The Charge of Anti-Semitism versus Israeli Behavior

Lawrence Davidson is a retired professor of history from West Chester University in West Chester PA. His academic research focused on the history of American foreign relations with the Middle East. He taught courses in Middle East history, the history of science and modern European intellectual history.

March 9, 2021  

Posted by Lawrence DavidsonIsrael

The Charge of Anti-Semitism versus Israeli Behavior

Part I—The Misuse of Anti-Semitism

When it comes to anti-Semitism, the Israelis and their Zionist supporters are so deceitful that they risk the moral degradation of Judaism. How do these two things, deceitfulness and the moral degradation, that is the deterioration of ethical standards, go together in this case?

First, the Zionists are deceitful because they purposely conflate Zionism which is an ethnocentric political ideology adhered to by a subset of Jews, with Judaism, a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural religion. Then they insist that Israel’s allies—particularly the United States—adhere to this same propagandistic conflation.

Second, this deliberately instigated error is an attempt to stave off criticism of the Israeli state and its policies toward Palestinians. Those policies are harsh and include segregation, ethnic cleansing and other apartheid-style acts of discrimination. By insisting that (1) the political ideology that promotes and rationalizes this behavior is an expression of religion of Judaism and therefore (2) criticism of these policies is the equivalent of anti-Semitism, the Zionists insist that Israeli state behavior is sanctified by the religion. This is a direct attack on the ethical standards of Judaism, hence the moral degradation. The tactic also undermines the gravity of the charge of anti-Semitism due to chronic misapplication by the Zionists.

Part II—Saturday Night Live Tells a Joke

Let’s take a look at the background of this situation.

First, the sad truth is that Israeli state policies result in racist behavior towards the Palestinians.

The noted journalist Jonathan Cook, who covers Israel and Lebanon as a freelance reporter, has concluded the Palestinians “are viewed as an unwelcome, surplus population that serves as a demographic obstacle to the political realization of a Greater Israel. The severe economic and military pressures Israel imposes on these Palestinians are designed to engineer their incremental displacement, a slow-motion ethnic cleansing.”

This observation has been confirmed by the recent report put out by Israel’s most respected human rights organization, B’Tselem, entitled “A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This Is Apartheid.” Among other points, the B’Tselem report demonstrates that “in the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, the Israeli regime implements laws, practices and state violence designed to cement the supremacy of one group—Jews—over another—Palestinians.”

Second, Israel and the Zionists insist that criticism of Israeli state policies is anti-Semitism.

Here is the most recent, admittedly rather absurd, example of the Zionists’ obsessive misuse of the charge of anti-Semitism—in this case directed toward a joke told on U.S. national television.

On February 24, the satiric comedy show, Saturday Night Live (SNL), joked about the Israeli discriminatory distribution of Covid-19 vaccine. It went as follows: “Israel is reporting that they vaccinated half of their population,” said the comedian Michael Che, “and I’m going to guess it’s the Jewish half.” It is not a hilarious sort of joke, but it is attention-getting in a way that draws a smile and an affirmative nod. This is because those in the know, know it is close to the truth, but like the skeleton in the closet, it is not supposed to see the light of day.

The immediate response by American Zionist organizations and spokespeople was, as the saying goes, over the top. The American Jewish Committee (AJC) declared that “Saturday Night Live’s ‘joke’ is dangerous, a modern twist on a classic anti-Semitic trope that has inspired the mass murder of countless Jews throughout the centuries.” This description is such an exaggeration that it smacks of a guilty conscience.

The AJC also said that the assertion that Israel had only vaccinated that half of the population that is Jewish is “untrue.” If you are only counting Israel proper (1948 Israel) the AJC is technically correct. However, if you include the Occupied Territories, which Israel claims to be part of the Jewish state, it is absolutely true that Israel has been holding back on supplying vaccines to the bulk of the Palestinian population—they have transferred only about 5000 doses for a population of almost 5 million and interfered with the Palestinian Authority’s own efforts to import vaccines. So whose “mass murder” are we really talking about?

The AJC complaint was followed up by remarks by the Israeli ambassador in Washington, Gilad Erdan. He said that the SNL joke “isn’t funny. It’s ignorant. It perpetuates anti-Semitism.” Then he told us, “the fact is that the success of our vaccination drive is exactly because every citizen of Israel —Jewish, Muslim, Christian—is entitled to it.” Here he is being purposely misleading. While claiming the OT to be part of Israel, the Israeli government has denied the Palestinians in that territory Israeli citizenship. Nonetheless, Israel has responsibility for Palestinians in the OT under international law. So, the ambassador is hiding his country’s racist vaccine policy, and its violation of international law, by using the term “citizen” in an obfuscating manner.

For the other side of the joke-response story, the reader should see journalist Abby Martin’s YouTube presentation in defense of Saturday Night Live, as well as going to the Israeli progressive website, 972, which reported on the SNL joke under the headline, “SNL Tells the Uncomfortable Truth About Israel.” Their point is that “For over half a century, Israel has lorded over Palestinian society, plundered their land, erased the border of Israel Proper, and settled hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers in a territory slated for a Palestinian state. With this one-state reality firmly in place, Israel is now attempting to obfuscate who exactly counts as part of Israel’s ‘population’—and whether they are deserving of the country’s public health service.” When the Israelis are not trying to confuse the issue, they are using access to Covid-19 vaccines as bait in attempts to wring concessions out of the Palestinian Authority or the Hamas government in Gaza.

So there sure is more than a core of truth to the SNL joke. The non-Jewish half of the population is being discriminated against when it comes to health care, as well as all other aspects of state support. Consider the statement by the Israeli minister of health, Yuli Edelstein, who asserted that the “State of Israel had no more obligations to take care of Palestinians, than the Palestinian minister of health has responsibility to take care of dolphins in the Mediterranean.” Of course the Palestinian minister of health is a powerless figure who is not bound, as is his Israeli counterpart, by the Fourth Geneva Convention. And, now consider Prime Minister Netanyahu’s decision to reward some twenty foreign countries which “have done favors” for Israel with thousands of vials of Covid vaccine, while the Palestinians in the OT get almost nothing. The Israeli government appeared to back away from this policy only after it generated harmful publicity abroad.

Part III—Promoting a Tribal Worldview

Except for some newspaper editorials and the report from 972, most Israeli Jews have been silent. There seems to be a numbness when it comes to the Palestinians that, in this case, makes many Israeli Jews either accepting of the government’s biased approach to the delivery of vaccines, or too uncaring in the face of the pandemic to notice.

Actually, we should not be too surprised at this. Israeli society has been structured to produce a predetermined sort of Jewish citizen—one who, under normal circumstances, rarely comes in contact with Palestinians (again, it is a segregated society) and, if and when they do think of them, sees them as dangerous interlopers on Jewish land.

Consider the context determining this outlook.

—More than most states, Israel is a tribal nation—a tribe with a flag, if you will. This sense of strong ethnocentrism is the product of centuries of anti-Semitism. The core of this outlook lay with the Ashkenazi—the European Jews who suffered the brunt of anti-Semitism, pogroms, and finally the Europe-centered Holocaust. It was their surviving leadership, guided by the ideology of Zionism, who finally realized the founding of Israel.

—Zionism is the political ideology that combines the goals of ethnic survival, statehood and the reshaping of the modern Jew into a citizen dedicated to the defense and future of a Jewish state.

—In other words what Israel does, or equivalently what Zionism does, is to institutionalize a tribal group sensitivity and ongoing sense of grievance. An expression of this sensitivity is the charge of anti-Semitism against anyone who is critical of Israel and its policies.

—How does Israel maintain and hone this sense of grievance as a basis of tribal solidarity? Through the institutions of society, particularly the state’s educational system and military service, which are designed to realize the appropriate Zionist worldview.

—For this it helps to have enemies right now: the whole non-Jewish world in general and the Palestinians in particular.

—Drill this worldview into successive generations and you get a first-class citizenry which sees no problem with discriminating and ultimately cleansing all supposed second-class interlopers. Thus, the miserly and begrudging outlay of Covid-19 vaccines for those “others!”

Part IV—Conclusion

The promotion of such a skewered worldview is not peculiarly Israeli, and certainly is not inherently Jewish. Tribalism was the social unit of all human beings for millennia and really did not start to break down until modern times. This breakdown process is imperfect, and so there are any number of groups resisting the trend toward multi-ethnic and multi-cultural societies. They still react, often violently, to immigrants and other strangers in their midst, and stick together based on ethnicity, religion, or other tribal-like identities. Here in the U.S., Donald Trump is the rather nasty leader of such a reaction.

However, as the growth of integrated societies testifies, tribalism isn’t inevitable. Rather, the modern tribal impulse for an ethnocentric state has to be artificially manipulated through incessant propaganda and organized miseducation.
This manipulation is exactly what is happening in Israel. As a result, the Israelis, and more broadly the Zionists, just can’t take a joke—particularly if it shines a light on their racist behavior.

My Struggle

FEBRUARY 20, 2020 BY GILAD ATZMON

By Gilad Atzmon

I launched my study into Jewishness two decades ago. It began as a result of my reaction to the relentless attacks on dissident Jewish thinkers who didn’t fit with the ‘revolutionary agenda’ of the so-called Jewish ‘anti Zionist’ Left.  I quickly grasped that it was actually the Jewish Left, the radicals and progressives, who displayed the most   problematic traits associated with Zionism and Jewish identitarianism.

I was perplexed: the same people who adhere to tribal politics and operate in racially segregated political cells preach universalism to others.  I came to understand that nothing was transparent or obvious about Jewish culture and identitarianism, and that this was by design. I decided to untangle the Jewish enigma from a new perspective: instead of asking who or what Jews are, I asked what those who self-identify as Jews believe in, what precepts they adhere to. This question was the beginning of my struggle.

By the time I published The Wandering Who?  (2011),  I realised that those who identify as Jews can be divided into three non-exclusive categories. 1. Those who follow Torah and Mitzvoth. 2. Those who identify with their Jewish ancestry. 3. Those who identify politically as Jews. In The Wandering Who I argued that while the first and the second categories are innocent, the third category is always contaminated by biological determinism. The third category is, in fact, racist to the core. While Jews aren’t necessarily a race, Jewish politics are, too often, racially oriented. This applies to both Zionists and the so called ‘anti’ Zionists. In my work there is no real distinction between Jewish Zionists and their Jewish dissenters. I have found them to be equally racist.

There is more to draw from this categorical approach. It is apparent that not many self identified Jews fall exclusively into just one of the categories. Jewish identity is a multilayered construct.  A West Bank settler, for instance, is usually a follower of Torah and Mitzvoth (cat’ 1), most often he/she speaks in the name of their Jewish ancestry and even claims lineage to Biblical figures (cat’ 2). And  it goes without saying that a West Bank Jewish settler identifies and acts politically as a Jew (cat’ 3). Surprisingly, a JVP activist in Brooklyn isn’t all that different. He or she may not adhere to the Torah but likely identifies ethnically as a Jew (cat’ 2) and certainly acts politically as a Jew (cat’ 3).

In The Wandering Who I argued that If Zionism is a racist ideology, then Jewish anti Zionists are at least as guilty of the same crime. In fact, in the Israeli Knesset, the third biggest party is a Palestinian party. You do the goy count: try to figure out how many Palestinians or Gentiles are on JVP’s board or amongst the British Jewish Voice for Labour (that doesn’t even accept gentiles as equal members).  Needless to mention, this observation didn’t make me overwhelmingly popular amongst Zionists and the so called ‘anti.’

On the day of the publication of The Wandering Who, hell broke loose. What started as a struggle to seek the truth or at least some understanding, evolved into a bloody war. Oddly, no one bothered to find a mistake in my work or pointed to where my argument was lacking. No one claimed that the facts I based my argument on were inaccurate. Both Zionists and ‘anti’ have deployed every trick in their Hasbara book to try and silence me. I was called a racist, an anti-Semite  and a Nazi despite the fact that my entire work is anti racist and in defiance of the Jewish racial argument.

Since 2011 I have been subject to a cowardly smear campaign. But the war called upon me has actually helped me to refine my views on Jewish Identity Politics. I realised that Jewishness (yehudiyut)  is a manifold of different forms of chosenness. Rabbinical Jews celebrate being God’s favorite children. Atheist Jews in practice, dumped  the God who first chose them in order to validate their own superiority as godless people. Jewish Marxists are special for their belief in equality. Tikun Olam Jews believe that it is down to them to save the Goyim. After a few more years of this study I realised that Judaism is just one Jewish religion amongst many and it is not even the most popular Jewish religion.

The great Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz figured out in the 1970s that while Jews uphold many religions and beliefs, all Jews believe in the Holocaust. It was this observation by Leibowitz that planted the notion of the Holocaust religion. When I wrote Being in Time, I realised that practically every precept can become a Jewish religion as long as it sustains a lucid concept of ‘chosenness’, self-love or auto validation.

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan revealed that the  ‘unconscious is the discourse of the Other;’ the fear that one’s deepest secrets could be unveiled and make it into the public discourse.  In Lacanian terms, the Jewish unconscious is the fear that the ‘Goyim Know.’ Their torment is that people ‘out there’ will start to converse about what has taken place in front of their eyes: whether it is AIPAC dominance of US foreign policy or the destruction of the Labour Party or the constant threat to world peace imposed by Israel and its Lobby.   

Judging by their desperate attempts to silence me, I assume that I must be seen, at least in the eyes of my Jewish detractors, as a prime conduit for that ever expanding general awareness – after all I have been blowing the whistle for a while. 

Jews do not like those who leave the tribe. Jesus paid a price, as did Uriel da Costa and Spinoza.  For Jews, the former Jew, or ex-Jew, is a threat most likely because many Jews may feel insecure about the ethical ground of their core beliefs, culture and ideology. Enlightened Jewish progressives are probably clever enough to admit to themselves that being born into chosenness is a problematic racially supremacist concept. Honest Jews may have gathered that being chosen by a God you yourself invented to favour you over the rest of humanity is actually funny. Orthodox Jews understand that large parts of  their core beliefs are inconsistent with the western universal humanist tradition. Many Zionists know that their claims to a historic right to a land they have never been in are ridiculous.

The Jewish strategy to handle their fears includes the suppression of elementary freedoms: Jewish Power as I define it, is the power to suppress criticism of Jewish power. I believe that it was I who coined the slogan, ‘We Are All Palestinians.’ In accordance with my definition of Jewish power, Palestinians are those who can’t even utter the name of their oppressor. While Israel calls itself the Jewish State and boasts about itself as Jewish, the Palestinians and their solidarity movement go out of their way to avoid the ‘J word.’ When British Jewish institutions including the chief rabbi and the British Jewish press called an open war on the British Labour and its leader no one in the Labour party dared utter the ‘J word’ except when asking for Jewish forgiveness. The condition of being Palestinian, of not being able to name one’s oppressor, is now a global symptom. This suppression of speech and thought has evolved into a tyranny of correctness.

By the time I wrote Being in Time I understood that my struggle has implications that far exceed my initial intellectual objectives.  What we face as western subjects is a massive battle between Athens and Jerusalem, where Athens is the birthplace of Western thought and Jerusalem is the city of revelation. Athens teaches us how to think, Jerusalem demands our obedience. 

