-Semitic.”

For Walker and Greenstein pointing at a concentration of mammon and political influence as the core of Zionist power is a ‘hate crime.’ For Walker and Greenstein a principled universal socialist position based on dialectical materialism is crude ‘antisemitism.’

I am delighted as well as amused to see myself, an immigrant saxophonist at the centre of this ridiculous political storm. But I may assure you that none of this is new to Brits. They have seen it all before, they know about the People’s Front of Judea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4

If they want to burn it, you want to read it …

Being in Time – A Post Political Manifesto, 

Amazon.co.uk  ,  Amazon.com  and   here  (gilad.co.uk). 

We Must Support Theatre 80 and Lorcan Otway!

June 26, 2017  /  Gilad Atzmon

 By Gilad Atzmon

Before the publication of my recent book, Being in Time, I visited the USA for a brief coast-to-coast tour. The literary/music expedition was met with significant opposition in New York City at Theatre 80. Theatre 80 is a great historical institution with a history of providing an intelligent platform for musicians including John Coltrane and Thelonius Monk, theatre, movies and speakers, including me.

We planned a night of open discussion on different issues to do with my new book, critiquing ID politics and the post political condition. We wanted a truly open dialogue and we personally invited each of my NYC and American detractors to share the podium. Apparently,  not one had the courage to engage in a public dialogue with me.   This is understandable I guess, I’ve bought myself a reputation of being outspoken on issues to do with Jewish power and controlled opposition.

The program evolved into a diverse panel featuring: Stanley Cohen, Prof. Norton Mezvinsky, Michael Lesher and yours truly.  It didn’t take long before the Jewish Forward together with family incest enthusiast Donna Minkowitz ran a hit piece on myself, the event and Theatre 80. This attack was followed by one Jewish ethnic activist Bill Weinberg. Soon after the rabid ultra Zionist Times of Israel joined in.

However, defying what Zionist have come to expect, Theatre 80’s owner Lorcan Otway made his position very clear. Otway is a Quaker and a staunch supporter of freedom of speech and an authentic defender of the 1st amendment, Otway wrote ”I Will Not Bend To Calls For Censorship at Theatre 80…..several people are upset that Gilad Atzmon is renting my theatre. Others, may be offended by other shows. I invite speech to be answered by speech.”

https://youtu.be/II5FYZngN98

Despite the relentless and at times threatening pressure to cancel the event, the panel was a great success. The room was full, the Q&A was fascinating and brought to light the ideological divisions that split American society. The discussion was the antithesis of the kosher echo-chamber my detractors are desperate to impose on the West and the USA in particular.

But here is where you are called into action. Theatre 80 struggles. HOFOPRO, a nonprofit organisation that supports great theatre at Theatre 80 has gotten no contributions this year. Otway writes, “we get large numbers of people every day supporting the theater, the museum, the tavern, but the city is just too expensive to support small business. Without HOFOPRO making it possible for underfunded theater companies to afford to play here, we will have to call it an end to Theater 80.”

Lorcan has given his life to this theatre, probably the last bastion of freedom in NYC.

“I would be happy to live out the end of my days without weekends, no vacations… but you all seem to be saying to me that we are not worth preserving. Is that what I am hearing these days?”

Let’s prove to Lorcan that he is wrong. We do care about his theatre, we do care about freedom, we do care about Lorcan Otway, this precious human being who adheres to the principles that made the USA into the promised land for so many people around the world. We must prove to Lorcan and the world that Athens is possible.

Please open your heart, put your hand in your pocket and show Lorcan how much you appreciate his principled attitude toward tolerance and freedom.

To donate towards the survival of Theatre 80 – https://hofopro.org/donate/

Palestinian Expo 2017: The UK Government and The Lobby

June 27, 2017  /  Gilad Atzmon

By Gilad Atzmon

Over the last decade, Palestinian solidarity has been hijacked by many Jewish organisations – JVP, IJAN, J-BIG – and also by other insipid left-leaning groups that in practice, have reduced Palestinian solidarity into a paradigm that is lame, meaningless and leads absolutely nowhere. This loose collective of tribal and Identitarian merchants has managed to reduce the magisterial Palestinian call for Right of Return into a squalid and self-serving Jewish internal debate about the ‘Right to BDS.’ The discourse of the oppressed is now defined by the sensitivities of the oppressor.

Palestine Expo 2017 , scheduled to take place on the weekend of July 8-9 at the QE2 centre, could have been an attempt to re-instate the meaning of Palestine: its culture, its politics and its call for liberation. It could have reinvigorated resistance and, most importantly, put the Right of Return at its heart. It could even have attempted to redefine and solidify the Palestinian conditions for peace in the region.