The Western humanist values and intellectual assets we are now nostalgic for came from Athens: democracy, tolerance, freedom of speech, philosophy, Agora, science, ethics, poesis and the tragedy. Jerusalem gave us laws, mitzvoth, regimes of prescribed and proscribed behavior. Athens teaches us how to think ethically: in Jerusalem, ethics are replaced by the Ten Commandments; rules to obey. Jerusalem is not solely a ‘Jewish domain.’ The Jerusalemization of our universe is apparent in every corner of society: from pop culture, to the work place, to academia and beyond.  It is the tyranny of correctness adopted by the new Left and it is at least as infectious within right identitarianism.  

My struggle as I now understand it, has evolved into a metaphysical quest.  I battle to reinstate Athens within my soul. If you want to make the West great again, my struggle is your struggle.  Defy Jerusalem, say no to authoritarianism, embrace Athens in your heart: learn to speak your mind, tell the truth as you see it and bear the consequences.   

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Burg, Soros and the ‘Jew-niversal.’

JANUARY 01, 2020

BY GILAD ATZMON

By Gilad Atzmon

 While the Jewish Lobby and its squads of thought-police are geared up to frame and destroy anyone who dares to mention Soros’ ethnicity, Avraham Burg, prominent Israeli politician, former chairman of the Jewish Agency and interim Israeli president lauds George Soros as the quintessential  ‘Jew-niversalist’ icon.

In his recent Haaretz Op-ed  titled “Get Ready for the ‘Jew-niversal’ Decade of George Soros and Open Society,” the Israeli politician opines that just “a few people have the courage to stand up to the decade’s new tyrants at the head of illiberal democracies.” Apparently “one of these people with courage is Soros.” According to Burg, Soros “represents a ‘Jew-niversal’ standpoint, a Jewish alternative symbol to the simplistic Jewish one embraced by Netanyahu, Trump and their supporters.”

Within the context of the notion of this so called ‘Jew-niversal,’ the 52% of the Brits who want to split from the EU are considered a ‘noisy suicidal minority.’ It seems that the so-called ‘Jew-niversal’ is not very tolerant towards people who vote Tory, Trump or Netanyahu. This ‘Jew-niversal’ seems pretty hostile towards those who happen to have some conservative  values or who are unlucky enough to be wrapped in white skin. And, as we have discovered, the ‘Jew-niversal’ is not very tolerant of literature and freedom of speech. We have watched Soros funded bodies work tirelessly to burn books, eliminate texts and even remove historical artefacts that are meaningful to people with whom they don’t agree. 

Burg’s notion of the Jew-niversal’ bears no relationship to the Greek notions of the  ‘universal’ or ‘universalism.’

While Burg doesn’t approve of the Barbarian face of Israel and Zionism, he somehow sees Soros as the embodiment of the Jewish commitment to Tikun Olam i.e., fixing the world. “While so many Jews are doing their utmost to become ultra-nationalist and violent thugs, tough and callous, Soros represents – perhaps not consciously – the other face of Jewish civilization, the hidden and enchanted one where the main obligation is the commitment to fix the world’s wrongs not only for Jews but for everyone.” I tend to think that the world would  be a much nicer and safer place if Jews decided to be slightly less passionate about saving other people and concentrated on fixing their Jewish State.   

In his Haaretz commentary Burg references Soros’ mentor, Karl Popper, author of The Open Society and its Enemies. According to Popper no person or organization has a monopoly on the truth, so the greater the number of  diverse opinions there are among people who live in peace and tolerance with one another, the more benefits there are that accrue to all.   Unfortunately, Soros and his Open Society do not follow Popper’s philosophical mantra. Soros’ ‘Jew-niversalism’ is a divisive construct. It breaks society into a manifold of identitarian segments that are defined by biology (race, gender, sexual preference). In the realm of the ‘Jew-niversal,’ people do not identify as mere humans who seek their common human experience. Instead each identity learns to speak in the dialect of the  ‘as a’ (‘as a woman…,’ ‘as a Jew…,’ ‘as a black..,’ ‘as a gay,’ etc. ). In the ‘Jew-niversal’ sphere people adopt identifications that differentiate themselves from the rest of humanity. Exclusivity and difference are celebrated, it contradicts the search for ultimate value of human brotherhood. The ‘Jew-niversal’ ‘jurisdiction’ reduces the universe into a mere expanded version of the ‘tribes of Israel’: tribes of Identitarians who engage in sectarian, racial and gender wars.   

The fake ‘diversity’ and sham ‘tolerance’ offered by the ‘Jew-niversal’  is, in fact, authoritarian and intolerant to the masses. The so-called ‘Jew-niversal’ is an exceptionalist concept designed to ‘otherise’ those with whom they don’t agree. 

Inadvertently Burg has revealed to us that the “war between the open and the closed, between isolationists and the embracers of inclusion,” is actually an internal Jewish battle between the Netanyahus of the world (Trump, Giuliani, Orban etc.) and the Jew-niversalists whom he calls ‘Soros Jews’: those who Burg  says “fearlessly fight so that the new decade is ours.”

“Ours”?

I guess that a gentile might well ask, who is ‘ours’ and am I included? Are those who voted Trump, Johnson, Brexit, Orban or Bibi included in the ‘Jew-niversal utopia’? Certainly not!  They are the basket of deplorables as the ‘Jew-niversalist’ Clinton referred to them just before her presidential dreams evaporated into thin air. Those who buy into Soros and the notion of the ‘Jew-niversal’ shouldn’t be surprised by the tsunami of successful Right wing politics.  Within the ‘Jew-niversal’ dream the world is broken into an amalgam of cosmopolitan identities set to fight each other instead of fighting Wall Street and the City. In the ‘Jew-niversal’ reality, the Left is maintained by an arch capitalist ‘philanthropist.’

If the Left intends to sustain any relevance amongst the working people and the working classes, it may want to consider supporting the values and needs of working people rather than accepting the dirty money of a capitalist  tycoon. If the Left wants to be relevant it better figure out how to reinstate the universal and universalism. I close this commentary by noting that there is no indication that the Left wants to reinstate its political or social role. Being paid by the Jew-niversal society institute seems to be its preferred mode. 

The End of Israel

by Gilad Atzmon

The lesson to be drawn from the current Israeli political stalemate is that Israel is imploding, breaking into the elements it has never managed to integrate into one. The schism is no longer the more quotidian dichotomy of Ashkenazi vs. Arab Jews (aka Sephardim); this divide is ideological, religious, spiritual, political, ethnic and cultural. Nor does it break down to Left and Right, Jewish Israelis are politically with the right even when they pretend to be ‘Left.’ Although some of the most astute critical voices of Israeli politics and Jewish fundamentalism are Israelis (such as Gideon Levi, Shlomo Sand, Israel Shamir and others), there is no political Israeli Left. Israeli politics break down into a lot of extreme right voters and many ordinary hawks. The Arab Joint List Party is practically the only Left party in the Israeli Knesset. This should not be surprising any more. Jewish Left, as I have been arguing for many years, is an oxymoron; Jewishness is a form of tribal identification and Left is universal. The ‘tribal’ and the ‘universal’ are like oil and water, they do not mix very well.

What is peculiar about the Israeli political divide is that the Israelis are more united than ever in their nationalist beliefs and in the primacy of their Jewish symptoms. Why is it, if the Israelis are so unified, that no one can form a government in their so-called ‘Jewish State’?

 Avigdor Lieberman, formerly an enthusiastic Netanyahu ally and himself a radical Jewish nationalist, delved into the Israeli political deadlock yesterday. He maintained that the elections had already been decided: “The ultra-Orthodox and Messianic bloc reaches 62-61 seats.” The leader of the rabid nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu said, “If there is no voting rate of at least 70% in Gush Dan and Sharon, the Halacha government will be established.”

Basically, Lieberman said that unless secular Israelis in Tel Aviv go to the polls, they should expect to live in a Halacha State under an ultra right wing Netanyahu government.  Lieberman appears to hold the key to Israel’s political stability. Although he and Netanyahu are ideological twins regarding Israeli security and nationalist matters, the two are bitter rivals who fight aggressively against each other. Netanyahu has known for a few years that, absent a strong ultra right wing government, he can expect to spend some time behind bars, an adventure that has become common for Israel’s prime political figures.  Netanyahu’s natural partners are the ultra right parties and the orthodox parties. Ideologically, Lieberman should also feel comfortable within such a political coalition but Lieberman has made a crucial political decision, essential for his political survival. A while back he grasped that his political home base, Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union, many of them barely Jewish and subjected to constant rabbinical terror, regard the Jewish Orthodox parties as their ultimate foes. Many of these Russian and Ukrainian Jews hold ultra right wing political positions but also see the Rabbis as an imminent threat to their survival.

Theoretically, Lieberman could broker a huge unity coalition with Netanyahu at the top, joined by Blue and White (Kachol Lavan) and its three right wing field marshals, Lieberman’s own party and probably the Labour party. Such a coalition would hold around 80 Knesset seats, more than enough to sustain a strong government but this coalition would refuse to guarantee Netanyahu’s immunity.

 Netanyahu gambles instead on a weak ultra right wing religious government, a government that may not hold for very long but would buy more time for its PM to stay out of jail.

 This conflict at the heart of Israeli politics is a window into the Jewish state and its fears. Israel is rapidly becoming an Orthodox Jewish state. Israel’s Orthodox Jews are the fastest growing group in the country. They are also the country’s poorest population, 45 percent live below the poverty line in segregated communities. Ordinarily, one would expect the poor to support the left, but Israeli Torah Jews are rabid nationalists and openly lend their support to Benjamin Netanyahu and his party.

Prof. Dan Ben-David of Tel Aviv University warned recently that Israel could cease to exist in a couple of generations. He pointed to the astonishingly high birth rate among ultra Orthodox Jews and predicted that, based on current trends, they will comprise 49% of Israel’s population by 2065. The ultra Orthodox parties are destined to dominate the Knesset within a generation or less. Ben David  predicts that their dependence on Israel’s welfare system will lead to a rapid decline is Israel’s economy. This is economically damaging enough and is made worse by the refusal of most rabbinical schools to incorporate standard Western subjects such as mathematics, science and English into their core curriculum. Consequently, Israel is educating a growing percentage of its population in a fashion that fails to equip them to contribute to the needs of a hi-tech society that is immersed in a conflict for survival.

 The picture that comes across is peculiar. As Israel becomes increasingly Jewish and fundamentalist in its nationalist and religious ethos, it has also become more divided on everything else. The Russian immigrants find it impossible to live alongside the ultra Orthodox and vice versa. The secular enclave in Tel Aviv is committed to seeing their metropolis as an extension of NY. The Israeli Left has morphed into an LGBT hasbara unit. It has practically removed itself from the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Jewish settlers adhere to the concept of a ‘Two Jewish States Solution.’ They want to see the West Bank become a Jewish land. Orthodox Jews are barely concerned with any of these political issues. They well know that the future of the Jewish state belongs to them. All they need to do is sustain a productive secular Jewish minority to serve as their milk cow.  On top of all of that we face Bibi’s survival wars that threaten to escalate any minute into a world conflict.

In light of all of this, the Palestinians are in relatively good shape.. They simply need to survive. Israel seems to be Israel’s fiercest enemy.

My battle for truth and freedom involves some expensive legal and security services. I hope that you will consider committing to a monthly donation in whatever amount you can give. Regular contributions will enable me to avoid being pushed against a wall and to stay on top of the endless harassment by Zionist operators attempting to silence me and others.

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‘To win, the Palestinians have to survive’

June 16, 2019  /  Gilad Atzmon

Gilad Atzmon: ‘To win, the Palestinians have to survive’


By Teresa Aranguren,

http://www.resumenlatinoamericano.org

Gilad Atzmon speaks in a torrent of words during our conversation on a sunny terrace in Madrid. He expresses himself passionately, neatly, but never runs over; he seeks to hit the nail and throws phrases like darts that aim to cross, penetrate and reach the other side, rather than hitting a target. I think he asks to be understood, and he makes an effort for it. It is likely because he feels or knows he is ‘misunderstood’.

Gilad Atzmon was born in Israel into a secular but actively Zionist family. He left the country in the early nineties, when he was thirty years old. He says it was the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 that opened his eyes to what Israel is, although it took him a while to leave the country where he was born and raised.

“It was not an easy decision. I left because I understood that I was dwelling in a land that belonged to others. Israel is Palestine. I have never returned, nor will I come back. “

 To say that he is a controversial author is to fall short. Gilad Atzmon is provocative, very politically incorrect and has the gift of bothering right and left, that is, from the right and from the left. He defines himself as a philosopher of politics.

 In his last book Being in Time, a Post-political Manifesto, published by Ediciones de Oriente and the Mediterranean and recently presented in Madrid, he attacks identity politics and what he describes as the tyranny of correctness, both phenomena that according to him are linked and feed each other “in the progressive circles that are so politically correct. People are encouraged to identify as a woman, as a gay, as a black, as a Jew or vegan, but not as a Muslim or White. This policy of exalting particular identities is very problematic and a serious danger, especially for the left, if you can still talk about the left … “

 The question of identity has been the central theme of Atzmon’s work and perhaps his vital and intellectual adventures as well. After all, he is a Jew who grew up in a Zionist family … and is accused by some of anti-Semitism.

“In the past, anti-Semites were people who hated Jews, nowadays people who oppose Israel are labelled anti-Semitic. I’m in the same club as Bernie Sanders, George Galloway, Richard Falk or Roger Waters: the humanists of our time. They call us anti-Semites because we are against what Israel does and what has happened in Iraq and Syria, and the power of the Neocons and AIPAC in Washington … I have never criticized Jews for being Jewish, I am Jewish (GA: this is a mistranslation, I do not identify as Jewish), my wife is Jewish and … – he explodes in a laugh-, my mistress too. I want to be able to criticize Jewishness, the ideology that drives Jewish tribalism, the idea of a chosen people, as any intellectual criticizes Catholicism or as Weber criticized Protestantism, even though I know I’d pay a price for it. The essence of Jewish power is the power to silence all criticism of Jewish power. To say what I want to say, I had to renounce working in the academic world, although I fulfil all the requirements and have all the qualifications. I chose to live as a jazz musician, which is more difficult from an economic standpoint, but it allows me to speak freely.”

Many of his opinions irritate me, for example his contemptuous and ironic look towards the international brigades:

“most were revolutionary Jews who travelled to Spain because they wanted to give their lives in the name of the ‘international working class, but the real workers did not go to Spain, they stayed at home. Real working class people go to work in the morning the feel the urge to identify ‘as working class’).”

Nevertheless, understanding truth as what one believes is true, I recognize an authentic passion for the truth in what he writes and inquires.

Someone said (I think it was Kant) that more important than having the right answers is asking the right questions. In the writings of Gilad Atzmon it is not easy to find answers, but we always find new questions that worry, surprise, challenge the political consensus.

Gilad Atzmon does not accept taboos or the notion of sacred territory, where it is better not to enter. He refuses to let what the rest of us regard as unthinkable stay untouched. Sometimes, his opinions turn out to be impertinent, but their impertinence has to do with their boldness, undoubtedly a form of value.

Before saying goodbye, I ask him if he sees any way out of the drama of Palestine. He remains silent for a moment, searching for the precise words.

“I am not an activist, I do not like to tell people what they should or should not do. But I think the key is a matter of percentages and demographics. It is all about facts on the ground, when the Palestinian population reaches 70% of the total population in Israel, everything will start to change. To win, the Palestinians have to survive.”

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There Goes The Neighborhood

May 16, 2019  /  Gilad Atzmon

By Devon Nola

I believe it’s a fair assumption that most social creatures understand when one is the newest arrival to, say, a party or a community, it is their responsibility to ingratiate themselves to the local, existing populace.  The most unwelcome guest is the one who arrives late and then proceeds to redecorate.  But this is exactly what we see happening, repeatedly, when Hasidic Jews descend on predominantly gentile communities.  In every case, the arrival of these orthodox groups is met with hostility and resistance by their host.  Is it possible that anti-Jewish sentiment is inherent in the gentile mind or are there natural grievances that need to be explored?

 Having lived for 8 years in a neighborhood that is home to a very large and quite powerful Chabad Lubavitch Hasidic community, I can say there are legitimate grievances.  I began delving into this phenomenon some time ago when I learned about the chaos surrounding Kiryas Joel, a Satmar sect of Hasidim in the town of Monroe in Orange County, NY.  The Satmar purchased land in an unincorporated section of Monroe to relocate some of the sect from Williamsburg in Brooklyn. The community started small, but due to the nature of Jewish ultra orthodox pro-creation practices, it multiplied at lightening speed.  The existing residents of Monroe grew weary as they watched their green, sprawling small town become inundated with multi-family dwellings to house the growing Hasidic population. The Satmar fought to become part of the incorporated section, which would allow them access to public funds. It wasn’t long before plans to annex massive acres of public land were put in motion for Jewish-only use and this sparked a fire storm between the two communities.  The details of the struggle can be seen in this 2016 documentary, Love Thy Neighbor.   Another issue was the exceedingly high numbers of Hasidics, who typically vote in blocs, impacting the local governing board in their favor, at the expense of the rest of the population.  Public school funds were being diverted to Jewish-only yeshivas. In some cases, public schools have actually collapsed as a result of this. It’s worth mentioning Kiryas Joel has the highest poverty rate in the nation (although, it is estimated that the dynasty controls $1 billion in assets in the U.S.)    More than 2/3 of the population live below the poverty line with 40% receiving food stamps.  So, we see a large handout to this community with zero return on investment.

In Rockland County, NY, the once idyllic suburban community of Ramapo has become chaotic with conflict due to the rapidly expanding Hasidic community.  The formerly picturesque neighborhoods with manicured lawns inside picket fences have been consumed by high-density multi-family dwellings.  In Ramapo, early residents bought single family homes and expected it to remain a neighborhood of single-family homes. This helps to preserve the value and the esthetic of the neighborhood.  But suddenly, they found themselves living next to a monstrous multi-family dwelling when the previous home had been leveled by the new orthodox owner and replaced with a structure housing four families. Another house was turned into a yeshiva. In one case, a trailer was dumped on the once-green lawn and the new Hasidic owner was running a business out of it.  It doesn’t seem as though rational people should need zoning laws enforced to tell them not to do this. Look around. Is anyone else operating a business out of trailer on their front lawn?

While the exploding demand for housing might be advantageous to property values in the short term, there are pitfalls. The increasing number of tax-exempt yeshivas and synagogues left crumbs in the town’s tax base.   Negligent (or greedy) city officials looked the other way, ignoring zoning, building and fire safety code violations. This created environmental implications by putting a strain on the sewer system, creating dangerous traffic congestion and in, some cases,  made it impossible for first responders to find an address since there was no municipal record of it. They ultimately overrun school boards and town councils, get zoning laws changed in their favor and in the end, property values plummet.

The neighboring communities, horrified by what happened in Ramapo, took measures to safeguard their town.  A significant step was having their local government put in place “no-knock” ordinances, prohibiting the oh-so common practice of hardcore real estate solicitation.  Hasidim come out in droves, knocking on doors, using very unethical methods such as intimidation, offering fistfuls of cash, in an effort to get the homeowner to sell. This practice is known as “blockbusting”. It’s intrusive and more importantly, it’s illegal and has been since 1968.  Nevertheless, they ignore the law and come back, repeatedly, in the hopes of wearing down the homeowner.  They often threaten the if they don’t sell. Many towns are now adopting this “no-knock” ordinance as a direct result of relentless orthodox solicitation.  Violation of the ordinance carries a fine anywhere from $100-$1250, depending on the town.

Watch Troublemakers in Ramapo:

We have seen these conflicts in virtually every suburban neighborhood on which the ultra-orthodox Jews descend.  Mahwah, in New Jersey, got a jump start.  After seeing the take-over in neighboring townships, they weren’t going to wait for the situation to accelerate.  The first sign of an eruv prompted the residents to put it into high gear. An eruv is essentially a symbolic boundary designated by white PVC pipe fixed to utility poles. This marks the area in which the orthodox Jews can engage in tasks the Torah forbids on the sabbath.  Apparently, G-d’s divine vision can’t see passed PVC. In the case of Mahwah, the eruv was put up by orthodox Jews from Orange County, NY.  Holy expansionism. Mahwah residents were already experiencing a problem in their community park, where the out-of-state Hasidim were crossing the state border, by the bus load, sometimes exceeding 100 people.  It made the park so over-crowded that local Mahwah residents weren’t bringing their own children to play for fear of injury based on the number of occupants.

Mahwah had very clear ordinances about signage within the community.  There are to be none. This ordinance, which is legal, had always been enforced. Not even so much as a ‘missing dog’ sign had ever been posted.  Residents of a township have the right to determine things like signage, overnight parking, etc., in their community and the ordinances are there to protect these decisions as long as they aren’t discriminatory or selectively enforced. However, the Bergen Rockland Eruv Association didn’t see it that way and filed a law suit, claiming the Mahwah residents were discriminating against them based on their religion. The Eruv Association insisted that the orthodox families had the right to religious freedom and the eruv was there to preserve this.  Apparently, the rights of the non-orthodox, who actually live and pay taxes in Mahwah, don’t figure into this equation.

In the end the Mahwah township council members, following the advice of their legal representation and under pressure from state government, voted 5-2 to settle.  The Eruv stayed, the township paid the Bergen Rockland Jewish association’s legal fees of $10,000 and the settlement stated that nothing would prevent the eruv association from expanding the boundary in the future.  Ahh, but the Mahwah residents didn’t walk away completely empty-handed.  The settlement stated that the PVC pipe would be painted to blend in with the pole.  Jackpot.

And this brings us to Lakewood, New Jersey, the latest victims of these unfriendly take-overs. Lakewood is in Ocean County.  What was once a rural vacation community is now home to one of the largest yeshivahs in the world. The population is exploding, as it often happens with Hasidic communities and with this comes all the problems we’ve seen in the other towns. Blockbusting, diversion of public-school funds for private Jewish institutions, taxpayers’ money and funds for public school buses have been siphoned to bus children to and from the Jews only school, over development of lands, negative impact on the environment due to over population, traffic congestion, etc. plague this community.  Even a senior community was overrun by these orthodox Jews. A serene, gated golf community, The Enclave, was where affluent people, 55 and over, thought they would take their last breath. They forged friendships and joked how the only way they would leave their community was feet first.  Sadly, that’s not how things turned out.  Aggressive solicitation began.  Seniors are often a vulnerable community to predatory practices,  and when they were told, “you better sell, you don’t want to be the only non-orthodox left in the community”, many panicked and relented to the pressure.  Eventually the golf course was slated to be replaced by multi-family dwellings to accommodate more Hasidim. Beginning with the first few orthodox that moved into The Enclave, trouble began to brew. The security bar at a side entrance, which wasn’t preventing strangers (or aggressive solicitors) from entering the community on foot as it should, was to be replaced with a proper gate operated by a card swipe. One orthodox man, who used this entrance on his way to synagogue on the sabbath, objected. He wasn’t permitted to use the technology that would open the gate. When the board wasn’t persuaded to reconsider the new gate, he filed a discrimination complaint with New Jersey Division on Civil Rights.  It begs the question, why on earth would one buy in a gated community full of goyim?  Future plans to have regulations put in place at the pool so that men and women would have separate swim times was also on the orthodox agenda. This was instituted in another community and violators were fined.

 A group, Rise Up Ocean County, is fighting back. RUOC is a collective of engaged citizens from approximately five townships, including Lakewood.  Their mission is concise: Mobilizing to preserve and improve the quality of life in Ocean County.  They have had enough of the yeshiva’s practices of “fueling ugly, unhealthy, inequitable economic development”, as quoted by the Jewish commentary outlet, ‘The Forward.’  RUOC is working on a documentary on this ordeal and here you can see a little taste, which exposes the 10 orthodox Rabbis that make up the Vaad, or council. They wield their power far beyond the religious community to influence public policy in their favor. If this power or their actions are contested, they rely on attacks of antisemitism.  I’ll be honest, if this is the definition of ‘Semitism,’ they give their neighbors ample reason to be disgruntled.

While Hasidim pride themselves on their love of community, it seems many of them don’t apply this fellowship in universal terms. What is it that drives such an institutional collective dismissal of the Other?   Why is it they don’t learn from their past?  I’m fairly confident that other than finding them a bit curious, no one would reject them if they didn’t insinuate themselves into lives outside Haredim.  Learning to live cooperatively as opposed to competitively with their neighbors might result in much more harmonious existence for everyone.

It’s Not ‘Anti-Semitic’ to Question the Influence of AIPAC in American Politics

ROBERT BRIDGE | 14.03.2019 | WORLD / AMERICAS

Freshman Democrat lawmaker Ilhan Omar triggered an earthquake in Washington that split the political aisle when she touched the forbidden third rail, which is any discussion of the pro-Israeli lobby’s influence on the US political system.

During a bookstore event hosted by Busboys and Poets, Omar told the assembled guests: “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is okay for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country. I want to ask why it is okay for me to talk about the influence of the NRA, fossil fuel industries, or Big Pharma, and not talk about a powerful lobby that is influencing policy.”

Judging how she prefaced the remark, with a lengthy discussion about “the stories of Palestinians” and how she was being regularly accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ to end all debate on the decades-old standoff, it was clear what lobbying group Omar was referring to.

It was the second time in as many weeks that Ilhan Omar, one of the first two Muslims to serve in Congress, was accused of allegedly espousing anti-Semitic comments.

In early February, Omar had responded to a tweet by journalist Glenn Greenwald who said it was “stunning how much time US political leaders spend defending a foreign nation even if it means attacking free speech rights of Americans.”

Omar responded, “It’s all about the Benjamins baby,” followed by a musical emoji.

When pushed by another Twitter user to say who she thinks is paying American politicians to be pro-Israel, Omar responded simply, “AIPAC!”

In fact, Omar was wrong. AIPAC does not raise funds for candidates. But its members do, with the group’s powerful endorsement.

On March 3, Omar tweeted to her fellow Congresswoman, Nita Lowey, that she should “not be expected to have allegiance/pledge support to a foreign country in order to serve my country in Congress or serve on committee…”

Such complaints have been heard before.

In 2014, former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney told Press TV that her campaign funding suddenly went “kaput” after she refused to sign a “pledge of allegiance” to Israel while she was in office.

“I refused to toe the line on US policy for Israel,” she said.

On another occasion, in 2006, academics John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt published a paper in the London Review of Books, entitled “The Israeli Lobby and US Foreign Policy.” In it, the authors discussed the influence of pro-Israel organizations in the United States, with primary emphasis on AIPAC, which they described as “the most powerful and well-known.”

Omar’s string of remarks quickly sparked similar debate, but this time inside of the Democratic Party. This demonstrated the potential future impact of a new generation of multiethnic lawmakers, many of whom, as Muslims, are increasingly frustrated by the Israeli-Palestinian crisis and their inability to discuss it.

Omar, however, was quickly upbraided by senior Democrats.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) called out the freshman lawmaker, saying her “use of anti-Semitic tropes and prejudicial accusations about Israel’s supporters is deeply offensive… and we call upon Congresswoman Omar to immediately apologize for these hurtful comments.”

Although Omar did offer contrition, she refused to budge on “the problematic role of lobbyists in our politics,” mentioning the NRA, fossil fuel industry and AIPAC. It seems like a fair criticism, all things considered.

Following the high-profile fallout, the House Democrats passed, with remarkable alacrity, a House Resolution that condemns anti-Semitism as “hateful expressions of intolerance…and anti-Muslim discrimination and bigotry against minorities.”

The resolution, while intended to tamp down messages of hate, conspicuously failed to mention Omar’s purportedly anti-Semitic remarks, focusing its attention instead on “white supremacists” and “white nationalists,” who were not even remotely mentioned by Omar during her bookstore comments, thus prompting 23 Republican lawmakers to reject the resolution.

The partisan smashup helped to deflect attention away from the main point of contention with regards to Omar’s claim, which on the face of it does not sound radical: Does the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC), as well as the other powerful lobbying groups, hold too much sway over US foreign policy? Should AIPAC be ranked as an agent of a foreign power working on behalf of Israeli interests in the US?

Mearsheimer and Walt certainly thought so. In their paper, they quoted a 1997 article in Fortune magazine, which asked members of Congress to name the most powerful lobbies in Washington. AIPAC was ranked second behind only the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), but ahead of the AFL-CIO and the National Rifle Association (NRA). The authors were quick to point out, however, that there was nothing inherently wrong about the way AIPAC operates. “For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise the Lobby are doing what other special interest groups do, just much better.”

How much better? Well, consider that in 2016, during a breakdown in relations between the Obama White House and Israel over the question of nuclear talks with Iran, AIPAC helped persuade the Republicans to let Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu address a joint session of Congress – without the foreknowledge of then President Barack Obama. As a thought experiment, try and imagine the same privilege being extended to any other leader in the world. The reason it is difficult to imagine is because it’s never been done before precisely because it’s unconstitutional.

“Democrats accuse Boehner of ambushing the president as the Republicans push – with the backing of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington – to strengthen sanctions against Iran,” as the Guardian reported.

Another example came with the push for war against Iraq following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 against the United States. An article in the Forward admitted that as “President Bush attempted to sell the … war in Iraq, America’s most important Jewish organizations rallied as one to his defense.” As Mearsheimer and Walt pointed out, this lobbying influence on behalf of war did not flush with the opinion of the US Jewish population.

“Samuel Freedman reported just after the war started that a compilation of nationwide opinion polls by the Pew Research Center shows that Jews are less supportive of the Iraq war than the population at large, 52% to 62%. Thus it would be wrong to blame the war in Iraq on “Jewish influence,” the academics argued.

Indeed, as Paul Waldman argued in The Washington Post, in the United States today, “a ‘supporter of Israel’ is much more likely to be an evangelical Christian Republican than a Jew.”

Whatever the case may be, the essence of the question remains the same: Does AIPAC, as well as many other lobbying groups, wield too much power in the US political system? The question cannot be casually brushed aside as ‘anti-Semitic,’ any more than questioning the power of Big Pharma, for example, could be dismissed as ‘anti-Doctor,’ or the power of the NRA as ‘anti-Cowboy.’ It makes no sense, and unfairly accuses people who are asking legitimate questions of the most loathsome charges.

With the face of the American political system changing along ethnic and religious lines, it is critical that such issues with regards to political influence get a fair hearing.

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• Rep. Ilhan Omar vs. Elliott Abrams
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• Israel lobby proves Ilhan Omar’s point
• More Power to You Miss Omar

Netanyahu’s Possible Indictment and Jewish Dialectics

March 01, 2019  /  Gilad Atzmon

By Gilad Atzmon

The Jewish State  is an unusual place. It indicts its leaders and occasionally even locks them behind bars. Former Israeli president Moshe Katsav was found  guilty of “rape, sexual harassment, committing an indecent act while using force, harassing a witness and obstruction of justice”. He was sentenced to seven years in prison. Veteran Israeli PM Ehud Olmert was convicted of two counts of bribery and was also sent to prison. Yesterday Israel’s attorney general published his decision to indict Mr Netanyahu on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust in connection with three cases.