But it didn’t aspire to do any of those things. Featuring Jewish anti-Zionist voices, and endorsed by various Jewish organisations, it instead attempts to give voice to the most politically-correct and Jewish-friendly vision of solidarity available. And guess what, it didn’t work. Instead of welcoming this Zio-friendly approach, British Jews, utilising all their lobbies and employing every trick in the Hasbara playbook, have act institutionally and aggressively to cancel the event

Yesterday, we learned from the Jewish Chronicle that the British Government in the person Sajid Javid, the Communities Secretary, has threatened to cancel the Palestinian cultural festival in central London next month over the organisers Friends of Al-Aqsa’s (FOA) ‘support of Hamas’. In a letter sent to FOA on June 14, Mr Javid said he was considering calling it off, citing: “concerns that your organisation and those connected with it have expressed public support for a proscribed organisation, namely Hamas, and that you have supported events at which Hamas and Hezbollah – also proscribed – have been praised”.

I guess that the recent election results haven’t taught the Tories the necessary lesson, that people are sick and tired of these manufactured ‘terror’ concerns, especially when they know that it is actually the British government that has been launching, one after the other, immoral and criminal Zio-con wars.

According to the notoriously Zionist Jewish Chronicle, Ismail Patel, founder of Friends of Al-Aqsa, “is closely linked to several Islamic organisations and has openly expressed support for Hamas in the past, calling the group “no terrorist organisation.” Needless to say, Patel is spot on. Hamas is a democratically-elected body which, against all odds, manages with some success and without being their fault, the biggest open-air prison known to humankind, and whose militancy should be understood only in the context of its resistance to Israeli blockade, oppression and occupation. Anyway, as far as I can see, the conference is not voicing any particular support for Hamas.

The JC then goes on to list further crimes of the FOA. It has “actively promoted boycotts of Israel and has hosted antisemitic musician Gilad Atzmon and Holocaust denier Paul Eisen on its website.” Well, as far as supporting boycotts is concerned, surely boycotting Israel is an entirely peaceful act, so if the British Government is really so fearful of terror, boycotting Israel may well be the way forward.

As for yours truly, I have nothing to do with this event and naming me as an ‘antisemite’ means very little unless one of these Jewish institutions that does this on a daily basis stands up and defines exactly what it is that I am not allowed to say. What exactly is the ‘crime’ of which I am accused? As things stand, I have never been questioned about any of my views or statements by a single law enforcement authority around the world. If the JC really believes I am guilty of any ‘hate crime’, then it really ought, once and for all, say what it is. The JC also doesn’t much like Paul Eisen, one of the very few authentic humanists around and who is repeatedly labelled a ‘Holocaust denier’ just because he insists that the Holocaust be treated as an historical narrative rather than as a religion. Is this really a crime in the UK?

By now, British Jewish institutions should surely have grasped that these old, recycled anti-Semitic/Holocaust denier labels have lost their power. After all, they tried it with Corbyn and as we know, if anything, it only contributed to his popularity and near victory in the last election.

In a letter replying to the Secretary of State, Mr Patel correctly states that the government is interfering unlawfully in this event and added that ministers had “failed to provide any satisfactory reason as to why they have chosen to cancel an event which seeks only to celebrate Palestinian culture and heritage.”

I would have liked to think that the Tories, now accused of BBQ-ing hundreds of working Brits and Muslims in Grenfell Tower, would have learned their lesson and behaved sensibly for a change.  And here is the good news, they certainly did! As I was about to post this article I learned from the Jewish press that despite the Jewish lobby relentless pressure  Palestine Expo 2017 is going ahead. A spokesman for Mr Javid said:

“We have worked with the QEII Centre to carry out checks following concerns raised about the Palestine Expo 2017. Following these checks, we have agreed the event can take place as planned.”

Seemingly calls to Boycott Israel and posting Gilad Atzmon and Paul Eisen articles is still a kosher adventure in the eyes of British law.

I guess that the British government may have learned its lesson after all. With a bit of luck,  it may even subscribe to Athens against all odds and turn its back to Jerusalem…

If you want to grasp this crucial dichotomy between Athens and Jerusalem, Being in Time is the book for you: Amazon.co.uk ,  Amazon.com  and   here.

Athens versus Jerusalem-a book review by Taxi (Plato’s Guns)

June 24, 2017  /  Gilad Atzmon

GA: The following is an incredibly clever book review by one of my favourite political commentators. Taxi  sees in  Being in Time an expose of  the ‘Athens vs. Jerusalem struggle.’ Taxi is  absolutely right – this is a battle  for our survival. It is far from being an easy one, We are both infiltrated and run over.