Israel is tough on its leaders. It is certainly tougher than Britain that has so far failed to charge Tony Blair with war crimes or the USA that similarly failed to indict George Bush for launching an illegal war*. Yet Israel is far from an ethical realm. It is institutionally racist towards the indigenous people of the land as well as African immigrants, and  it is also abusive to its poor. Israel is occasionally accused of gross war crimes. One may wonder why a criminal state with such an appalling record is so harsh with its leaders.

Zionism is one possible answer. Zionism, in its early days, was contemptuous of ‘the Jews.’ It promised to civilise the chosen people by means of ‘homecoming.’ The following comments weren’t made by Adolf Hitler or a member of the Nazi party but by some of the most dedicated early Zionists:

The wealthy Jews control the world, in their hands lies the fate of governments and nations. They set governments one against the other. When the wealthy Jews play, the nations and the rulers dance. One way or the other, they get rich.” (Theodor Herzl, Deutsche Zeitung, as cited by an Israeli documentary)

‘The Jew is a caricature of a normal, natural human being, both physically and spiritually. As an individual in society he revolts and throws off the harness of social obligations, knows no order nor discipline.’ (Our Shomer ‘Weltanschauung’, Hashomer Hatzair, December 1936, p.26. As cited by Lenni Brenner)

‘The enterprising spirit of the Jew is irrepressible. He refuses to remain a proletarian. He will grab at the first opportunity to advance to a higher rung in the social ladder.’ (The Economic Development of the Jewish People, Ber Borochov, 1916)

The harsh treatment of Israeli politicians by the Israeli media and judicial system is inspired  by that Zionist promise. Israel wants to be ‘a state like all other states.’ It wants its politicians to be ethical and behave with dignity. But the Israeli people aren’t sure about the importance of such trappings. Mostly, they could care less whether the judicial system or the media approve of their leaders’ ethical records.

Ariel Sharon’s political career didn’t come to an end after the massacre in Sabra and Shatila. The Kahan Commission  that was formed to probe Israeli involvement in that colossal crime found that the IDF was indirectly responsible and that Sharon, who was then the Defense Minister, bore personal responsibility for the massacre. The commission recommended the removal of Sharon from his post as Defense Minister. These findings did not stop Sharon political career, as we know, he went on to become Israel’s prime minister a few years later.

Aryeh Deri, a prominent Israeli politician and king maker was convicted of taking bribes while serving as Interior Minister. He was given a three-year jail sentence in 2000.  Of course Deri was able to return to politics, and was re-elected to the Knesset in 2013 and resumed his role as a key political player.

As much as early Zionism promised to change the people of Israel, the people themselves haven’t been keen of turning into something totally foreign to their true nature. Despite yesterday’s polls that suggest that Netanyahu’s support has dropped following the decision to indict him, it is likely that within a few days we will find that Netanyahu’s support is rising.

This response to findings of criminal behaviour enlightens the dialectical clash between what the Israelis ‘are’ and the image they insist upon attributing to themselves.

Israelis love to see themselves as a dignified Western civilisation guided by law and order. They avidly sell this image to the world;  but in reality the Jewish state is a an abusive tribal ghetto ran by oligarchs and underworld characters. Israel is at least ‘democratic’ enough to bring this contradiction to light. Its parliament is saturated with enough convicted criminals that Wikipedia dedicated a page to them, titled  “List of Israeli public officials convicted of crimes or misdemeanors”.

* Needless to mention, Israel sends its politicians to jail for bribery but also does not prosecute war crimes as much as it should.

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My battle for truth and freedom involves  some expensive legal services. I hope that you will consider committing to a monthly donation in whatever amount you can give. Regular contributions will enable me to avoid being pushed against a wall and to stay on top of the endless harassment by Zionist operators attempting to silence me.

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Condemnation of IDF Killings Is Never Anti-Semitic but Is Always an Essential Duty of the Global Media to Report

Source

By Hans Stehling,

As of November 19, last year, lethal force by Israeli forces resulted in the killing of 252 and injuring of 25,522 Palestinians in Gaza, OCHA has reported. Many of the injuries were life-changing, including hundreds of cases of severe soft tissue damage, some necessitating amputation of limbs.

Most of the killings took place in the context of protests, where Israeli forces, following orders from senior officials, used live ammunition against people who approached or attempted to cross or damage fences between Gaza and Israel. Israeli officials rejected the international human rights law standard in policing situations that prohibits the intentional use of lethal force except as a last resort to prevent an imminent threat to life.

Israeli authorities continued to illegally expand settlements in the occupied West Bank and to discriminate systematically against Palestinians and in favour of settlers, in providing services, allowing freedom of movement, and issuing building permits, among other actions. During 2017 and the first eight months of 2018, Israeli authorities approved the illegitimate plans for 10,536 housing units in West Bank settlements, excluding East Jerusalem, and issued tenders for a further 5,676.

The Tories’ Racist Mantra: ‘All Jews/Israelis Are Superior and Good: All Arabs/Palestinians Are Inferior and Bad’

Meanwhile, Israeli authorities destroyed 390 Palestinian homes and other property, forcibly displacing 407 people as of November 19, the majority for lacking construction permits that Israel makes nearly impossible for Palestinians to obtain in East Jerusalem or in the 60 percent of the West Bank under its exclusive control (Area C).

The indisputable fact is that there are two peoples both with a valid claim to the land of Palestine. To allow one to be butchered by the other is a violation of international law, human rights and an abject failure of democratic government.

For that butchery of men, women and children to be openly funded and facilitated by the United States Congress is a violation of the principles of the United Nations of which both Israel and the United States are members. It is also a gross violation of both the tenets of Judaism and Christianity.

The status quo is anathema to every true democracy in the world.  The killings and oppression must end and end now.  Failing which, the UN Security Council should pass a Resolution declaring Israel under its current government to be a rogue state which is outside the norms of accepted conduct and with which no other country should continue to trade until it undertakes to accept and implement in full the requirements of UN Security Council Resolution 2334.

It is completely unacceptable to hide behind the patently false accusation of anti-Semitism.  Ordinary Jewish men and women throughout the world are sickened and ashamed at the brutality perpetrated in their name in the Occupied Territories in exactly the same way as are we all in Britain, Europe and around the world.

Hans Stehling (pen name) is an analyst based in the UK. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Just World Educational

The original source of this article is Global Research

 

israeli (apartheid state) Occupation Soldiers Alarmed at Lebanese Border When Searching For Fictitious Hezbollah Tunnels

Israeli Occupation Soldiers Alarmed at Lebanese Border

Photo

Israeli occupation forces (IOF) are alarmed at the border with Lebanon due to the fog which has spread across the area, few days after the occupation military announced the start of the so-called “Northern Shield” Operation which is aimed at ‘cutting off’ alleged attack tunnels dug by Hezbollah.

Al-Manar reporter in Lebanon’s south, Ali Shoeib, reported that IOF fired their machine guns into the air as they were frightened when a Lebanese Army vehicle carried out a routine patrol east of Mais Al-Jabal town, near the border with the occupied territories.

“Israeli enemy soldiers fired their machine guns into the air in fear as they were surprised by a Lebanese Army routine patrol,” Shoeib tweeted on Saturday.

Shoeib then used the hashtag: “weaker than a spider web,” referring to Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah’s well-known quote about the Zionist entity.

Imagine yourself Free to Conflate

October 01, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

By Gilad Atzmon

How many time have you heard the so-called ‘Jews in the movement’ warning others not to conflate Judaism and Zionism? How many times have the usual suspects attempted to absolve the ‘J word’ while blaming ‘Z’ related crimes?  How many times have you had to apologise or withdraw any comparison between these two apparently similar notions? What does ‘conflation’ mean in the Jewish-Zionist context?

To conflate is to combine two or more sets of information or ideas into one. When accused of conflation, we are blamed for bringing  (distinct) things together and fusing them into a single entity; of mixing together different elements and failing to ‘properly distinguish’ among them or of mistakenly treating such elements as equivalent.

Conflation might be unmerited if two completely remote concepts were fused without substantiating or justifying the correlation.  But this is not the case with Judaism and Zionism, nor is this the case for Jewishness and authoritarianism, nor for choseness and exceptionalism.

Although at its inception Zionism was openly hostile towards Judaism and Diaspora Jewish culture, the profound Zionist phantasy of a collective Jewish metamorphosis didn’t last long.

Early Zionists vowed to fight what they saw as a Jewish cultural malaise. They intended to eradicate Jewish ‘non proletarian’ inclinations as well as the Jewish sense of choseness and to make ‘Jews people like all other people.’ It didn’t take long before Jewishness, that deep sense of Jewish exceptionalism, hijacked the Zionist revolution. The notion that Jews were entitled to ‘self determine themselves’ on someone else’s land itself, in fact, entailed the end of the Zionist ‘revolutionary’ tale.

The wish to become ‘people like all other people’ confirmed that Zionists could never become people like all other people: no other people wish to become people like all other people.

From its formation, Zionism has been a racially oriented national liberation movement. The project has been an exclusively Jews-only movement  and not just anyone could join. In other words, as much as early Zionism was driven by animosity towards Jewish  exclusivity, it actually adopted the most problematic aspect of Jewish biological doctrine.*

I guess a possible explanation of this is that Zionism, like all other Jewish identitarian formations, is an attempt to furnish the Judaic moment with contemporaneous meaning and a nationalist dream. The ‘revolutionary’ Bund that was formed in the same year (1897) offered Jews a different solution, that of a ‘cosmopolitan’ socialist redemption. Jewish ‘anti’ Zionists are just another Jews-only club that convey the message that not all Jews are as bad as Bibi.

This is where conflation comes into play, transcending the literal and grasping at the essential. Conflation is a moment of epiphany, the moment of an abrupt realisation that things that seems remote or foreign to each other actually belong in the same category. To conflate is to exercise the human ability to synthesise, to think in abstract terms, to extend one’s view from the object to meaning. It is therefore disturbing  that our so-called ‘allies’ in the solidarity movement are upset by the rest of us exercising our human capacity to put things together and think in categorical and abstract terms.

To be sure, Judaism which is a religious precept and Zionism which is a political movement are distinct entities. We all know that some rabbinical Jews clash with Zionism and Israel. Yet when examined as aspects of Jewishness – the celebration of Jewish exceptionalism-  Zionism and Judaism have a lot in common. And it is hardly a secret that the vast majority of Judaic sects accept the inherent spiritual bond between Zionism and Judaism.

A crucial question is why the so called ‘Jews in the movement,’ who are largely secular, are offended by the conflation of Judaism and Zionism? What is it that they try to hide or suppress? Is it that they aren’t as ‘secular’ as they claim to be or is it because they are actually far more Zionist than they are willing to admit?

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* This unique form of lack of self awareness isn’t only a Zionist symptom. In fact, Jewish so- called ‘anti Zionists’ are contaminated by the same symptom. Jewish Voice for Peace that opposes Zionist Jewish exclusivity is, in fact, more racially exclusive that the Jewish State; while in the Israeli Knesset the third biggest party is an Arab party, in Jewish anti Zionist organisations you won’t find a single gentile in a steering position. The British Jewish Corbyn support group (JVL) made it clear on it website that Goyim could join only as ‘solidarity members’ not as proper members. True membership is reserved for racially qualified members of the tribe.

israel’s plans for a “Greater Jerusalem” would mean no Churches or Mosques

Conference on the Holy City of Jerusalem: ‘Greater Jerusalem Means No Churches and No Mosques’

‘There can never be peace until the Jerusalem file is satisfactorily resolved,’ says chairman of Jerusalem Endowment.

The 9th International Conference on the Holy City of Jerusalem discussed the city’s importance to Islam and Christianity [Getty Images]

Palestinian interfaith officials have warned against monopolising the city of Jerusalem by the Israeli government and the effects that would have on Christianity and Islam.

Hanna Issa, secretary-general of the Palestinian Authority‘s Muslim-Christian Committee said that more than 95 percent of Jerusalem had already been “Judaised” by Israel, and that “Greater Jerusalem” would alter the city’s identity and importance to Christianians and Muslims.

“Israel wants to establish its so-called ‘Greater Jerusalem’ on an area of 600sq km, which would mean the destruction of the city’s churches and mosques,” Issa said.

The warning came during the 9th International Conference on the Holy City of Jerusalem on Wednesday, which kicked off in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah.

The conference was attended by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and numerous delegations from across the Arab and Muslim world.

Munib Masri, chairman of the Jerusalem Endowment, stressed Jerusalem‘s importance for both Muslims and Christians.

“The world must understand that there can never be peace until the Jerusalem file is satisfactorily resolved,” he said.

He added: “Jerusalem requires practical initiatives and financial support with a view to strengthening the resolve of its people.”

Speaking at the event, Youssef Edies, Palestinian minister of religious endowments, described Jerusalem as “the birthplace of religions”.

“We must focus on Arab, Muslim and international efforts on resisting the fierce Western onslaught against the Holy Land,” he asserted.

Israeli control

Israel occupied and annexed East Jerusalem in the aftermath of the June 1967 War, in a move that was never recognised by the international community.

Since then, Israel has built more than a dozen housing complexes for Jewish Israelis, known as settlements, some in the middle of Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem.

Israel’s settlement project, which is aimed at the consolidation of Israel’s control over the city, is also considered illegal under international law.

About 200,000 Israeli citizens live in East Jerusalem under army and police protection, with the largest single settlement complex housing 44,000 Israelis.

Such fortified settlements, often scattered between Palestinians’ homes, infringe on the freedom of movement, privacy and security of Palestinians.

Call for free access

Last Saturday, a United Nations envoy accused Israel of trying to block him and other diplomats from a pre-Easter “Holy Fire” ritual in the packed Jerusalem church Christians revere as the burial site of Jesus.

Robert Serry, the UN’s peace envoy to the Middle East, said in a statement that Israeli security officers had stopped him and a group of Palestinian worshippers and diplomats in a procession near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, “claiming they had orders to that effect”.

Last month, the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem said church authorities had applied for around 600 permits for Palestinian Christians in Gaza to travel to Jerusalem to celebrate Easter, but none were granted.

Father Ibrahim Shomali, chancellor of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, said: “We have to have free access to the Holy Land, free access to our holy places.”

The Listening Post

Jerusalem: Media flashpoints and erased narratives

SOURCE: Al Jazeera and news agencies

Jeremy Jesus-Christ Corbyn

April 04, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

By Gilad Atzmon

Yesterday we learned that Jeremy Corbyn has yet again upset ‘the Jews,’ and by ‘the Jews’ I mean a few loud obnoxious voices who claim to ‘represent the Jews.’  Since he is a well meaning guy, Corbyn accepted an invitation to celebrate the Jewish Passover dinner with Jewdas, who are apparently the ‘wrong’ Jews according to the Zionist lobby.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews (BOD) and Campaign against Antismitsm are beside themselves. During a phone – in to LBC Radio BOD’s president Jonathan Arkush stated that Jeremy Corbyn has “reached the tipping point.” The BOD had made it clear to Corbyn that he should stop giving any credence to Jewish “ultra-fringe” groups.

One would expect the BOD that claims to ‘represent British Jewry’ would also represent Jewdas and maybe even some other independent Jewish voices. I guess we can deduce from this that rival Jews cannot tolerate each other, based not on having no points of agreement, but on the way in which they put each other down. These groups slander their political foes  in a manner that resembles the notorious Herem religious ritual.  This kind of base behaviour recalls the old Jewish joke: how many synagogues are needed in a village with one Jew? Two; one to go to and one to boycott.

But what about the rest of humanity, the so-called goyim, the Brits, for how long will they agree to allow their politics to be hijacked by a microscopic lobby falsely claiming to represent a miniature community that amounts to 0.5% of British population? It seems that Jews openly smear and slander each other, but this privilege is reserved exclusively for Jews. Goyim are supposed to walk on their tiptoes. The mere mention of the ‘J’ word can easily cost you your future, your career and your livelihood.

Corbyn seems to have found a way through the tribal maze. The opposition leader is basically a Christ figure. Being the nicest guy in the world of politics, he manages to  expose the tribal bullies. Corbyn’s secret weapon is kindness. Time after time when he is viciously attacked by Jewish groups such as the CAA, the JLC or the BOD the Labour leader reacts in a soothing voice, half smiling as he accepts the criticism, apologises on behalf of his party and vows to appease his Jewish critics.

For those who still fail to understand, Corbyn does as Christ instructed, and turns the other cheek.  And like their Biblical forebears , those who claim to represent British Jewry fail to read the map. Instead of backing down in the face of acquiescence, they provide the Brits with a spectacle of venom. Rather than shaking Corbyn’s hand and seeking peace and harmony, they unabashedly punch the other cheek.

For some reason that is beyond me, the British Zionist Lobby decided to launch its recent slander campaign against Corbyn on Good Friday. Corbyn for his part, went along with their plans and celebrated the Passover Dinner with a group that sound like Judas (Jewdas).  By now the Brits are unable to tell  whether the acronym JC refers to Jeremy Corbyn or Jesus Christ. So here is my advice to the nagging Zionist lobby.  If you decide to destroy a Jesus type figure for attending a Passover dinner, don’t be surprised if he is resurrected by the following Sunday.

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)

Jewdas according to Jewdas

April 04, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

Reported by Gilad Atzmon

Jewdas, the ‘Jewish alternative Diaspora’ who dared inviting Corbyn to the passover dinner were quick to  swear allegiance to the tribe.  The Independent  quoted their statement yesterday.

“We have been campaigning against antisemitism on the left and the right for many years. Like, way before it was popular… We have run anti-antisemitism workshops in such far flung corners as Marseille and Bloomsbury, opposed neo-Nazi demos in Stamford Hill and Golders Green, produced and distributed information on how to criticise Israel without being antisemitic, demonstrated against left-antisemite Gilad Atzmon, and most importantly mercilessly took the p*** out of Ken Livingstone. You could call us trend setters.”

We are as good Jews as anyone, Jewdas are telling us,  we are vetting anti Zionism in the Left. We campaigned against Atzmon and Livingston. We police thoughts of your behalf they tell their Jewish brothers and sisters.

It is true, this strange bunch tried initially to recruit me (back in the early 2000s). Last august, however,  they attempted to picket one of my London concerts. They were caught lying to their  teeth as you can judge for yourself:

https://youtu.be/TKMITv5ZPdw

o read more: http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/2017/8/4/jewdas-lies-video-must-watch

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)

How Zionist is the New World Order? and How Biblical Is Zionism?

March 13, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

GA: If Zionism was intially all about the ‘promised land’, Neoconservatism stands for the shift towards a ‘promised planet.’ How do we bridge the gap between the nationalistic aspiration and the  globalist agenda?   From Yahweh to Zion by  Laurent Guyénot offers some interesting answers. Guyénot doesn’t attempt to tell us what Yahweh is but instead what the notion of Yahweh represents within the contexts of Judaism, jewish culture, Jewish politics and Jewish identification.  Guyénot’s offers a  very important contribution. I hope that is books are made of fire resistant materials.      

Laurent Guyénot

https://www.veteranstoday.com

Editor’s note: In these two articles, historian Laurent Guyénot explores questions that you are not even supposed to ask…much less actually think about. Those of us who still read, and think, are grateful.  –Kevin Barrett, Veterans Today Editor

How Zionist is the New World Order?

by Laurent Guyénot, first published at Vinyard of the Saker

Laurent Guyénot is the author of From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land … Clash of Civilizations, 2018.  ($30 shipping included from Sifting and Winnowing, POB 221, Lone Rock, WI 53556).

The Zionist paradox

Jewishness is full of paradoxes. For example, remarked Nahum Goldmann, founder and longtime president of the World Jewish Congress: “Even today it is hardly possible to say whether to be a Jew consists first of belonging to a people or practicing a religion, or the two together” (The Jewish Paradox, 1976)[1]. The answer has always depended on the circumstances. Another paradox is the relationship of Jewishness to both tribalism and universalism: Israelis, “the most separatist people in the world,” in Goldmann’s words again, “have the great weakness of thinking that the whole world revolves around them.”[2]

This great weakness is, of course, a great strength, and so is the ambiguity of Jewishness. It has served Israel—a secular “Jewish state”— very well. Theodor Herzl thought of Zionism on the model of European nationalistic movements, lobbying for the right of the Jews to become a nation among nations. But everyone can see now that Israel is no ordinary nation. It never was and never will be. It is the paradoxical nation.

Part of the ambiguity comes from the very name Israel, which already had a twofold meaning before 1948: it referred to an ancient kingdom supposedly founded in the first millennium BCE, and destroyed by the Romans in the first century CE. But for the following two thousand years, Israel was also a common designation for the Jewish community worldwide, “international Jewry” as some call it. That was the meaning of “Israel”, for example, when the British Daily Express of March 24, 1933 printed on its front page: “The whole of Israel throughout the world is united in declaring an economic and financial war on Germany.”[3] The members of Israel were then called Israelites interchangeably with Jews. Although quite contradictory in terms, the two notions (national Israel and international Israel) have been conflated by the 1948 Law of Return, which made every Israelite of the globe a virtual Israeli.

Today, Zionism has shifted into a kind of meta-Zionism where the greatest number of the Israeli elite—including individuals with no stamped Israeli citizenship but a profound loyalty to the Jewish state—reside outside Israel. Some of them hold key positions in state administrations, particularly in the United States. As Gilad Atzmon remarks, “there is no geographical center to the Zionist endeavor. It is hard to determine where Zionist decisions are made”; “the Israelis colonize Palestine and the Jewish Diaspora is there to mobilize lobbies by recruiting international support.”[4] The neoconservatives—“an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim,” as correctly assessed the Jewish Daily Forward[5] — are the most influential group of Diaspora Jews dedicated to Israel. They are no conservatives in the traditional sense, but rather crypto-Likudniks posturing as American patriots in order to align US foreign and military policies with the Greater Israel agenda—high-level sayanim, so to speak (read John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, 2008).

Their mentor Leo Strauss, in his 1962 lecture “Why We Remain Jews,” declared himself an ardent supporter of the State of Israel but rejected the idea that Israel as a nation should be contained within borders; Israel, he argued, must retain her specificity, which is to be everywhere.[6] Indeed, this paradoxical nature of Israel is vital to its existence: although its stated purpose is to welcome all the Jews of the world, the state of Israel would collapse if it achieved this goal. It is unsustainable without the support of international Jewry. Therefore, Israel needs every Jew of the world to define his/her Jewishness as loyalty to Israel. Ever since 1967, the hearts of an increasing number of American Jews began to beat secretly, and then more and more openly, for Israel. Reform Judaism, which had originally declared itself to be exclusively religious and opposed to Zionism, soon rationalized this new situation by a 1976 resolution affirming: “The State of Israel and the Diaspora, in fruitful dialogue, can show how a People transcends nationalism while affirming it, thus establishing an example for humanity.”[7]

How do they both affirm and transcend nationalism? The biblical way. The Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, is the unalterable prototype of Jewish history: everything that follows the fall of the Hasmonean kingdom has to be biblical—the Holocaust, for example. Inevitably, Jewish nationalism, or patriotic love for Israel, resonates with the destiny of Israel as outlined in the Bible: “Yahweh your God will raise you higher than every other nation in the world” (Deuteronomy 28:1). Every nation is a narration, and Israel’s narrative pattern is cast into the Hebrew Bible. To love Israel is to love Israel’s biblical story, no matter of how mythical it is. And through biblical prophecy, the vision of the past becomes the vision the future: Solomon’s empire will come to pass.

That is why Zionism was never an ordinary form of nationalism, nor can Israel ever be a “nation like others.” The paradoxical nature of Israel is best embodied by its founding father Ben-Gurion: a secular Jew who saw himself as a new Joshua,[8] hoped for “the restoration of the kingdom of David and Solomon,”[9] and prophesized that Jerusalem will be “the seat of the Supreme Court of Mankind, to settle all controversies among the federated continents, as prophesied by Isaiah.”[10]Let us be fair and assume that Ben-Gurion was simply referring to Isaiah’s prophecy that “the Law will issue from Zion” and that Yahweh will “judge between the nations and arbitrate between many peoples” (2:3-4), not to the Second Isaiah’s prophecy that Israel “will feed on the wealth of nations” (61:6), and that nations who do not serve Israel “will be utterly destroyed” (60:12).[11] Ben-Gurion’s vision lives on: a 2003 “Jerusalem Summit” attended by three acting Israeli ministers including Benjamin Netanyahu and many American neoconservatives including Richard Perle, affirmed that “one of the objectives of Israel’s divinely-inspired rebirth is to make it the center of the new unity of the nations, which will lead to an era of peace and prosperity, foretold by the Prophets.”[12] Zionists have always been in love with the Bible.

Such are the geopolitical implications of the Jewish paradox: Zionism cannot be a mere nationalistic aspiration, as long as it claims to be Jewish, for “Jewish” means “biblical”. And more than two thousand years ago, the ancient prophets had bent over the cradle of Israel to predestine it as “a nation above other nations.” Israel carries in its biblical genes the plan for a world order headquartered in Jerusalem. I’m not talking about a secret conspiracy here: the Jewish plan to rule the world has been plainly outlined in the global bestseller for more than two thousand years. If most people in the Christian world don’t see it, it is because it is right under their nose. Christians claim that the Jews don’t read their Bible correctly, or that they got their Zionism from the Talmud or the Kabbalah. Both claims are pitiful attempts to exonerate the Old Testament from the Zionist catastrophe: the Hebrew Bible was written by Jews for the Jews, and I have never heard a Zionist quote the Talmud or the Kabbalah, whereas they quote the Bible every day.

The prophetic spirit that inspired Isaiah long ago has been very active since the beginning of the 20th century. It spoke through religious leaders like Kaufmann Kohler, a leading figure of American Reformed Judaism, who wrote in his major work on Jewish Theology (New York, 1918) that “Israel, the suffering Messiah of the centuries, shall at the end of days become the triumphant Messiah of the nations.”[13] And it spoke through secular thinkers like Alfred Nossig, a Zionist who collaborated with the Gestapo in the Warsaw ghetto for the emigration of selected Jews to Palestine, who wrote in his Integrales Judentum (Berlin, 1922):

“The Jewish community is more than a people in the modern political sense of the word. It is the repository of a historically global mission, I would say even a cosmic one, entrusted to it by its founders Noah and Abraham, Jacob and Moses. [. . .] The primordial conception of our ancestors was to found not a tribe but a world order destined to guide humanity in its development.”[14]

The Feuerbachan approach

The paradoxical nature of Jewishness (combining separatism and universalism), which is reflected in the ambiguous nature of Zionism (combining nationalism and internationalism), is ultimately linked to the Jewish conception of God. Is the biblical Yahweh the national god of Israel or the universal God of humankind? Let’s search for an answer into the Book of Ezra, the paradigmatic episode for the Jewish colonization of Palestine. It begins with an edict of the Persian king Cyrus, which says:

“Yahweh, the God of Heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and has appointed me to build him a Temple in Jerusalem, in Judah. […] Let [every Jew] go up to Jerusalem, in Judah, and build the Temple of Yahweh, the God of Israel, who is the God in Jerusalem” (Ezra 1:2–3).

Here Cyrus speaks in the name of “the God of Heaven” while authorizing the Judean exiles to build a temple to “the God of Israel […] the God in Jerusalem.” We understand that both phrases refer to the same God, called Yahweh in both instances, but the duality is significant. It is repeated in the Persian edict authorizing the second wave of return. It is now Artaxerxes, “king of kings,” who switches from the “God of Heaven” to “your God” or “the God of Israel who resides in Jerusalem” when addressing Ezra (7:12–15). The phrase “God of Heaven” appears one more time in the book of Ezra, and that is again in the edict of another Persian king: Darius confirms Cyrus’s edict and recommends that the Israelites “may offer sacrifices acceptable to the God of Heaven and pray for the life of the [Persian] king and his sons” (6:10). Elsewhere the book of Ezra only refers to the “God of Israel” (four times), “Yahweh, the God of your fathers” (once), and “our God” (ten times). In other words, according to the author of the book of Ezra, only the kings of Persia see Yahweh as “the God of Heaven” (a fiction, of course: for Persians, the God of Heaven meant Ahura Mazda) while for the Jews he is primarily the “God of Israel”. That is the deepest secret of Judaism, and the key to Jews’ relationship to universalism and to the nations: success rests on their ability to make Gentiles believe that the national god of Israel residing in the Jerusalem Temple is the God of Heaven who happens to have a preference for Israel.

The misunderstanding led to a public scandal in 167 CE, when the Hellenistic emperor Antiochos IV dedicated the temple in Jerusalem to Zeus Olympios, the supreme God. He was simply expressing the idea that Yahweh and Zeus were two names for the supreme cosmic God, the Heavenly father of all mankind. But the Jewish Maccabees who led the rebellion against him knew better: Yahweh may be the Supreme God, but He is Jewish. Only Jews are intimate with Him, and any way the Pagans worship Him is an abomination.

So is Yahweh God, or just the god of Israel? Why should we care? Well, let’s call it the Feuerbachan approach to the Jewish question. In his famous work The Essence of Christianity(1841), which was to influence greatly Karl Marx, Ludwig Feuerbach sees the universal God as “the deified and objectified spiritual essence of man”: theology is anthropology in disguise, and “The consciousness of God is the self-consciousness of man.” But if we regard the biblical Yahweh as a creation of Jews alone, rather than humanity at large, then we can consider him as a personification of the national character of the Jewish people—or, more correctly, a reflexion of the mentality of the Jewish elite who invented Yahweh.

It is known to biblical scholars that, in the oldest strata of the Bible, Yahweh appears as a national, ethnic god, not the supreme God of the Universe. “For all peoples go forward, each in the name of its god, while we go forward in the name of Yahweh our god for ever and ever” (Micah 4:5)[15]. “I am the god of your ancestors,” Yahweh says to Moses (Exodus 3:6), who is then mandated to declare to his people, “Yahweh, the god of your ancestors, has appeared to me,” urging them to talk to Pharaoh in the name of “Yahweh, the god of the Hebrews” (3:16–18). The Hebrews chant after the miracle of the Red Sea engulfing Pharaoh and his army, “Yahweh, who is like you, majestic in sanctity, among the gods?” (15:11).[16] And in Canaan, a Hebrew chief declares to an enemy king: “Will you not keep as your possession whatever Chemosh, your god, has given you? And, just the same, we shall keep as ours whatever Yahweh our god has given us, to inherit from those who were before us!” (Judges 11:24).[17] In all these verses, Yahweh is an ethnic or national god among others.