PLATO’S GUNS

Athens versus Jerusalem

by Taxi

https://platosguns.com/2017/06/24/athens-versus-jerusalem/

A review of ‘Being in Time: A Post-Political Manifesto’ – by Gilad Atzmon/Skyscraper Publication

First, I must make stern objection to the subtitle of this book: “A Post-Political Manifesto“.  No, dearest reader, this is no manifesto at all.  A manifesto is usually instructive and Atzmon’s book is actually reflective.  A manifesto is imbibed with strict political dogma, whereas Atzmon’s book is charged with a free-flowing, philosophical energy.  The book is, in fact, an astute and remarkable comment on the metaphysics of our current political condition: using the age-old blueprint of Athens versus Jerusalem to unravel the dark and twisted marvels of our current political dystopia.

For over two thousand years, a war between rationalist Athens and messianic Jerusalem has ensued, but not to clear conclusion.  For several millennia, this epic war has vacillated and the victor’s scales have tipped hither in one era and dither in another.  The war between Athens and Jerusalem continues relentlessly into our present day, and this side of the 21st century, it is cultural philosopher and Jazz artist, Gilad Atzmon, who now updates us on this epic and raging battle where each side is struggling to occupy the very perception of humanity itself.  Both sides claim to be the saviors of mankind; and currently, the Jerusalem school of thought is leading, but only because its agents have successfully infiltrated to the core, the elite leadership and governments of the Western world.

 

Simultaneously, Athens is presently having its victories too, as evidenced by the growing popularity of Atzmon’s elegant Athenian book – a rare publishing phenomenon in itself indeed, indicating a growing market hungry for Athenian thought.  Moreover, this current Athenian awakening can also be measured by recent polls, and by the palpable bulging of an eclectic population on Social Media, unified in expressing its disgust, distrust and utter rejection of Jerusalemite rule.  You could say that the various chattering masses are currently seeking the humanism and order that Athens promises because they are so very dissatisfied and disillusioned by what Jerusalem has delivered them: division, intolerance, senseless wars and hopeless human misery with no end.

One observes that since the controversial establishment of the State of Israel, the Jerusalem school has had an accelerated progress.  Inside of 70 years, Jerusalemites, with feverish dedication have successfully installed their peculiar brand of anarchy through the aggressive spread of divisive Identitarian Politics, tyrannical Political Correctness, ruinous Predatory Economics, vampirical Controlled Opposition, as well as a most lethal form of warmongering Jewish Power – all simultaneously and insidiously injected into Western societies.  Jerusalem has evidently delivered us nothing but endless warfare overseas and palpable instability and dystopia in our Western societies.  It has brought us a non-humanistic world.  It has given us a lowering of citizen morale and an increase in barbaric immorality where might over right is normalized.  Jerusalem has steeped us in an absurd environment where decadent perversions are permitted, but freedom of speech is curtailed.  A world where freedom of thought is punished instead of promoted.

In the philosophical arena, Athens represents Truth and Jerusalem: the Dream.  Both appeal to the human condition but clearly, one is more grounded in reality than the other.  Today we witness how Jerusalem’s promised Dream (of the messiah) has delivered us a convoluted and godless nightmare.  It is the very sinews of this nightmare that Being In Time so meticulously and courageously explores, illuminating and dissecting the elite powers that be and the diabolical machinations behind our current socio-political catastrophe.

Atzmon’s book takes us on a most unique philosophical journey, deconstructing this ongoing nightmare with fascinating insight and intellectual rectitude and rigor.  His gripping chapters are impressively substantive: dissecting each of Jerusalem’s current Jew-centric poison tentacles with astounding clarity and moral cognizance.  Making sense of the maddening world we live in is what Atzmon’s book so assuredly delivers.  His thoughtful deliberations on Identity Politics and other Jerusalemite maladies are stunningly profound in their clarity and logic: simple, indisputable logic.  No other contemporary philosopher or political writer has ever so successfully exposed the most vital of Jerusalem’s grotesque operators: their uniquely deceptive Controlled Opposition agents.  For this alone, Atzmon’s book must be read.  All efforts at liberation from Jerusalem are lost without knowledge and understanding of the duplicitous nature and aims of Jerusalem’s Controlled Opposition.  Without the skulduggery of the Controlled Opposition, Jerusalem cannot advance from within; cannot lasso the support of the blindsided masses.  Controlled Opposition IS the enemy within, the most dangerous of all enemies.  Atzmon exposes the very character and workings of these Controlled Opposition agents: using insider knowledge, facts, and a sprinkle of his own brand of wry wit.

Truly, there are too many important chapters in Atzmon’s book to break down here one by one, but I sincerely urge people seeking a humanistic and truth-based world to read this incredible book: an important document on the contemporary moralities of our current political zeitgeist; a book written by a devout Athenian philosopher glued to the mathematics of reality and to the stellar principles of humanism.

And with such rich knowledge in hand, can change be that far behind?

 Gilad’s Being in Time can be ordered on Amazon.co.uk  & Amazon.com  and on Gilad’s site  here.