What sets him apart from other tribal gods of his kind is possessive exclusivism: “You shall have no other gods to rival me” (Exodus 20:3); “I shall set you apart from all these peoples, for you to be mine” (Leviticus 20:26). This is the justification for strict endogamy: it is forbidden to marry one’s children to a non-Jew, “for your son would be seduced from following me into serving other gods” (Deuteronomy 7:4).

Yahweh is known as “the Jealous One” (Exodus 20:5 and 34:14; Deuteronomy 4:24, 5:9, and 6:15). But jealousy is an euphemism for outright sociopathy, because what Yahweh demands from his people is not just exclusivity of worship, but the destruction of their neighbors’ shrines: “Tear down their altars, smash their standing-stones, cut down their sacred poles and burn their idols” (Deuteronomy 7:5). Judean kings are judged on the unique criterion of their obedience to that precept. Hezekiah, whose disastrous policy of confrontation with Assyria led to a shrinking of the country, is praised for having done “what Yahweh regards as right,” namely abolishing the “high places” (2 Kings 18:3–4). His son Manasseh, whose 50-year reign is known to historians as a time of peace and prosperity, is blamed for having done “what is displeasing to Yahweh, copying the disgusting practices of the nations whom Yahweh had dispossessed for the Israelites” (2 Kings 21:2). Manasseh’s son Amon is no better. Josiah, on the other hand, proved worthy of his great-great-grandfather Hezekiah, by removing from the temple “all the cult objects which had been made for Baal, Asherah and the whole array of heaven. […] He exterminated the spurious priests whom the kings of Judah had appointed and who offered sacrifice on the high places, in the towns of Judah and the neighborhood of Jerusalem; also those who offered sacrifice to Baal, to the sun, the moon, the constellations and the whole array of heaven” (2 Kings 23:4–5).

It is ironic that Yahweh, originally a minor tribal god, should compete with the great Baal for the status of supreme God, as when Elijah challenges 450 prophets of Baal in a holocaust contest, which ends up with the slaughter of them all (1Kings 18). In ancient Syria, Baal Shamem, the “Heavenly Lord,” was identified as the God of Heaven and honored by all peoples except the Jews.[18] The goddess Asherah, whom Yahweh loathed even more, was the Great Divine Mother worshipped throughout the Middle East. In Mesopotamia, she went under the name of Ishtar, while in the Hellenistic era, she was assimilated to the Egyptian goddess Isis. The Hebrews themselves called her “Queen of Heaven” and turned to her in times of trouble, to the dismay of their priest and prophet Jeremiah, who threatened them with Yahweh’s exterminating wrath (Jeremiah 44).

Historians of religion tell us that Yahweh was still a national god at a time when the notion of a supreme God was widespread. When and how the Levites declared the god of Israel to be the true and only God is not entirely settled, but it is generally admitted that it happened shortly before the time of Ezra, when the Book of Genesis was composed (with much borrowing from Mesopotamian and Persian myths). The process is easy to imagine, for it follows the cognitive logic of a narcissistic sociopath among the community of gods: from the commandment of exclusive worship and the destruction of other gods’ shrines, it is a small step to the denial of the very existence of other gods; and if Yahweh is the only existing god, he must be “The God.”

A curious story about King Hezekiah can serve as an illustration of this process. The Assyrian king threatens Hezekiah in the following manner, explicitly identifying Yahweh as the national god of Israel:

“Do not let your god on whom you are relying deceive you with the promise: ‘Jerusalem will not fall into the king of Assyria’s clutches’ […] Did the gods of the nations whom my ancestors devastated save them?”

Hezekiah then goes up to the Temple and offers the following prayer:

“It is true, Yahweh, that the kings of Assyria have destroyed the nations, they have thrown their gods on the fire, for these were not gods but human artifacts—wood and stone—and hence they have destroyed them. But now, Yahweh our god, save us from his clutches, I beg you, and let all the kingdoms of the world know that you alone are God, Yahweh” (2 Kings 19:10–19).

So here we witness how Yahweh was promoted from the status of a national god to that of universal God by the prayer of a devout king. In response to that prayer, according to the biblical story, “the angel of Yahweh went out and struck down a hundred and eighty-five thousand men in the Assyrian camp,” then struck their king by the hand of his sons (19:35–37). Pure fiction: the Assyrian annals tell us that in reality, Hezekiah paid tribute to the Assyrian king. Which proves that Hezekiah’s claim was deceptive.

Conclusion

The exclusive monotheism demanded by Yahweh is a degraded imitation of that inclusive monotheism toward which all the wisdoms of the ancient world converged by affirming the fundamental unity of all gods. As Egyptologist Jan Assmann emphasizes, the polytheisms of the great civilizations were cosmotheisms, insofar as the gods, among other functions, form the organic body of the world. Such a conception naturally led to a form of inclusive or convergent monotheism, compatible with polytheism: all gods are one, as the cosmos is one.[19] The notion of the unity of the divine realm naturally connects with the notion of a supreme God, creator of heaven and earth, enthroned atop a hierarchy of deities emanating from him—a concept familiar to Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, and most ancient philosophers. The exclusive and revolutionary monotheism that the Yahwist priests crafted for their own benefit is of a totally different kind: it is, in fact, the exact opposite of the inclusive and evolutionary monotheism of neighboring peoples.

From the historical perspective, it is not the Creator of the Universe who decided, at some point, to become the god of Israel; rather, it is the god of Israel who, at some point, was declared the Creator of the Universe by the Levites and their scribes. The Jewish conception of Yahweh parallels that historical process: for the Jews, Yahweh is primarily the god of Jews, and secondarily the Creator of the Universe. This is what Maurice Samuel kindly tried to tell us in You Gentiles(1924): “In the heart of any pious Jew, God is a Jew.” “We [Jews] and God grew up together,” that is why “we need a world of our own, a God-world, which it is not in your nature to build.”[20]

And so the paradoxical nature of Yahweh is, in reality, a deception. The idea that the Heavenly Father of humankind, somewhere in the second millennium BCE, chose a particular people and ordered them to dispossess and slaughter other peoples is, any way we look at it, an outrageous absurdity. The fact that billions of people have believed it for thousands of years makes no difference. Or rather, that is the problem: many peoples throughout history have believed themselves to have been chosen by God, but only the Jews have managed to convince others that they have. That has turned this outrageous absurdity into the most devastating idea in world history.

The deceptive nature of biblical monotheism is the key to understanding traditional Jewish attitude to universalism. For the Jewish conception of God is reflected in the Jewish conception of Humanity. Just like their tribal god speaks of himself—through his prophets—as the God of humankind, Jewish communitarian thinkers speak of Jewishness as the essence of humanity: Judaism constitutes a “particularism that conditions universality” so that “there is an obvious equation between Israel and the Universal”; in other words, “Israel equals humanity” (Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, 1990).[21] It is almost always in reference to their Jewishness that such opinion makers, who are often ardent Zionists, proclaim themselves universalists: see for example how Rabbi Joachim Prinz, a German Zionist who in 1934 had applauded the Nazi state for being “built upon the principle of the purity of nation and race,” declared in 1963, as chairman of the American Jewish Congress, that he supported the African-American civil rights movement “as a Jew.”[22] “Jewish universalism” is a contradiction in terms and therefore necessarily deceptive. It is self-deception in the case of most Jews, who believe what they have been taught by their representative elites ever since the Haskalah: that there is no contradiction in being a tribalist at home and a universalist in the street—provided that, in each of their universalist stand, they do not lose sight of the important question: “Yes, but is it good for the Jews?”[23] Of course, there are many remarkable exceptions: Jews who have broken through the mental “Jewish prison” (as Jewish journalist Jean Daniel calls it)[24] to reach for some universal truths. I call it the genius of the escapee.

Ultimately, the deceptive nature of both biblical monotheism and Jewish universalism is a key to unraveling the Zionist paradox: nationalism and internationalism go hand in hand in Israel’s destiny, because Israel is, fundamentally, a biblical and therefore universal project. For the Jewish cognitive elites who determine Jewish public opinion to a large extent, the New World Order is an ancient et eternal idea. It is Israel’s destiny carved in the Bible. It is inherent to Jewishness.

1. Nahum Goldmann, Le Paradoxe juif. Conversations en français avec Léon Abramowicz, Stock, 1976 (archive.org), p. 9. ↑
2. Nahum Goldmann, Le Paradoxe juif, op. cit., p. 6, 31. ↑
3. Alison Weir, Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel, 2014, k. 3280–94. ↑
4. Gilad Atzmon, The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics, Zero Books, 2011, pp. 21, 70. ↑
5. Gal Beckerman, Jewish Daily Forward, January 6, 2006, quoted in Stephen Sniegoski, The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel, Enigma Edition, 2008, p. 26. ↑
6. Leo Strauss, “Why We Remain Jews,” in Shadia Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, St. Martin’s Press, 1999, pp. 31–43. ↑
7. Quoted in Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, Praeger, 1998, kindle edition 2013, k. 5463–68. ↑
8. Dan Kurzman, Ben-Gurion, Prophet of Fire, Touchstone, 1983, pp. 17–22. ↑
9. As he declared before the Knesset in 1956, quoted in Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Pluto Press, 1994, p. 10. ↑
10. David Ben-Gurion and Amram Duchovny, David Ben-Gurion, In His Own Words, Fleet Press Corp., 1969, p. 116 ↑
11. All Bible quotes are taken from the Catholic New Jerusalem Bible, which has not altered the divine name YHWH into “the Lord,” as most other English translations have done for unscholarly reasons. ↑
12. Official website: http://www.jerusalemsummit.org/eng/declaration.php. ↑
13. Kaufmnann Kohler, Jewish Theology, Systematically and Historically Considered, Macmillan, 1918 (www.gutenberg.org), p. 290. ↑
14. Alfred Nossig, Integrales Judentum, Interterritorialer Verlag, 1922, pp. 1–5 (on http://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/item/DXCTNNZZ3INPTI2S3MYPGLQOFR3XSW22). ↑
15. Most translations use a uppercase for the “God of Israel”, and a lowercase for other national gods, but ancient Hebrew does not distinguish between uppercase and lowercase letters, so here, and in further quotes, I have used a lowercase g for all national gods, including Israel’s, and reserved the uppercase G for the One supreme God. ↑
16. See also Psalms 89:7. ↑
17. Jean Soler, Qui est Dieu?, Éditions de Fallois, 2012, pp. 12–17, 33–37. ↑
18. Norman Habel, Yahweh Versus Baal: A Conflict of Religious Cultures, Bookman Associates, 1964, p. 41. ↑
19. Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism, Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 3.  ↑
20. Maurice Samuel, You Gentiles, New York, 1924 (archive.org), pp. 74–75, 155. ↑
21. Online on monoskop.org/images/6/68/Levinas_Emmanuel_Difficult_Freedom_Essays_on_Judaism_1997.pdf. ↑
22. Prinz’s pro-Nazi statements from his 1934 bookWir Juden are quoted in Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Pluto Press, 1994, p. 86. Prinz’ introduction to King’s “I have a dream” speech on August 28, 1963, beginning with “I speak to you as an American Jew,” is at http://www.joachimprinz.com/images/mow.mp3. ↑
23. Jonny Geller made this paradigmatic question the title of his humorous book Yes, But Is It Good for the Jews? Bloomsbury, 2006. ↑
24. Jean Daniel, La Prison juive. Humeurs et méditations d’un témoin, Odile Jacob, 2003

Solzhenitsyn’s Damning History of the Jews in Russia – a Review

Source

“The Jews accumulated wealth by cooperating with each other. (p. 31).”

“They made profits by taking the peasants’ grain to the point of impoverishing them (and causing famine), turning it into brandy, and then encouraging drunkenness. (p. 21, 24).”

“Jews forced peasants into lifelong debt and crushing poverty by requiring payment, in cattle and tools, for liquor. (p. 31).”

MORE: History The Jewish Question

The translation of Solzhenitsyn’s book appears to have been done without permission from his family, and this might be why this lengthy and detailed review is no longer available on the page of the book on Amazon.com, where it originally appeared.

The book might disappear altogether from Amazon, so if you want to get your Kindle copy, act now. Otherwise you can find it on many sources on the internet.

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Jews had enormous influence in the English and American media at the turn of the century – this is what most people in America and UK were told about Russian Jews (Click for Hi-Res image)

The translator, Columbus Falco, describes the censorship of this book when it appeared in 2002:

“Published in the original Russian in 2002, the book was received with a firestorm of rage and denunciation from the literary and media world, from the Jews, and from almost the entire intelligentsia of the established order in the West…

Immense efforts have been made by the Russian authorities and also by the Western liberal democratic power structure to ignore 200 YEARS TOGETHER, to suppress it as much as possible, and above all to prevent and interdict the book’s translation into foreign languages, most especially into English, which has become essentially the worldwide language of our epoch…

The Russian authorities have to this date refused to allow any official English translation of the book to be published”. (p. 2).

 CHARACTERISTICS OF SOLZHENITSYN’S MAGNUM OPUSSo what is so naughty, naughty about this book?

Most of it consists of unremarkable information that can be found in standard, non-censored texts. [For details, see comments.]

Agree with author Solzhenitsyn or not, but recognize the fact that he is no lightweight. Solzhenitsyn goes into considerable detail about many different historical epochs, and clearly has a deep knowledge of the issues that he raises. His approach is balanced. He is sympathetic towards Jews as well as critical of Jews.

The latter evidently does not sit well with many, because it does not comply with the standard Judeocentric narrative, in which Jews are just victims and can do no wrong. Worse yet, a famous writer is bringing sometimes-unflattering information about Jews to light, and this is threatening. Hence the censorship.

  JEWS IN 19TH CENTURY TSARIST RUSSIAFar from living in oppression, Russia’s Jews not only had more freedom than the serfs, but also more than the Russian traders and merchants. (pp. 16-17), and this was also true of more recent times. (p. 45). Soon after the Partitions of Poland, Derzhavin visited the area and reported on the Jews in the then-current manorial society. The Polish nobility had turned over the management of their estates to the Jews (p. 21), and the Jews engaged in conduct that brought them short-term profits and long-term antagonisms.

Consider the PROPINACJA. The Jews accumulated wealth by cooperating with each other. (p. 31). They made profits by taking the peasants’ grain to the point of impoverishing them (and causing famine), turning it into brandy, and then encouraging drunkenness. (p. 21, 24). Jews forced peasants into lifelong debt and crushing poverty by requiring payment, in cattle and tools, for liquor. (p. 31).

In addition, a system of bribery protected this arrangement. Thus, the Polish magnates were on the “take” of part of the wealth squeezed by Jews out of the peasantry, and, without the Jews and their inventiveness, this system of exploitation could not have functioned, and would have ended. (p. 22). Solzhenitsyn adds that, “…the Jewish business class derived enormous benefit from the helplessness, wastefulness, and impracticality of landowners…” (p. 54).

The Jews kept moving around in order to prevent an accurate count of their numbers—in order to evade taxes. (p. 25). A delegation of Jews travelled to St. Petersburg to try to bribe Russian officials to suppress Derzhavin’s report. (p. 28). In 1824, Tsar Alexander I noticed that Jews were corrupting local inhabitants to the detriment of the treasury and private investors. (p. 32).

Jews were not forced into “parasitic” occupations: They chose them. (p. 31). By the late 19th century (the time of the pogroms), Russian anger had boiled over, focusing on such things as Jews not making their own bread, massive overpricing and profiteering, enriching themselves while impoverishing the muzhik, and taking control of forests, lands, and taverns. (pp. 78-80).Nor is it true that the Jews were kept out of “productive” occupations. To the contrary. A concerted 50-year tsarist effort to turn Jews into farmers attracted few participants (p. 33), and ended in failure. (p. 58). None of the rationalizations for its failure are valid: Other newcomers to Russian agriculture (Mennonites, Bulgarian and German colonists, etc.), facing the same challenges as the Jews, did quite well. (p. 36). Jewish farmers neglected farm work (pp. 34-35), and kept drifting back into selling goods and leasing of their property to others to farm. (pp. 56-57). The century-later efforts by the Communists, to get Jews into farming, fared no better. (p. 208, 251).

Jewish resistance to assimilation is usually framed in terms of the GOY excluding the Jew. It was the other way around. For the first half of the 19th century, rabbis and kahals strenuously resisted enlightenment, including the proffered Russian education to Jews. (p. 38).

Jews have always tended to exaggerate the wrongs they have experienced from others. (p. 42). This applies to such things as double taxation, forced military service, expulsion from villages, etc. (p. 42, 46, 50).

The Jews of the Vilnius (Wilno), Kaunas, and Grodno regions sided with the Russians during the Poles’ ill-fated January 1863 Insurrection. (p. 69). This confirms Polish sources.

 Mainstream Judaism did not conduct ritual murder. However, it is possible that some Jewish cults did so. (p. 40). [For more, see my review of BLOOD PASSOVER]. As for the PROTOCOLS, their authenticity was rejected early-on by the tsarist government. However, this did not erase legitimate grievances about Jewish influence. (p. 174).JEWS IN COMMUNISM: THE USUAL EXCUSES

We often hear that Communist Jews were “not real Jews”. This nonsense is equivalent to saying that Lenin and other Russian Communists were “not real Russians”—a contrived distinction that Solzhenitsyn refuses to make. (p. 117). [For more, see comments].

One common exculpation for Jews supporting revolutionary movements, and then Communism, is that of the tsarist system preventing Jews from improving their lot. This is nonsense. Once the Jews accepted the Russian education system, their numbers increased, to such a spectacular extent (by about 1870: p. 63, 71), in Russian higher education, that quotas (numerus clausus) had to be imposed upon them. This nowadays-called affirmative action became necessary because Jews were wealthier and thus unfairly advantaged in schooling-related matters. (p. 88).

Hungary is instructive. There, Jewish grievances were the least valid. Hungarian Jews had enjoyed atypical freedoms and a high standard of living, and there had been no pogroms. Yet the 1919 Hungarian Communism was especially dominated by Jews, and was odiously cruel. (pp. 153-154).

  Another exculpation for Jews in Communism was the alleged need for defense against pogroms conducted by the Whites. Not so. The massive influx of Jews into the Soviet apparatus occurred in late 1917 and 1918, but the White pogroms did not begin until 1919. (p. 121).THE CRUCIAL ROLE OF JEWS IN COMMUNISM

One can easily make lists of Jews in high positions in the Soviet Union. Influential Jews commonly occurred at a rate 10 or more times the abundance of Jews in the USSR. (e. g, pp. 143-on, 225-on). [For more, see comments]. Whether or not motivated by “ethnic solidarity”, Jews in authority tended to promote other Jews to high positions. (p. 138).

However, the Jewish role in Communism goes far beyond what is apparent in any such “grocery list”. For instance, consider what some call the Judaization of academia, and its impact on the bloody events of 1917. Solzhenitsyn comments, “The February Revolution was carried out by Russian hands and Russian foolishness. Yet at the same time, its ideology was permeated and dominated by the intransigent hostility to the historical Russian state that ordinary Russians didn’t have, but the Jews had. So the Russian intelligentsia too had adopted this view.” (p. 98).

Now consider the October Revolution. Lenin contended that the Bolshevik success in the revolution had been made possible by the role of the large Jewish intelligentsia in several Russian cities. (p. 119). Furthermore, according to Lenin, the October Revolution was preserved by the actions of Jews against the attempted sabotage by government officials. (p. 128).

 The energy and high intelligence of the Jews made them indispensable. (p. 129, 189). In fact, Solzhenitsyn suggests that Soviet Communism lost its ideological fervor, and began slowly to die of “Russian laziness”, already in the late 1960s, all because the Jews were largely gone. (p. 317).SOME INTERESTING FACTS

Dekulakization was not just an economic measure. It was a tool to uproot peoples and destroy their traditions and culture. For this reason, Stalin’s dictatorship can in no sense be accepted as a nationalist (Russian) phenomenon. (p. 221).

Religious Judaism was never persecuted as intensely by the Communists, in the 1920s and 1930s, as was Russian Orthodox Christianity. (p. 306). High-level Jew Lazar Kaganovich directed the destruction of the Church of the Redeemer. He also wanted to destroy St. Basil’s Cathedral. (p. 223).

The famous mobile gas chambers were not invented by the Nazis. They were developed, in 1937, by Isai Davidovich Berg, a leading Jew in the NKVD. (p. 237).

COMMUNISM IS OK—UNTIL IT NO LONGER SERVES JEWISH INTERESTS

Solzhenitsyn notes the irony that, in the West, there was little effective concern about the victims of Communism until it turned on the Jews. He quips,

“15 million peasants were destroyed in the ‘dekulakisation’, 6 million peasants were starved to death in 1932, not even to mention the mass executions and millions who died in the camps, and at the same time it was fine to politely sign agreements with Soviet leaders, to lend them money, to shake their ‘honest hands’, to seek their support, and to boast of all this in front of your parliaments.

But once it was specifically JEWS that became the target, then a spark of sympathy ran through the West and it became clear what sort of regime this was.” (p. 346; Emphasis is Solzhenitsyn’s).

NOWADAYS JEWS DODGE THEIR RESPONSIBILITY AND BLAME THE RUSSIANS

Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes the standard double-standard (one which Poles are all too familiar with), as he describes current Jewish attitudes,

“There are so many such confident voices ready to judge Russia’s many crimes and failings, her inexhaustible guilt towards the Jews—and they so sincerely believe this guilt to be inexhaustible almost all of them believe it! Meanwhile, their own people are coyly cleared of any responsibility for their participation in Cheka shootings, for sinking the barges and their doomed human cargo in the White and Caspian seas, for their role in collectivization, the Ukrainian famine and in all the abominations of the Soviet administration, for their talented zeal in brainwashing the ‘natives’. This is not contrition.” (p. 335).

Of course, Solzhenitsyn is not insinuating that Jews are collectively guilty for Communism. However, Jews should accept collective liability for Communism and its crimes in much the same way that Germans accept collective liability for Nazism and its crimes. (p. 141, 321). Until they do so, this issue of the Zydokomuna (Judeo-Bolshevism) will not go away.

JEWISH INFLUENCE IN COMMUNISM WAS FAR GREATER THAN ANY “GROCERY LIST” OF JEWISH COMMUNISTS

We keep hearing that Jews at no time constituted a majority of the leadership in Communism. This is technically true, but it does not tell the whole story.

Refer to: Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews, by Albert S. Lindemann:

To begin with, Jewish Communists were noted for their high intelligence, verbal skills, assertiveness, ideological fervor, etc. (p. 429).

Not surprisingly, few non-Jewish Communist leaders approached the caliber of the Jewish Communist leaders. For example, Lindemann reminds us that, “Jewish or gentilized, Trotsky was a man of unusual talents.” (p. 447). In addition, “Trotsky’s paramount role in the revolution cannot be denied…” (p. 448). This can be generalized, “Other non-Jews might be mentioned but almost certainly do not quite measure up to Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Yoffe, Sverdlov, Uritsky, or Radek in visibility inside Russia and abroad, especially not in the crucial years from 1917 to 1921.” (p. 432).

Finally, influential Jews did not have to act alone. In fact, Jews had the skill of influencing non-Jews to think in Jewish ways. Lenin can validly be understood as a “Jewified gentile” (pp. 432-433). The same can be said for the renegade-Pole Dzerzhinsky (p. 442, 446), as well as the Russian Kalinin, who was called by Jewish Bolsheviks “more Jewish than the Jews”. (p. 433).

I. JEWISH COMMUNISTS INFLUENCED NON-JEWS TO GO ALONG WITH THEIR THINKING

Let us elaborate on Feliks Dzerzhinsky. Refer to: The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police:

Author Leggett describes how Dzerzhinsky grew up in Vilna [Wilno, Vilnius], which he describes as a cosmopolitan city with a strong Jewish element and a focal point of socialist ferment in Tsarist Russia. (p. 34). He adds that, “Dzerzhinsky came under the influence of Martov, future leader of the Menshevik Party, by whom he was introduced into Jewish circles, both proletarian and of the intelligentsia; he made many Jewish friends and zealously learned Yiddish. The Bund—Jewish social democratic workers’ organization in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, founded in 1897—helped Dzerzhinsky in his political activity, for instance in late 1899. Dzerzhinsky’s close friend and schoolmate in Vilna was Mikhail Goldman…” (pp. 24-25).

The strong Jewish influence very much extended to Dzerzhinsky’s personal life. Leggett continues, “Goldman’s sister, Julia, was for several years Dzerzhinsky’s romantic love…formed a deeply romantic attachment, lasting from 1905 to early 1910, for another Jewish woman, Sabina Feinstein, sister of a prominent SDKPiL member. Very soon afterwards, in November 1910, Dzerzhinsky married Sofia Sigizmundovna nee Mushkat, who was likewise Jewish…” (p. 25).

As if to underscore the fact that Jewish influence in Communism is much greater than just the “grocery list” of Jewish Communists, Leggett writes of “Rosa Luxemburg [Luksemburg], celebrated for her intellectual brilliance and her political passion.” (p. 24). So intoxicated had “Bloody Feliks” (“KRWAWE FELEK”) Dzierzinski become of Luksemburg’s ideas that he actually clashed with Lenin on the resurrection of the Polish state. Only that it was the non-Pole Lenin supporting the restoration of the Polish nation and renegade-Pole Dzerzhinsky opposing it, in accordance with Luxemburg. (pp. 23-24).

The foregoing can be generalized. Refer to: The Crucifixion of Russia: A History of the Russians and the Jews A new English translation of Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn comments,

“The February Revolution was carried out by Russian hands and Russian foolishness. Yet at the same time, its ideology was permeated and dominated by the intransigent hostility to the historical Russian state that ordinary Russians didn’t have, but the Jews had. So the Russian intelligentsia too had adopted this view.” (p. 98).

II. JEWS AS THE “BRAINS” BEHIND THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND THE EARLY SOVIET UNION

See my review of: The Rulers of Russia

III. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF JEWS IN THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AS NOTED BY SOME JEWS

See my review of: The new Poland,

IV. DECADES BEFORE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION, JEWS HAD PLAYED AN INDISPENSABLE ROLE IN KEEPING REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENTS GOING IN THE FACE OF ADVERSITY, AND IN MAKING RADICAL MOVEMENTS EVEN MORE RADICAL:

See my review of: Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia

V. COMMUNISM PERMEATED MUCH OF PRE-WWII JEWISH THINKING, NOTABLY IN POLAND

Refer to: Flags Over the Warsaw Ghetto

(My Review was Feb 12, 2012)

Moshe Arens wrote: “The years preceding World War II were a time when Socialists throughout the world were preaching the `class struggle’ and `solidarity of the proletariat.’ Many of them, not only avowed Communists, saw the Soviet Union as the pioneer and leader of this `struggle.’ This was also true in Palestine, where the Socialist Zionists had achieved a dominant position in the Jewish community.” (p. 7). The so-called “proletarian” camp included the Socialist Zionists and the non-Socialist Bund. (p. 9). Arens notes: “The Socialist Zionist movements, attached to Marxist ideology…” (p. 44). ZOB leader Anielewicz was a member of Hashomer Hatzair with its “Marxist approach to Zionism”. (p. 113). Hashomer Hatzair and Left Po’alei Zion showed their true colors (pardon the pun) in preferring that the red flag be hoisted over the fighting Ghetto instead of the blue-white Zionist flag. (p. 287).

ZOB leader Hersh Berlinski exhibited undisguised disloyalty to Poland as he said that his support was to the USSR over Poland. (p. 142). As for the Warsaw Ghetto rank-and-file soldiers, Arens refers to them as: “…younger generation, their orthodox Marxist thinking giving rigidity to their arguments.” (p. 106). Who can blame Poles for their reluctance to support the Uprising owing to its taint of Communism? (p. 71; 200-201; 226)

VI. A RATHER CANDID DISCUSSION, ABOUT JEWS IN COMMUNISM, BY LEADING JEWISH COMMUNISTS

See my review of: “Them”: Stalin’s Polish puppets

VII JEWISH COMMUNISM AS A FORM OF JEWISH NIHILISM

See my review of: Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism

——–

CONCLUSION: Since Jews Take Collective Credit for Their Albert Einsteins and Jonas Salks, Should They Not Also Assume Collective Liability for Jewish Mass-Murderers Such as Genrikh Yagoda and Lazar Kaganovich?

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HOW THE MASSIVE OVER-INVOLVEMENT OF JEWS IN COMMUNISM LONG INFLAMED POLISH-JEWISH RELATIONS

The ZYDOKOMUNA (Judeo-Bolshevism) cannot be wished away. In addition, the Jewish share of blame for Communism is not erased just because there were non-Communist Jews. Finally, since Jews regularly call on Poles to “come to terms with the past”, in a collective sense, for the actions of only SOME Poles, the Jews should be held to the same standard.

To learn of the dominance of Jews in the leadership of the early decades of the Soviet Union, please click on, and read my detailed review of, The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority (Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies).

See also THE RULERS OF RUSSIA, by Denis Fahey. (1940). Condon Printing Company, Detroit.

For details on the massive long-term Jewish overrepresentation in the leadership of the Soviet Communist Secret Police (the NKVD), responsible for the murder of millions of innocent people, please click on, and read my detailed review, of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, Volume 26: Jews and Ukrainians.

Also see THE JEWISH CENTURY. My Amazon review is dated October 29, 2010.

For a scholarly Russian-language primary source on the Jewish leadership that had dominated the NKVD, please click on, and read my detailed English-language review, of Kto Rukovodil NKVD, 1934-1941: Spravochnik.

One Yellow Star – a glimpse into tribal psychosis by Elias Davidsson

February 08, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

“The surrender to a regime of correctness is a surrender to Jerusalem. It is a strict divergence from Athens and its spirit.”

 Introduction by Gilad Atzmon: Elias Davidsson wasn’t  happy with my recent expose of his tribal sabotage attempt of  the 9/11 truth movement and so  he took revenge: a one star Amazon book review. His review collects  Being in Time’s  most spectacular gems presumably with the hope that this pile of quotes will finish me off once and for all. Here is the bad news for Davidsson and his operators — I take  pride in each of these cherry picked quotes.  I plan to circulate them one by one in the coming weeks and monitor how they affect my Amazon ranking.  I will let others decide whether these quotes are “post-factual,” “presumptuous” or “deceptive” as Davidsson describes them. For the time being, I would like to thank the son of David for, once again, providing us with a window into the depths of tribal morbidity and delusional detachment. 

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). 

The Banality of Good pt. 7: Global Tribes vs. National Pride

February 05, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

If global capitalism is a problem, we may have to consider the idea that equality within borders is a possible answer.

Global Tribes vs. National Pride

Clara:   I have just been reading a Canadian Jewish news bulletin and all the tribal features are there: the community life with kosher catering, the private Sunday schools with their curriculum of Jewish culture, Judaism and the Holocaust, the comment on why we shouldn’t sympathize with Palestinian children and the trip for adolescents to Israel where each of them is supposed to find out ‘what Israel means to me’.

In my opinion one of the flaws of biologically oriented identity politics is the belief that ‘the differences between the respective identity groups are bigger than the differences within the group’ as the ‘Saker’ defines ‘racism’. I am not sure that supporting Israel’s politics is really in the best interests of all the Canadian (US-American, British or German) Jews or even in the best interests of the Israelis themselves. But as members of the tribe they are all on board of the same ship.

Is that what you mean when you argue that identity politics are a tool of globalization and that  the ‘identitarian tribes’ are used to support Neocon / Zionist policies?

Gilad: It is actually simpler than that. The emergence of more and more ghetto walls between us the people dismantles our ability to fight for our universal needs, let alone see the universal for what it is. In the name of diversity, we create a fragmented human landscape that is blinded to its fragments.  This tribal construct is indeed ideal environment for Neocons, mammonites as well as our compromised politicians.

Clara:   In ‘The wandering who’ you write that compassion has evaporated in Jewish thinking. I often feel it is the same in Germany: we do not sympathise with the Greek people and their poverty in connection with the introduction of the Euro, we think they ought to be punished for ‘being lazy, living above their means and not doing their homework’. The same goes for the poor in our country. And we mourn the victims of terrorism in Germany and France but we are not really interested in the terror victims in St Petersburg, Beirut or the terrible suffering in Yemen. And the one time our politicians seemed to show compassion by opening the borders for refugees, the many Germans who, like myself, welcomed that chance had to realize the double standards which were behind it: supporting the wars and economic policies that caused people to leave their homes and not adequately addressing the social and security problems the influx of refugees caused at home.  

Does this lack of compassion have to do with the ‘incapability of mourning one’s own fate’ we mentioned in the beginning of our conversation and which seems to be a common feature in Jewish and German mainstream thinking?

Gilad: The lack of compassion is a symptom of chosenness and exceptionalism . Chosenness and exceptionalism are indeed attached to Jewishness but not only. It is hardly a secret that the selfish manner of thinking is embedded in capitalist thinking. The next question you may want to ask yourself is what is the connection between Jewish culture and capitalism. This is obviously a loaded question that has many answers. Marx believed that the two were intrinsically tied. Werner Sombart agreed with Marx. Max Weber didn’t.  My point, as always, is that we must be able to discuss these matters in the open.

Clara:   I agree, and it is actually a kind of selective compassion with double standards. But there is also the aspect of collectively getting stuck in the victimized self-image connected with identitarian world views.
Anyway, let’s be a bit more specific here. In a talk you gave in Berlin you said that for example the international feminist movement was used to promote wars for the rights of Muslim women. And just recently Angela Jolie posed for NATO exactly for that reason. You also gave the example of gay rights. When it comes to attacking Russia, gay activists from many countries show their concern about gay rights there. So we are led from one fragmented campaign to the other and forget about more important issues.

But what is the alternative? In that talk you seemed to argue that we should return to think in terms of national interests instead. You seem to want to replace the concept of ‘identitarian tribes’ by returning to the idea of strong national states and fixed borders. Isn’t that a very dangerous right-wing concept? Doesn’t that lead to new chauvinism, the persecution of ethnic minorities and more?

Gilad:  This is a good question. To start with, I am not a political activist. I do not offer solutions or alternatives. As mentioned before, I am a philosopher, I am refining questions rather than repeating readymade answers.  I indeed often argue that if global capitalism is a problem (and it is a problem), we may have to consider the idea that equality within borders is a possible answer. Now, let’s talk about Nationalism and National States. I contend that Nationalism isn’t necessarily a problem unless celebrated on the expense of others. In the 1940’s people and nations were minced in the name of lebensraum, in the Neocon dominated global universe we do the same in the name of Coca-Cola, Gay-Rights and fake democracy. I argue, therefore that ethical thinking which is basically an Athenian aspired domain is the remedy.   

Clara:   If there is a definition of left wing, it is concern for social issues and anti-imperialism. Many people argue that politics addressing these issues need a strong national state, i.e. Bill Mitchell  (fiscal policies), Paul Steinhardt (social welfare policies – paywall) and Professor Michael Hartman (national elites are still strong). While others advocate ‘more EU’ to address social issues on an international level, these people claim that such a project is bound to fail, even if tried which currently is not really the case; the EU is not a social project. The right wing parties want ‘less EU’ as well, but tend to support neo-liberal policies.
But again – slippery grounds – people quickly ‘stone you’ when you start talking about the role of the national state. When Sarah Wagenknecht from the Left Party criticized Merkel’s open-border policy, she was accused of socializing with the right-wingers from AfD.

Often accusations of working together with right-wing people (Nazis!) replace an open exchange of argument. I think this is a dangerous development.

Gilad: Again, you are pointing at the Jerusalemite tendency, that tyranny of correctness that dictates a manner of speech, a pattern of ‘correct’ thinking, newspeak. Orwell recognized that that tendency is inherent to Left politics which is fascinating considering the Athenian dialectic nature of Marx thinking. We are living in an upside down world –The anti Fascist are often intrinsically fascists. The anti Zionists are mostly AZZ (Anti Zionist Zionists) and the Athenians who see it all are castigated subject to constant abuse. Yet, the people are not buying into that reality. Brexit proves that Brits want to see a change. Trump won because Americans are frustrated (surely, they are more frustrated now).  Far from being surprising the popularity of Corbyn in Britain and Sanders in the USA can be realised as a similar symptom of frustration with the current identitarian dystopia. Both leaders are nostalgic anti identiatrian characters.  The meaning of it is simple. We are moving into a realm that transcends beyond left/right banal binary. To be in time is to grasp the post political condition.

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

Part 6: http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/2018/2/3/the-banality-of-good-pt-6-jewish-power-and-identity-politics

 

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

Gilad Atzmon rebuts Elias Davidsson’s Hasbara rant

December 27, 2017  /  Gilad Atzmon

For the last several years I have repeatedly pointed out that when it comes to Palestine, the discourse of the oppressed is shaped by the sensitivities of the oppressor.  No one demonstrates this thought process better than German Jewish activist Elias Davidsson. The tribal operator ended his slanderous article about me in the German New Left Rubikon magazine:

“As a longtime anti-Zionist, I will not allow our fight for a just peace in Palestine to be disintegrated by psychopathic anti-Semites, nor will I regard people as comrades spreading the horrible theories of a Jewish world conspiracy. This theory has already resulted in millions of bodies.”

Ask yourself who comprises ‘our’ what ‘fight’ he is referring to. Indeed, I have never accused the Jews of a conspiracy. I argue, as forcefully as I can,  that there are NO Jewish conspiracies. Self–identified Jews don’t hide a thing, they act in the open.  Jewish Power, accordingly, is the power to silence criticism of Jewish power. This is exactly what Davidsson is attempting to do. And so he implements the Hasbara guidebook.

Elias Davidsson is an elder wannabe musician.  I suppose that in the last few years he has been unable to restrain his envy. His vicious attacks on yours truly have provided him his moment of fame in his waning years.

Until 2011 Davidsson regularly begged me to publish his unreadable rants. They were never up to standard and I rejected most of them. In 2011 I did publish a piece by Elias Davidsson in which the boy declared himself a “radical anti-Semite.’

A few months later, my book The Wandering Who? was published. The book was a world wide best-seller. Apparently Davidsson couldn’t take it. Although the book was endorsed by some of the greatest humanists and scholars, Davidsson declared the book a ‘neo-nazi text.’ Why? Because, like Hitler, I referred to a ‘Jewish organismus.’ If the tribal had just a few extra grey cells in his skull he would have comprehended that Hitler’s organismus was set to incriminate the Jews as a collective while my use of the term Jewish organismus was as a possible vindication of the Jews as a collective.

Here are my words,

“it is of course possible that there is no decision-making process at all. It is more than likely that ‘Jews’ do not have a centre or headquarters. It is more than likely that they aren’t aware of their particular role within the entire system, the way an organ is not aware of its role within the complexity of the organism.” (The Wandering Who pg. 21)

Basically, the concept is that the finger that pulls the trigger is not necessarily responsible for the dead body in the room.

I thought at the time that Davidsson was uniquely duplicitous, agonized with envy or just too stupid for my time. I ignored him.

I didn’t hear from Davidsson for a few years, but last week he has popped out again. In his Rubikon piece Davisson performs every Hasbara spin technique from duplicity to outright fabrication.

“Atzmon is primarily concerned with the freedom to question the Holocaust, not the general right to freedom of expression,” says the son of David. Is this true? Have I ever excluded any other intellectual domain? A week ago, at the Babylon theatre in Berlin, I spoke out against all history laws. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=48&v=-0YOJKGuNzQ

I specifically mentioned the Nakba Law and the Armenian Genocide law. However, it is the primacy of Jewish suffering embedded in the core of the Holocaust religion and the laws surrounding it that bothers me the most.

Davidsson continues:  “Atzmon is not on the side of the victims, but just trying to play down the crime.”  Is this true? Is stripping the holocaust of its religious status and treating it as a universal lesson in ethics equal to  ‘playing down the crime’? Quite the opposite. It changes the narrative from that of a Jewish/German anecdote into a vivid dynamic and universal lesson that can be applied to Palestine, Syria and Iraq.

And then we are referred yet again to that same snippet of revisionist advocacy from The Wandering Who? Davidsson calls this paragraph   “classic Holocaust Denial.”

“I think that 65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, we must be entitled to start asking questions. We should ask for historical evidence and arguments rather than follow a religious narrative that is sustained by political pressure and laws. We should strip the Holocaust of its Judeo-centric exceptional status and treat it as an historical chapter that belongs to a certain time and place. The Holocaust, like every other historical narrative, must be analysed properly. 65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz we should be able to ask – why? Why were the Jews hated?” (The Wandering Who p 175)

In the eyes of the deranged Davidsson a call for  ‘disclosure’ and openness about the past that moves beyond Jewish victimhood shows a ‘neo Nazi’ inclination.  Of course, it doesn’t. Worse, the duplicitous Davidsson cut my paragraph in the middle.

Here is the rest of the text which he chose to omit:

“65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz we should be able to ask – why? Why were the Jews hated?  Why did European people stand up against their neighbours? Why are the Jews hated in the Middle East, surely they had a chance to open a new page in their troubled history? If they genuinely planned to do so, as the early Zionists claimed, why did they fail? Why did America tighten its immigration laws amid the growing danger to European Jews? We should also ask what purpose Holocaust denial laws serve? What is the Holocaust religion there to conceal? As long as we fail to ask questions, we will be subjected to Zionist lobbies and their plots. We will continue killing in the name of Jewish suffering. We will maintain our complicity in Western imperialist crimes”

It is clear why Davidsson omitted the rest of the paragraph. It is about him and his tribal agenda.  “As long as we fail to ask questions…We will continue killing in the name of Jewish suffering.” Elias Davidsson attacks me and falsifies my words because he wants to sustain the primacy of Jewish suffering.

According to this miserable man I am motivated by “personal and pathological hatred of ‘Jews’, including Jewish activists who act  for Palestinians rights,[ …] therefore, he (Atzmon) describes himself. as a ‘self-hating Jew.’

When scholars refer to a pathology they point at forensic evidence that substantiates their verdict. Davidsson fails to offer any evidence of my ‘pathology.’  I will help the elder Zionist to refine his argument. The fact that I occasionally define myself as “a self hater” suggests that I hate myself rather than others. Consistent with Otto Weininger’s brutal realisation that in art, understanding of the self is understanding of the world, I dig into myself as an act of disclosure.

Like his friend Ludwig Watzal who was caught plagiarising quotes originally fabricated by Dershowitz, Davidsson is misquoting me and even put words in my mouth in a deliberate attempt to deceive.  Davidson builds his entire zigzag narrative on a nine year old discussion on American TV.  “Asked if any Jews had died by the Nazis, Atzmon says: ‘that is a completely irrelevant question.. Because I’m not a historian,’”

What I actually say in the video is that my concern with the holocaust is not about numbers, “even if it were, 2.5 million it is quite enough”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXAwYIU9yRs&t=1m10s

…we are talking about huge numbers here. In my work, I want to move beyond numbers and to grasp why, what is it in the Jews that makes Jewish history a chain of disasters? Why is antisemitsm rising again? And the crucial question is why Elias Davisson, supposedly, a ‘truth seeker’ is so fearful of me asking these questions? Why does Davidsson feel the need to lie and to omit certain lines? What kind of people engage in such duplicitous behaviour? The answer is simple. The fear of truthfulness is a Jerusalemite symptom. Jerusalem replaces reason with a strict regime of correctness.

Then the ignoramus argues that “ethnic cleansing” of Jews from Nazi Germany is “Atzmon’s invention.”   ”On the contrary,” Davidsson says,  “German Jews had to apply for emigration in the Third Reich. Not all could emigrate.”

Maybe the German speaking Davidsson should explain to us what the notions judenrein and judenfrei meant to the Nazi regime. One may well wonder how this nonsense passed the Rubikon’s editorial standards. David Cesarani’s  Final Solution provides  an incredible account of the Nazi’s ethnic cleansing of German and Austrian Jews. You would expect Davidsson to grasp that ‘applying for immigration’ was a bureaucratic procedure. And this is exactly why we need history to be subject to revision.

The notion of ethnic cleansing wasn’t around when Raul Hilberg wrote ‘The Destruction of European Jews,’  the only source Davidsson cites.  It wasn’t until Kosovo in the late 1990s that the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ made it into our vocabulary. It was in the late 1990s and early 2000s that the new notion of ethnic cleansing helped us to re-shape our understanding of the Nakba in 1948 and of Nazi atrocities. I guess it is too much to expect Davidsson and the Rubikon editorial to grasp this nuanced intellectual evolutionary process.

In his attempt to discuss the death march, Davidsson is again out of his depth and quoting Raul Hilberg isn’t very helpful. Here is the death march dilemma as I see it: if the Nazis wanted the Jews out of their Reich or dead, why did they march thousands of them back to the Reich at the end of the war?

This is an historical dilemma that is begging for an answer,  it juxtaposes two conflicting historical narratives. I accept that silencing me is the preferred solution for the Jerusalemite, but if I may advise the elder Davidsson, it won’t remove the dilemma. At best it will only delay the discussion.

And finally the unthinkable happens, Davidsson manages to  depart from the Holocaust.  He lands on ‘Christ killing.’ “Atzmon said that the Israeli attack on the Gaza humanitarian flotilla ‘was [ideologically] a repetition of the killing of Jesus Christ.’” According to Davidsson this is a “propagandist” attempt  to “curry favour with Christian anti-Semites.” I will help the spin merchant to grasp some elementary basics.  Christ killing is a symbol of the murder of innocence and goodness. In my eyes, and I am hardly alone in this thought, a lot of Israeli brutality falls into this category. The crude attack on the Mavi Marmara was a prototypical case of an assault on goodness. Unlike Davidsson, I operate on my own. I am not affiliated with anyone, whether Christian, Socialist or Nazi. I am searching for that which unite us as humans. I am searching for the conditions that make humanism a possibility.  I am committed to one thing; that which I believe to be true at the time I utter it. I do accept that for Davidsson and his ilk such an approach is a fatal threat. I wish I knew how to help them out.

Being in Time – A Post Political Manifesto,

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